The Khārijites and the Ibāḍiyya

The Khārijites were Islam's earliest breakaway movement; their moderate offshoot, the Ibāḍiyya, survives today, chiefly in Oman.

At a glance

The Khārijites (“those who went out”) emerged in the first Muslim civil war when a group that had supported ʿAlī turned against him over his agreement to arbitrate his dispute with his rivals, holding that judgment belonged to God alone. Their defining doctrine was uncompromising: a Muslim who committed a grave sin and did not repent ceased, in their view, to be a believer, and leadership belonged to the most pious — of any origin — rather than to any lineage or tribe.

Their rigorism made them fierce opponents of successive rulers and, in their extreme wings, prone to violence; over time most Khārijite groups died out. But a moderate branch, the Ibāḍiyya, avoided this fate by rejecting aggression and quietly enduring, and its communities persist to this day in Oman and parts of North and East Africa.

Khārijism left a lasting mark even in defeat: the community's reaction against its intolerance pressed Sunni thought to formulate its own more accommodating theology of the sinner and the believer.

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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.