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The nature of the Islamic sources for the early Muslim groups that were retroactively labelled Khārijites (khawārij) makes obtaining an accurate portrait of Khārijite notions of leadership difficult. On the one hand, Islamic sources use earlier Khārijite works as the basis of their narratives, but later (proto-Sunnī and proto-Shīʿa) Muslim author-editors remained hostile to the Khārijite groups they wrote about. On the other hand, both Khārijite authors and the medieval Muslim author-editors who preserved their…

Abū l-Muʾthir al-Ṣalt b. Khamīs al-Kharūṣī al-Bahlawī (d. sometime before 280/893-4) was an Omani Ibāḍī historian and jurist. He was born in Bahlā, in the interior of Oman, but lived most of his life in nearby Nizwa, a town that was considered the seat of the Ibāḍī imāmate up to the second half of the third/ninth century. He studied under the Basran Ibāḍī imām, jurist, and scholar Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Maḥbūb al-Raḥīl (or al-Ruḥayl, d. 260/873) and was a contemporary of the important and early legal scholar Abū l-Ḥawārī Muḥammad b. Abī l-Ḥawārī (al-Fāri…

Sālim Ibn Dhakwān (fl. late first/seventh century or second/eighth century?) was the purported author of an early Ibāḍī sīra (epistle) known as the Sīrat Sālim b. Dhakwān. Ibaḍīsm is a distinctive sect, neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī, which originated in the decades after the Prophet Muḥammad’s death in 10/632; Ibāḍism is the majority religion in Oman, and Ibāḍī communities are also found in parts of North Africa and East Africa. Very little is known for certain about Ibn Dhakwān: a Sīstānī boy named Sālim Ibn Dhakwān was said …

Like other Muslims, Ibāḍīs have long employed ḥadīth (in the general sense of what was related about the Prophet and his community) in seeking to understand how Islam should be understood and practised (Wilkinson, Ibāḍism, 126). Up to the sixth/twelfth century, however, Ibāḍīs preserved attitudes towards ḥadīth that, on the one hand, remained closer to earlier Islamic approaches to it, but, on the other hand, increasingly diverged from Sunnī and later Shīʿī norms concerning ḥadīth. Since the sixth/twelfth century, Ibāḍīs have progressively adopted Sunnī standards for ḥadīth. This…

Abū Bilāl Mirdās b. Udayya (d. 61/680–1) was an early Basran Khārijī (shurāt) hero and martyr. He was from the Rabīʿa b. Ḥanẓala branch of the Tamīm tribe, and Udayya was said to be his mother’s name. According to the sources, his father’s name was Ḥudayr (al-Balādhurī, 5:188). Nothing of his early life is known, and the stories of his later exploits are so heavily steeped in legend that it is perhaps more appropriate to approach them as hagiography (Gaiser, Tracing the ascetic life, 67–8). He and his broth…

Mukhtār b. ʿAwf al-Azdī (d. 130/748), of the Banū Salama, known as Abū Ḥamza, was a Basran native (Ibn Khayyāṭ, 251; al-Iṣfahānī, 23:227), an ascetic (al-Jāḥiẓ, 2:79), and an Ibāḍī military leader later remembered as one of the shurāt (martyr soldiers, lit., exchangers, those who exchanged their lives for God’s pleasure) (al-Darjīnī, 2:258, 262; Ibn Khayyāṭ, 250). He was said to have agitated against the Umayyad caliph Marwān II (Marwān b. Muḥammad, r. 127–32/744–50) for several years in Mecca before he met ʿAbdallāh b. Yaḥyā (Ṭālib…

The Ibāḍiyya are a distinctive Muslim denomination, being neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī, who emerged in Basra in the first half of the second/eighth century. They are the only surviving offshoot of the shurāt, a group which other Muslims later classed as Khārijī. Successful missionary activity allowed the Ibāḍiyya to spread to the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and the East African coast in places such as Zanzibar. Today, Ibāḍī communities maintain a particularly strong presence in Oman but also continue to exist in North Africa. Ibāḍism can be distinguished from other Muslim commu…

The Najadāt were an early Khārijī subsect, named after its founder, Najda b. ʿĀmir (d. 73/692; Najdiyya and other variant spellings are recorded). Initially, he followed Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq (d. 65/684–5) in the Basran Khārijī rebellion of 65/684–5 against the Umayyad governor Masʿūd b. ʿAmr al-ʿAntakī (d. 65/684–5) and then against the Zubayrid general Muslim b. ʿUbays (d. 65/684–5), retreating with the Azāriqa into al-Ahwāz (Pers., Ahvāz), in southwestern Iran (al-Balādhurī, 7:174). There, howeve…

Bakriyya is an unclear appellation that may refer to one of two different groups, both of which supported Abū Bakr’s claim to the caliphate. A third usage of the term is a conflation of these two groups, generically casting the Bakriyya as promoters of Abū Bakr’s right to succession. The first set of reports refer to an early first/seventh-century group known as the Bakriyya who circulated ḥadīth about Abū Bakr’s excellent qualities (faḍāʾil) in response to claims about ʿAlī’s merits and right to the caliphate by partisans of the latter. The early Shīʿī heresiograph…

Abū Jābir Muḥammad Ibn Jaʿfar al-Izkawī (d. 281/894) was an Omani Ibāḍī jurist from Izkī, a town in northeastern Oman. He is credited with Kitāb al-jāmiʿ, the first major compendium of Omani Ibāḍī fiqh (law). He was a student of the great Ibāḍī jurist and scholar Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Maḥbūb al-Raḥīl (or al-Ruḥayl) (d. 260/873) and initially supported the contentious decision of the qāḍī (judge) Mūsā b. Mūsā to depose Imām al-Ṣalt b. Mālik (d. 275/889) in 272/886, after the imām removed him from his brief posting as qāḍī of Suḥar (Wilkinson, 322). He is said later to have been u…

Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad b. Nāṣir b. Miyāl (or Mayyāl) b. Yūsuf al-Lawātī (d. 528/1133–4) was a North African Ibāḍī historian, biographer, poet, and specialist in traditions (aḥādīth). He was born in the Barqa province (i.e., ancient Cyrenaica, present day eastern costal Libya) in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, into the Berber tribe of the Lawāta. In 450/1058–9, at the age of 18, he settled in Ajlū in the oasis of Arīgh (modern day Oued Righ, Algeria), where he died at the age of 96 in 528/1133–4 (…

Kitmān , meaning “secrecy” or “concealment,” is one of the four stages of religion (masālik al-dīn) in which the Ibāḍī community might find itself living. Unlike the stages of manifestation (ẓuhūr), defence (difāʿā), or sacrificing to accomplish God’s aims (shirāʾ), it is the stage that requires Ibāḍīs to hide many of the practices of Ibāḍism in order to preserve it from enemies who might threaten or suppress it. Under such circumstances, kitmān becomes an obligation with important ramifications for how the Ibāḍī community conducts its affairs. Notably, the imāmate…

Khārijīs (also Khārijites; Ar. khawārij, sing. khārijī, “those who went out”) is the epithet given to groups of Muslim sectarians who held pious action to be the main criterion for accepting a person as a true Muslim, and who rejected the exclusive claims to the caliphate of the Quraysh, the tribe of the prophet Muḥammad, as well as the claims of the ʿAlids. Among Khārijīs, the term khawārij itself enjoyed only limited use among some militants (ʿAbbās, 105–6, 125; Gaiser, Shurat legends, 3), as the majority of early adherents preferred the term shurāt (sing. shārī), “exchangers,” likely …

Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad Ibn Baraka al-Bahlawī (d. late fourth/tenth century) was an Omani Ibāḍī jurist from Bahlā, in the interior of Oman. He adhered to the intellectual school of Omani Ibāḍism known as the Rustāq party, having studied under the second-generation Rustāq-party scholar Abū Mālik Ghassān b. al-Khiḍr al-Sallānī (d. early to mid-fourth/tenth century), who was a native of Ṣuḥār, on the coast of Oman, but founded a school in Bahlā (Custers, 1:149). With his most famous pupil, Abū …

Abū Sufyān Maḥbūb b. al-Raḥīl (or al-Ruḥayl) al-Qurayshī al-Makhzūmī al-ʿAbdī was a Basran Ibāḍī jurist, theologian, and historian who became a leader of the Basran Ibāḍī community after the death of Wāʾil b. Ayyūb, in about 190/806. His dates are uncertain: Crone and Zimmermann (310–1) propose his birth before 140/757 and his death in about 210/825; equally uncertain are his tribal identifications as a Qurayshī (al-Saʿdī, 8:303) or an ʿAbdī (i.e., a member of the ʿAbd al-Qays) (al-Darjīnī, 2:278), both of which Wilkinson doubts (Ibāḍism, 164). When his mother re-married, he be…

Abū l-Faḍl Abū l-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm al-Barrādī was a North African Ibāḍī scholar of the late eighth/fourteenth century. According to the biographical dictionary of Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Shammākhī (d. 928/1521) he was born in Jabal Dammar in what is today southern Tunisia, and travelled to Jerba Island (present-day Tunisia) to study under Abū l-Baqāʾ Yaʿīsh al-Jarbī (d. 787/1385). He then moved to Yafran (in the Jabal Nafūsa region of present-day Libya), where he continued his studies with Abū l-Sākin ʿĀmir b.…