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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…

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 …

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…

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 …