Academic Research

Origins of Ibadi (Paul M. Love)

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    • Modern historians refer to the supporters of the Northern African revolts of this tumultuous period collectively as “Kharijites.” The word khariji (pl. khawarij), from the Arabic root kha-ra-ja (“to go out”), often served the Arabic historical tradition as an umbrella term for groups deemed dissident. The traditional historical narrative traced the origins of the Kharijites to the famous Battle of Siffin (656 CE) in which the opposing armies of the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin ʿAli b. Abi Talib and the governor of Syria, Muʿawiya b. Abi Sufyan, battled for the rule of the Muslim community and the empire it was rapidly creating. When ʿAli agreed to an arbitration agreement, a contingent of his supporters left the field of battle in protest. Their opposition to the arbitration (tahkim) and slogan that “there is no judgement except that of God” (la hukma illa li-llah) led Arabic historians to refer to them as the muhakkima. One understanding has their “leaving” the field of battle as their reason for their being dubbed “Kharijites” (i.e. “those who go out”).
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    • More likely, however, is the explanation offered by Patricia Crone, who suggested that the term “is a self-designation” referring to the Qur’an.
    For an overview of the basic historical narrative of the emergence of the Kharijites, (see Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 54–64. Crone and Zimmermann had earlier argued that the use of the term in the Epistle of Sālim b. Dhakwān “is a self-designation, probably coined with reference to Q. 4:100 (wa-man yakhruju min baytihi muhājiran ilā ʾllāh, ‘he who goes out from his house emigrating to God’)”: Patricia Crone and Fritz Zimmermann, eds., The Epistle of Sālim Ibn Dhakwān (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 275). In any case, this simplified version of the Battle of Siffin long served historians as an origin story not only for the Kharijites but also for the division between Sunni and Shiʿi Muslim communities. Recently, however, Adam Gaiser has shown that the Kharijites and their Ibadi inheritors in the east ought to be situated in their Late Antique and Arabian contexts.
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    • In general, the history of pre-modern Ibadi communities comprises two geographic spheres: one comprising a kind of latitudinal line of geographic pockets throughout Northern Africa; and another centered in the Arabian Peninsula, more precisely in Oman. Both geographic communities traced their origins to the Iraqi city of Basra, where support for the muhakkima was quite strong in the decades after the Battle of Siffin. That support took a variety of forms, one of which historians have often referred to as “quietist” Kharijite groups, in contrast to the more active calls for revolt among other groups also labeled Kharijite by their opponents. Historians have identified the Ibadis with the former, quietist tendency, and trace the earliest history of the community to this late seventh- and early eighth-century milieu in Basra.
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  2. Khawarijites thought the term “khawarij” was offensive, so they didn’t call themselves it: While the early muhakkima and their supporters may have used the term khawarij with pride in their poetry, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the title carried a heavy stigma and Ibadi historians were keen to dissociate themselves from it.

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