- Ali & Khawarij:
- The Khawa¯rij featured in these scenes are serenely contemptuous of the worldly power of those whom they confront. They have numinous truth on their side and indeed numinous truth that has redeemed them from error. Those who call them to obedience have placed their faith in the present world, and it is in the present world only that their power resides. According to the Khawa¯rij, it was the duty of all real Muslims to confront such representatives of corrupt worldly might and to fight them.
- Sizgorich describes the nascent Hanbalis behaving similarly to the Kharijites in terms of communal boundaries and violence against outsiders. Ironically, Hanbalis were passionately opposed to the Kharijites.
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- Over time, members of the H˘anbalı¯ community very consciously defined themselves in opposition to members of other Muslim communities, including various Alid sects, such “heretical” communities as the Murjia, the Nus.airiyya, the Mutazila and the Qadariyya, and, with a special vigor, the Khawa¯rij.
- Despite their rejection of the violence excesses of the Kharijites, however, Ibn H˘anbal and his followers were just as concerned with the maintenance of communal boundaries as were the Khawa¯rij. Indeed, much like the Kharijites, Ibn H˘anbal was a stern, ascetic, and intransigent champion of his vision of proper Islamic belief and practice.
- Despite this, however, Ibn H˘anbal clearly understood the excesses of violence committed by the Kharijites and the destabilizing effects of that violence upon the Muslim umma, as an exceedingly dangerous threat to the survival of that community. The dilemma Ibn H˘anbal therefore seems to have faced was how to pursue projects of boundary maintenance within the Muslim umma while somehow defusing the potential for violent conflict such projects carried.