Ibāḍism

Ibāḍism is a distinct branch of Islam, neither Sunni nor Shiʿi, that emerged from the first century's disputes over leadership and survives as the majority tradition of Oman.

At a glance

Ibāḍism took shape in Basra among those who rejected the arbitration that ended the fighting between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya, holding that a question of right could not be submitted to human settlement. External writers have therefore classed it as a moderate branch of the Khārijite movement. Ibāḍīs themselves generally reject that label, tracing their school instead to the quietist scholars of Basra and distinguishing their position sharply from the militant groups that declared other Muslims unbelievers and made war on them. Chronicle records both descriptions and adjudicates neither.

The doctrinal profile is its own. Authority rests with an imām chosen for learning and justice rather than lineage or tribe, and may lapse when no suitable candidate exists — so the community developed a theory of its own condition, distinguishing states of concealment (kitmān) under hostile rule from open manifestation (ẓuhūr) when an imamate can be established. In theology Ibāḍīs stand near the Muʿtazila on the created status of the Qurʾān and on the divine attributes, and they hold a rigorous doctrine of works, while stopping short of the excommunicating zeal of the groups they are often grouped with.

Politically the tradition built states at the far edges of the caliphate. Al-Julandā ibn Masʿūd was elected imām in Oman in the mid-eighth century, and the Rustamid imamate at Tāhert governed a Berber Ibāḍī polity in North Africa from the late 770s until the Fāṭimids destroyed it in 909. Elsewhere communities survived by withdrawal into defensible oases and islands — the Mzab valley in the Algerian Sahara, Jabal Nafūsa in Libya, Djerba off the Tunisian coast — and Omani trade carried the school to East Africa and Zanzibar.

Oman remained an Ibāḍī imamate, in tension and sometimes in open conflict with its sultanate, into the twentieth century, and Ibāḍī jurisprudence remains the reference tradition of the Omani state. The community is small — a few million at most — but its literature is old and continuous, and its existence is a standing correction to the assumption that Islam divides only into Sunni and Shiʿi.

Related in Chronicle

Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.