The Kharijites and takfir: 6 facts

After the battle of Siffin in 657, Ali agreed to arbitration with Muawiya. The agreement came when Muawiya’s troops raised copies of the Quran on their spears and called for the book to decide between the two armies. A group in Ali’s army objected, saying “judgement belongs to God alone,”^[1] and left, hence their name, the Khawārij (those who went out). At Nahrawan in 658 Ali defeated them.

They then held that both sides had become unbelievers by agreeing to human arbitration. They took their slogan from verses of the Quran that are true in themselves. Ali is reported to have answered that it was a true word used for a false purpose, and he pointed out that the Quran itself tells people to appoint arbiters in disputes.^[2]

The decisive step was theirs: they turned a disagreement over a political decision into a charge of unbelief against fellow Muslims, among them the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. Sources record that before Nahrawan they had killed a man named Abd Allah ibn Khabbab, a companion’s son, and his wife, because he would not renounce Ali.^[3] Takfir led to bloodshed at once.

Before Nahrawan, Ali sent his cousin Ibn Abbas to the Kharijites encamped at Harura, near Kufa. A report in al-Nasa’i’s Sunan al-Kubra gives their three objections: Ali had let men judge in a matter that belongs to God; he had fought at the Battle of the Camel and taken no captives or spoils, which they said was lawful if his opponents were unbelievers and forbidden if they were believers; and he had erased the title “Commander of the Believers” from the arbitration document.^[4]

Ibn Abbas answered each one from the sources. The Quran gives the penalty for killing game in the sanctuary to two just men (5:95) and sends arbiters to a quarrelling couple (4:35), and saving blood is weightier than either. Aisha, whom the other side had fought at the Camel, is the mother of the believers by the Quran (33:6), so whoever takes her captive or denies her motherhood is in error. The Prophet had the words “Messenger of God” erased from the treaty of Hudaybiyya, and that did not remove his prophethood.

According to the report, two thousand of them went back, and the rest were fought at Nahrawan. The first answer to the takfiris was an argument from the text, offered before any sword was drawn.

In 661 a Kharijite named Ibn Muljam struck Ali with a poisoned sword as he went to the dawn prayer in Kufa. Ali died two days later. The group had claimed to act for God.

The historian al-Tabari reports that three Kharijites had agreed to kill Ali, Muawiya and the governor Amr ibn al-As on the same morning. Only the attack on Ali succeeded.^[3] Ali is reported to have told his family to do no more to Ibn Muljam than to strike him once in return, and to forbid mutilation of the body.

Their other marks were harshness toward Muslims who differed and a readiness to declare major sinners unbelievers. The sources also describe them as unusually devout, with long prayers and much recitation of the Quran. Their piety shows that zeal is no protection against error.

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said that there would arise a people who recite the Quran “but it does not pass beyond their throats,” who “pass through the religion as an arrow passes through its game,” and whom those who fought them would be rewarded.^[5] The early scholars applied the description to the Kharijites.

In the report the Prophet adds that his companions would think their own prayer and fasting small beside that of these people. The hadith appears in both Sahih collections, and it is among the best attested warnings in the Sunni tradition. Ali is reported to have cited it before Nahrawan.

It was taken as a warning about piety without understanding. The objection from today’s extremists is that the same hadith licenses fighting any group one judges to fit it. The classical answer is that the jurists applied the reward only to armed rebels who attacked the Muslim community, and Ali is reported to have declined to call even the Kharijites unbelievers, saying that they were brothers who had rebelled.^[6]

The Prophet said: “If a man says to his brother ‘O unbeliever,’ it returns upon one of them.”^[7] The standard creed of Sunni Islam, the Tahawi creed, says “We do not declare any of the people of the qibla to be unbelievers for a sin, as long as he does not hold it lawful.”^[8] The qibla is the direction of prayer, so the phrase means those who pray as Muslims do.

The Kharijites had a verse to support them: “whoever does not judge by what God has revealed, those are the unbelievers.”^[9] The companion Ibn Abbas is reported to have said of it that this is unbelief of a lesser kind, short of leaving the faith.^[10] Al-Ghazali, in his treatise on the limits of unbelief, urged great caution in declaring anyone who prays toward Mecca an unbeliever.^[11]

So a Muslim is an unbeliever only by clear and deliberate rejection of what is certain in the faith, and only a court of qualified judges may so rule. Later jurists added that the judge must establish that the person understood and was not under compulsion.

Ismail al Faruqi, in his essay on Islam in the Historical Atlas of the Religions of the World, describes how the first dispute was settled. The overwhelming majority of Muslims held that a grave sinner, whatever his moral state, is still a Muslim, and that only apostasy, the profession of a faith contrary to Islam or the denial of God and of his unity, removes a person from the community. The defeat of the Kharijites, he writes, meant the rejection of their doctrine of faith.^[12]

In 2004 the Amman Message, signed by hundreds of scholars from every school, affirmed the validity of eight schools of Islam and forbade declaring any of their followers apostates.^[13] The scholars gave it three rulings in 2005, and these were endorsed by assemblies of scholars from across the Muslim world.

In 2014 an open letter of 126 scholars to the leader of ISIS condemned the group’s takfir and violence.^[14] It answered the group point by point from the Quran and hadith, and told it that it had no right to declare Muslims unbelievers or to kill them.

The Ibadis of Oman, who descend from the moderate wing of early Kharijism, reject extremism and follow tolerance. They themselves refuse the name Kharijite. Their example shows that a community descended from that movement can hold the rest of the Muslim world to be Muslim.