The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Kharijis

The origins of this dissident sect of the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods are generally traced to the First Islamic Civil War (656–61) and in particular to the divisions within ‘Ali b. Abi Talib’s camp following his acceptance of the Syrian call for arbitration at the Battle of Siffin (657). The name of the sect (those who go out) is frequently associated with the secession of pious elements at Kufa opposed to ‘Ali’s decision; nevertheless, precisely what was at issue between those first “Kharijis” and ‘Ali is hard to pinpoint, and their famous slogan “Judgment belongs only to God” (the so-called taḥkīm, from which is derived another name for the sect) may have been born out of wider concerns than merely the arbitration episode. Recent scholarship has understood the name “Khariji” not as deriving from a particular foundational event during ‘Ali’s caliphate but as a self-designation, possibly drawn from Qur’an 4:100, intended to underscore the link between emigration and militant activism. During the decades that followed the First Civil War, the Khariji movement established itself as one of the principal streams of opposition to Umayyad authority in Iraq, Iran, Jazira, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Maghrib.

Khariji resistance can be found as early as the 660s and 670s among small groups of militants around Kufa and Basra who shared a similar rejectionist stance toward the political establishment in Iraq. Many of these men had a reputation for ascetic piety (excessive prayer, fasting, and night vigils), as well as a particular attachment to scripture. The most fundamental Khariji political ideas were first incubated in this milieu of small, face-to-face groups sharply dissociating from their enemies while convinced of their own exclusive status as the true “People of Paradise.” By the 680s, the center of Khariji activity had shifted to Basra, and under the pressure of the Second Civil War, their doctrines were debated and systematized as the movement itself broke into competing subsects.

Two key doctrines distinguished the Kharijis from other Muslims of the time. First, they saw the imamate as an office held on the basis of merit (variously understood as piety, knowledge, or militancy) rather than descent; should an imam lose his superior merit, he must also lose his office. The membership in the tribe of Quraysh shared by the first caliphs of Medina as well as the Umayyads was held to be irrelevant: Abu Bakr and ‘Umar b. al-Khattab were both seen as legitimate on the basis of merit; ‘Uthman b. ‘Affan and ‘Ali were both seen to have gone wrong and thus were lawfully removed from office (i.e., assassinated). The Umayyads were seen as illegitimate “imams of error” from the start, and it was up to the believers to take action in order to replace them with more suitable leadership. They held that the community retained the ultimate right to remove its imam. Accordingly, while the Kharijis ascribed both religious and political authority to their imams, they nevertheless granted them unquestioned obedience only insofar as they retained their superior merit. This does something to explain the fissiparous nature of the Khariji movement, which generated numerous subsects. Merit also superseded Arab ethnicity: the imam could be (and in practice sometimes was) a non-Arab, an expression of the ethnic egalitarianism that attracted non-Arabs to the movement from a relatively early period.

Second, all Kharijis judged ordinary Muslims to be infidels, a doctrinal stance known as takfīr. Believers were to join up with the true community by leaving the company of infidels in the garrison towns (i.e., performing hijra, or emigration) and actively establishing their own imamates. When engaging ordinary Muslims in battle, they were to treat them in every respect as the infidels they were: such people could be despoiled of their property, enslaved, and killed indiscriminately (isti‘rāḍ).

It was the second of these two key doctrines, takfīr, that generated differences of opinion and doctrinal systematization among the Kharijis of Basra during the 680s and afterward. Extremists such as the Azariqa and Najadat, active in western Iran and Arabia, maintained the original Khariji insistence on total separation from infidels. They tolerated no intermarriage or inheritance between themselves and ordinary Muslims and insisted on emigration and holy war. (Armchair Kharijis who did not actively seek to establish an imamate were to be considered unbelievers, while those who made hijra would retain their status as “People of Paradise,” even if they sinned on occasion.) Others took a more moderate path. Without denying the infidel status of ordinary Muslims, they considered them infidels of a different sort. “Hypocrites” (munāfiqūn) was the usual term, or alternatively (and much later) “those who are ungrateful for God’s blessings” (kuffār ni‘ma). Either way, a complete severance of relations was no longer obligatory in all circumstances. The point was to justify coexistence until a resumption of political and military activity was practical. This moderate tendency came to be embodied in the Ibadi sect, the only surviving Khariji group. The more extreme wings of the Khariji movement met with suppression and flared out or, in one notable case, survived for a time by denying the very obligation to have an imam (and hence the need for emigration and holy war by which an imamate could be established). Extremist Kharijism can be found in contemporary times only in the political discourse surrounding certain radical Islamist groups, such as the one called Takfir and Hijra by the Egyptian authorities in the 1970s.