The rise of the Khawarij

After Siffin, a group walked out of the camp of ʿAli ﵁ and built its rejection of the arbitration into a theology of its own. What began as a political protest became within a few months an armed sect that declared lawful the blood of every Muslim who accepted the arbitration.

The secession

The group that walked out of the camp of ʿAli ﵁ in the afternoon following the acceptance of the truce was not coherent in its composition. Among them were senior Iraqi tribal chiefs from Tamim and Bakr and other tribes. Among them were Quran reciters of Kufa who had memorised the Book in their youth and who now wished to carry its judgment in the matter of the fitnah in their own hands. Among them were young warriors who had fought at Siffin and who felt betrayed after the Mushaf ruse. Among them were elders of the first generation of Bedouins who had converted to Islam and who had never found a place of their own in the urban politics of Kufa. They had, insofar as there was a common denominator among them, one shared principle: the acceptance of the arbitration was a sin that no Muslim was permitted to commit.

In the camp of Harura, where they first settled, they developed this principle into a political and theological reading. They put forward the slogan la hukma illa li-Llah, drawn from a number of verses of the Quran in which Allah ﷻ declares in a pronouncement that judgment belongs to Him. They turned this pronouncement into an exclusionary principle: whoever delegated the judgment to human arbiters had transferred the judgment to man and had therefore assumed the standing of an unbeliever. Under this reading, ʿAli ﵁, Muʿawiya ﵁, Abu Musa ﵁ and ʿAmr ﵁ all fell into the standing of men who had no claim to the caliphate, and whose blood, in the severe wording they developed, was no longer protected in the eyes of anyone who shared their conviction.

The negotiations of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁

When ʿAli ﵁ returned from Siffin to Kufa, he sent Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁, the most learned jurist of his young generation, to Harura with the instruction to enter into disputation with the seceded group. Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ came into the camp, wearing the cloak he had acquired in Mecca, and spoke with them in a tone that addressed them not as opponents but as lost brothers. He asked them what they reproached ʿAli ﵁ for. They answered in three points: he had accepted the arbitration where judgment belonged to Allah ﷻ alone; after the battle of Siffin he had not distributed the spoils of the fallen Syrians, even though he had declared them lawful combatants; and he had allowed his own title as Amir al-Muʾminin to be struck from the arbitration document at the request of ʿAmr ﵁, thereby reducing himself in the document to an ordinary party.

Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ answered all three points. To the first he answered that the Quran itself, in Surah an-Nisaʾ, mentions the appointment of two arbiters for marital disputes, and in Surah al-Maʾidah the appointment of two just men to determine compensation for game killed on the Hajj grounds. If for such matters arbitration by human arbiters had been provided for in the Book of Allah ﷻ, he reasoned, then a fortiori it could not be construed as a sin for a political-legal dispute between two groups of believers. To the second he answered that the prohibition on distributing the spoils after an internal fitnah conflict was embedded in the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ, for in the engagements of Banu Qurayza and Banu Nadir a distinction had been made between war spoils taken from unbelieving opponents and internal legal measures against those who had first belonged to the faith. To the third he answered that the striking of the title was a procedural detail in which ʿAli ﵁ himself wished to accommodate the Syrian side so that the procedure would not founder on a choice of words, and that the title remained untouched in his actual office.

About two thousand men from Harura accepted these answers and returned with Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ to Kufa. The others, and they were the majority and the leadership of the group, stood their ground. Under their commander ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi they departed from Harura for a new camp at Nahrawan, a village near a canal east of the Tigris, and built up there a military infrastructure which they intended for a long seclusion.

The theology of Nahrawan

In the months at Nahrawan, the Khawarij developed their reading of Islam in a number of directions that in later generations would be recorded as the hallmarks of their sect. They rejected the administrative form of the caliphate as it had been worked out in Medina and held that the caliphate belonged to every pious Muslim, regardless of tribe or clan, as long as he was appointed by the community and as long as he remained in his office within the strict bounds of what they held to be the law. They held that a commander who committed a major sin automatically fell from his office and that it was lawful to make war on him. They held that every Muslim who rejected their reading of the matter lapsed into the standing of an unbeliever and that his blood was no longer protected. They held, in the most extreme form of this reasoning, that in war against such Muslims it was lawful to take their women, children and possessions.

This theology was, in the words of those who analysed it in later sources, a remarkable combination of strict piety in personal practice with a great laxity in the protection of the blood of others. The Khawarij kept the night prayers in their own camp longer than they were kept in any mosque of Kufa. They recited the Quran with a devotion that is mentioned in later sources not without reverence. They strictly abstained from wine, from adultery, from theft. But when a strange traveller passed their camp and did not declare his opinion on the arbitration to be theirs, they cut him down without judicial procedure.

The warnings

The Messenger ﷺ had, according to narrations broadly preserved in the Sunan sources, made pronouncements in his lifetime about a group of men who would arise in the community after him and who would excel in piety in their outward deeds, but whose theology would make them a calamity for the community. He had said, in the narration also cited by Suyuti ﵀, that there would come men in the community whose prayer would make the prayer of those who stood before them appear slight, and whose fasting would make the fasting of those who stood before them appear slight, but whose recitation of the Quran would not pass beneath their throats, and who would shoot out of Islam as the arrow shoots from the hunter’s bow.

In this narration, and in a number of further narrations preserved in the Sahih sources, the Messenger ﷺ had also named a specific sign: that among the leaders of this group there would be a man with a deformed arm that hung in the shape of a woman’s breast. This sign, as would later become apparent at the battle of Nahrawan, was not metaphorical.

The occasion for the mobilisation

The direct occasion for the military mobilisation against Nahrawan, as has already been indicated in the previous article, was the murder of ʿAbdullah ibn Khabbab ﵁ and his pregnant wife. When the news became known in Kufa, ʿAli ﵁ convened his council. He spoke a word that has been preserved in later sources:

A delegation was nevertheless still sent to demand the surrender of the perpetrators. The Khawarij refused and answered, in the narration preserved in later sources, that they were all responsible for the deed, for they had taken it by communal decision. Whoever wished to avenge the deed would have to attack them all. With this answer the legal ground for the military action was furnished.

The army of ʿAli ﵁ marches east

In Safar of the year 38 AH, according to the most accepted reckonings, ʿAli ﵁ mobilised his army in Kufa for the march to Nahrawan. It was not the full army he had taken to Siffin; it was a selected column of veterans, about fourteen thousand men, with the remainder of the garrison of Kufa kept on standby against the possibility that Muʿawiya ﵁ might use the opportunity to carry out offensive manoeuvres against Iraq.

The army marched in two days to the vicinity of Nahrawan. On the day of arrival, ʿAli ﵁ sent a final envoy to the camp of the Khawarij. The envoy carried the message that the perpetrators of the murder of Ibn Khabbab ﵁ had to be surrendered. The Khawarij answered, once again, that they were all responsible. The envoy departed. ʿAli ﵁ drew up his battle order. He appointed Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ to the right flank, ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁ to the left flank, and himself with the central column. He planted his banner on a hill with a good view over the battlefield and waited.

The final call before the battle

Before the fighting began, ʿAli ﵁ rode in person to the front lines of his army and spoke towards the camp of the Khawarij. He called out that he was summoning them for the last time to surrender and to submit to the judicial decision of the caliphate. He promised, according to what has been preserved in later sources, that whoever submitted to his banner would be exempt from prosecution except in the matter of the specific perpetrators of the murder of Ibn Khabbab ﵁. He promised safe conduct to whoever walked away from the battlefield and took no part in the fighting.

A number of Khawarij, according to the narration between five hundred and a thousand, separated from the main force under this call and crossed over to the camp of ʿAli ﵁. Others, in a smaller group, went off and away without submitting to either camp. What remained was a main force of about two thousand to three thousand men who stood in fixed ranks facing ʿAli ﵁. Their commander ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi rode along the ranks and addressed them in a final call whose wording the narrators recorded as that of a commander who knew he was addressing his men for the last time in this world:

He also invoked, in a fragment preserved in later sources, a hadith which he himself interpreted in a distorted manner. With this speech in their ears, his men marched in raised battle order against the camp of ʿAli ﵁. What happened in the hours that followed was not a battle in the sense of Siffin, but a slaughter in the sense of a one-sided military confrontation in which one side was far superior to the other in steel and discipline. With that battlefield comes the next article.

The letter of ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb to his followers

In the weeks at Nahrawan after the establishment of the Khariji camp, ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb wrote a letter to his followers who had stayed behind in other parts of Iraq. In the letter, part of which has been preserved in later sources, he called on them to join him at Nahrawan for what he described as an undertaking that would defend the pure Islam against the deviations of ʿAli ﵁ and Muʿawiya ﵁. He appealed to a number of Quran verses in which, by his own interpretation, he believed he found a justification for his secession. He promised to whoever enlisted a share in what he foresaw as the ultimate victory of his movement. He warned, in a sentence broadly preserved in later sources, that whoever acted against his movement lapsed into the standing of an unbeliever and that his blood was no longer protected.

The letter had effect. Hundreds of men from Tamim, from Bakr, from other tribes of the east of Iraq joined his camp in the months before the battle of Nahrawan. The Khariji army reached its peak size of about four thousand men, before the battle of Nahrawan would reduce it to about a third of that size.

The division among the Khawarij over the conduct of war

Among the Khawarij at Nahrawan there was no unanimous line on the manner in which they were to wage their war against ʿAli ﵁ and Muʿawiya ﵁. One part, under Ibn Wahb, favoured a direct pitched battle against whichever of the two caliphs approached them first. One part, under Hurqus ibn Zuhayr, favoured a guerrilla war with attacks on couriers and small garrisons. One part, under a third group that is described less extensively in the narrations, favoured a withdrawal into the desert where they would live in their own community without entering into direct confrontation with the two caliphs. The three lines were argued in internal debates, and the outcome was a compromise in which Ibn Wahb’s line of a direct pitched battle prevailed, on the understanding that they would first wait at Nahrawan itself for the attack of ʿAli ﵁ and meet him in a defensive battle formation. It was this choice that would show its consequences at the battle of Nahrawan, for the Iraqi cavalry was able to overwhelm the Khariji position in an encircling movement that would not have been possible in an active guerrilla war.

The tribal chiefs who did not join the Khawarij

In the tribal territories of Iraq, a number of tribal chiefs were active in these years whose political position lay between ʿAli ﵁ and the Khawarij, and who, despite the Khariji recruitment among their tribesmen, did not themselves join the secession. Among them were al-Ahnaf ibn Qays ﵁ in Basra, who in his political wisdom remained loyal to ʿAli ﵁ in every phase of the fitnah without moving into the front line of military confrontations; and ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁ in Kufa, who in his rank as a senior Sahabi ﵁ and in his military experience was a steadfast pillar of ʿAli ﵁'s army. These tribal chiefs drew the younger generation in their tribal territories away from the Khariji recruitment and brought it about that the Khariji army at Nahrawan did not reach the size it could have reached in more favourable circumstances.

The return to Kufa of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ after the disputation

After his disputation at Harura with the seceded group, Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ returned to Kufa with the two thousand men he had persuaded to give up their secession. He brought them to the city in an organised column, and he presented them to ʿAli ﵁ in an audience in the mosque. ʿAli ﵁ received each of them with a personal word and accepted their renewed bayʿah without reservation. He gave them no reproach for their earlier secession, and he did not warn them against further secessions. He treated them as brothers who had fallen into an error of ijtihad and who had now returned in a correction of ijtihad. It was a manner of dealing that was broadly preserved in later sources as evidence of his delicacy in the treatment of those who had come back from their position, and it stood in sharp contrast to the way in which the remaining Khawarij at Nahrawan, in their own conscience, treated every allegiance to ʿAli ﵁ as unbelief.

The later development of the Khariji current

In the centuries after Nahrawan, the Khariji current would split into many branches. The Azariqah under Nafi ibn al-Azraq would become, in the years under the Umayyads, an armed movement that would lead to great military conflicts in Basra and in Ahwaz. The Ibadiyyah, a more moderate branch that would split off from the Azariqah at the end of the first century after the hijra, would grow in Oman and in parts of North Africa into a lasting form of Islamic practice that lives on in its original circle to this day. The Sufriyyah, a third branch, would lead to a number of uprisings in Iraq and in Iran in the years under the Umayyads and the early Abbasids. What was carried forward in all these branches was the original Khariji conviction that the caliphate belonged to every pious Muslim without distinction of tribe, that a commander who fell into a major sin automatically fell from his office, and that in a time of fitnah the weapon was justified against whoever belonged to the designated adversary. The Sunni mainstream has refuted these convictions in its doctrine in every generation, and the Ibadiyyah branch has, in its own development, carried these convictions forward in a more moderate form without the extreme elaborations of the Azariqah and the Sufriyyah.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 190 (secession and theology of the Khawarij), p. 191 (disputation of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ at Harura and return of two thousand), p. 191 (murder of ʿAbdullah ibn Khabbab ﵁ and his wife by the Khawarij), p. 191 (mobilisation of ʿAli ﵁ for Nahrawan and his final call before the battle).