Kharijites

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The Kharijites ( Arabic الخارجية, DMG al-Ḫāriǧīya ) or Chawāridsch ( Arabic الخوارج, DMG al-Ḫawāriǧ  'those who went out to fight') were a religious and political opposition movement of early Islam that emerged during the uprising after the murder of the third caliph ʿUthmān ibn nAffān in 656. The two terms, which are derived from the ambiguous Arabic verb ḫaraǧa (“go out, separate yourself, go out to fight, rebel”) are, however, only foreign names. The members of the movement themselves mostly referred to themselves as shurāt ("[self] selling"), a name that is derived from the principle of shirā ' , which had an important meaning for them. The early Kharijites were called after their first camp in Harura 'near Kufa also Harūrīya .

At the end of the 7th century, Kharijitism split into numerous subgroups. Of these subgroups, only the Ibādīya with followers in Oman, North Africa and on the East African coast still exists as a special Islamic community. The Ibadites of the present no longer regard themselves as Kharijites, but as a group that emerged in opposition to the radical currents within Kharijitism.

Emergence

Protest in Siffīn against the planned arbitration court

The origin of Karijitism is the disintegration of the Muslim community after the murder of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān into two camps, one of which supported the son-in-law of the prophet ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib in Kufa and the other Muʿāwiya I , who as a former Syrian governor and his cousin Uthman demanded the punishment of his murderers. When there was a military confrontation between the two camps near Siffīn on the upper Euphrates in the early summer of 657 and at a certain moment the supporters of Ali gained the upper hand, Muʿāwiya resorted to a ruse. He sent a group of Syrians to the īAlīs camp with copies of the Koran attached to the tips of their lances and shouting in a loud voice that a truce should be granted and that the decision should be left to the judgment of the holy book. When ʿAlī agreed to the establishment of an arbitration tribunal to decide on the behavior of ʿUthman, the guilt for his death and thus indirectly also the legality of his own caliphate, this met with rejection from some of his followers. With reference to verses of the Koran, which command the fight against rebels, they said that precisely such an arbitration court was unlawful because it could only pass a human judgment, while they understood the outcome of the battle as a divine judgment. While they were still in Siffīn, some of them raised the cry, based on Koranic formulas (cf. for example Sura 12:40): "The decision / rule belongs to God alone!" ( Lā ḥukma illā li-Llāh ) .

The Muhakkima, Exodus to Hārūrā '

These people, who were also called al-Muhakkima ("those who demand judgment [of God]") because of their slogan , were joined by some others on the way back to Kufa. When their number had grown to several thousand, they withdrew to a place called Harūrā gelegenen in the vicinity of Kufa and renounced the rule of ʿAlī. Apparently they linked theocratic ideas with their slogan, because they proclaimed that one should take the oath of allegiance ( Baiʿa ) only to God. They also stressed the Qur'anic principle of territorial law and prohibition of injustice and called for a consultative body to elect the new leader of the community. In order to get the people of Hārūrāʾ to give up their resistance, Alī entered into negotiations with their leaders. From what has been recorded about these negotiations it appears that the people of Hārūrā considered the killing of Uthman, Talha and az-Zubair in the camel battle, as well as the followers of Muʿāwiya, to be lawful and expected an arbitration tribunal to give them their justification for action against these people should be agreed.

The exodus to Nahrawān

The Nahrawan Canal in a photograph from 1909

Apparently ʿAlī succeeded in reconciling some of the people of Hārūrā with his rule and persuaded them to return to his camp. However, in the spring of 658 there was a second exodus of the dissatisfied when it became clear that ʿAlī wanted to hold on to the holding of the arbitral tribunal. This exodus, in which three or four thousand people took part, led to the Nahrawan Canal east of the Tigris . The people of Nahrawān, who had chosen their own leader in the form of ʿAbdallāh ibn Wahb ar-Rāsibī , demanded that Alī admit that he had committed a sin and an act of disbelief by agreeing to the arbitration tribunal, and further demanded that his decision be withdrawn . The fanaticism of the members of this group manifested itself in a number of terrorist acts. They soon declared not only Alī and ʿUṯmān to be unbelievers, but also all those who did not agree with them in this view. People who refused to curse ʿUthmān and ʿAlī were cruelly murdered. Those people who took part in the exodus to an-Nahrawān are referred to in the Arabic sources as Chawāridsch (so-called chāridschī "exodus"), which is translated in German with the term "Kharijites".

The size of the Kharijite army continued to grow. ʿAlī, who had initially avoided a confrontation with the Kharijites in order to avoid a two-front war, was forced to act against them due to the increasing aggressiveness of this group. After he had succeeded in regaining some of those who had moved to an-Nahrawān, he attacked those who remained in July 658 and massacred them on the Nahrawān Canal. In the period between September 658 and February 659 there was a whole series of Kharijite uprisings against him. In January 661 ʿAlī was murdered by the Kharijite Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam, who wanted to avenge the slaughter of an-Nahrawān with it .

Persecution and segregation

Under the Umayyad caliphs Muʿāwiya I and Yazid I , the Kharijites were cruelly persecuted. Their governors in Iraq, Ziyad ibn Abi Sufyan (665-673) and his son ʿUbaidallāh ibn Ziyād (673-683), are said to have killed 13,000 of them. Up until that time, the Kharijites were a fairly homogeneous community. A change occurred when ʿUbaidallāh Allah opened the prisons after the death of Yazid in 683 and released 400 Kharijites. Several of them moved to Mecca to support the local caliph Abdallah ibn az-Zubair , but turned away from him when they saw that he did not share their political views. Some of them, including Nāfiʿ Ibn al-Azraq, resisted when Ibn Zubair wanted to set up a governor in Basra in 683 .

Ibn al-Azraq was killed in battle fairly soon, but his followers refused to give up the fight and withdrew to Khusistan with large numbers . There these Azraqites , as the followers of Ibn al-Azraq were called, marched through the country, pillaging and pillaging. Muslims who differed in their views or who refused to follow them were killed, including their children and wives. This practice was called istiʿrād . Only those who actively supported the Azraqites were spared.

The fighting Kharijites in Iran faced many moderate Kharijites in Basra, who wanted the Islamic State and the community to be based on the principles of the Koran, but disapproved of the Azraqite Istiʿrāḍ practice. They were also ready to accept Ibn Zubair's rule as long as they were not persecuted. The Azraqites frowned upon this “quietist” group as staying seated ( qaʿada ) and viewed them as unbelievers who had to be killed because they did not actively participate in their struggle. For themselves they used the term shurāt ("those who sell themselves"). This terminology is based on the passages in the Koran, where a distinction is made between the true believers, who sell their person to God for the price of eternal life and fight accordingly, and those who remain seated (cf. Sura 4:95; 9: 11). The Azraqites sang the "purchase" ( shirāʾ ) of paradise through death in battle in numerous poems.

A third Charijite group was formed on the Arabian Peninsula. The Kharijit Najda ibn ʿĀmir, who still fought with Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq in 683 against the governor sent by Ibn az-Zubair, placed himself at the head of a group of Kharijites in 686 in al-Yamāma in eastern Arabia and conquered a large area, the Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and Oman in the east and parts of Yemen and Hadramaut in the south. The Najadites, the followers of Najda, were not quite as radical as the Azraqites. For example, they did not regard the quietist Kharijites in Basra as infidels, but only as hypocrites and continued to have relationships with them. After a brief boom, the Najadites were defeated and destroyed by an Iraqi army in 693.

In the period that followed, the moderate Kharijite camp split even further. The Bayhasites, the Sufrites, the Maimuniya and the Ibadites belong to the charijite subgroups that emerged.

Common lessons

As radical advocates of equality among the faithful, the Kharijites strictly rejected any family or tribal preference in the selection of the caliph . In their opinion, the best Muslim should become a caliph, even if he is the son of the lowest (black) slave or non -Arab, which made the Kharijites attractive to many Muslims of non-Arab origin ( Mawālī ).

Characteristic of the Kharijites was also their relationship with the first four caliphs: while they greatly venerated Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Chattab , they mostly cursed the memory of Uthman ibn Affan and ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib , although they were for their first reigns well explained.

Significance in modern Egyptian discourse

The original Kharijites as a religious-political movement, with the exception of the Ibadites, perished in the Middle Ages. Since the middle of the 20th century, the term has had a new meaning in the political discourse of Egypt: radical Islamic groups who question the legitimacy of the state and reject the government and society as "unbelievers" are accused by representatives of the state of being heretical Kharijite Lessons followed. Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Abū l-Aʿlā Maudūdī are particularly considered to be modern Kharijites . The former chairman of the Egyptian State Security Court, Muhammad Saʿīd al-ʿAschmāwī, justified this use of the term by saying: “The term 'Kharijites' is less a name for a group of sects than a name for all those who are affected by the manipulation of Language and in exploiting religion to achieve their political goals, to exclude themselves from Islam and its law. "

literature

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Studies
  • Rudolf-Ernst Brünnow : The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. A contribution to the history of the first Islamic century . Leiden 1884. Digitized
  • Jeffrey T. Kenney: Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-513169-X .
  • Karl-Heinz Pampus: On the role of the Ḫāriǧīya in early Islam . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1980.
  • ʿAzmī Muḥammad A. Ṣāliḥī: The society, beliefs and political theories of the K̮hārijites as revealed in their poetry of the Umayyad era . London Univ. Diss. 1975. PDF
  • Rudolf Strothmann : "Schiiten und Charidschiten" in Handbuch der Orientalistik, 1. Abt. VIII, 2: Religious history of the Orient in the time of the world religions . Brill, Leiden, 1961. pp. 467-495. Here p. 493f.
  • William Montgomery Watt : "Kharijite Thought in the Umaiyad Period" in: Der Islam 36 (1961) 215-231.
  • William Montgomery Watt: "The Significance of Khārijism under the ʿAbbāsids" in Recherches d'islamologie: Recueil d'articles offert à Georges C. Anawati et Louis Gardet par leurs collègues et amis . Peeters, Louvain, 1977. pp. 381-388.
  • William Montgomery Watt, Michael Marmura: The Islam II. Political developments and theological concepts. Stuttgart u. a. 1985. pp. 1-31.
  • Julius Wellhausen : The religious-political opposition parties in ancient Islam. Berlin 1901. pp. 3-55. Digitized
  • Alfred Wilms: "Berber traits in the community life of the southern Algerian Charidschites" in African languages ​​and cultures: a cross section; [Dedicated to Johannes Lukas on the occasion of his 70th birthday]. German Inst. For Africa Research, Hamburg, 1971, pp. 326-335.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Hans Wehr: Arabic dictionary for the written language of the present. Arabic-German. 5th edition. Harrasowitz, Wiesbaden, 1985, p. 329, although this term is only rarely used in Arabic.
  2. ↑ Cf. Lutz Berger: With the weapons of Islam against Zionists and anthropomorphists. The Political Relevance of Medieval Theology in Ibāditic Islam of the Present . In: Die Welt des Islams 48, 2008, pp. 222–239. P. 229f. and Muḥammad Nāṣir Bū Ḥaǧǧām: Tauḍīḥ makānat al-Ibāḍīya min al-ḫawāriǧ . As-Sīb 1993.
  3. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, pp. 13-15.
  4. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, pp. 15-17.
  5. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, pp. 17-20.
  6. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, pp. 20-24.
  7. ↑ Cf. CF Robinson: Art. ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Ziyād in Encyclopaedia of Islam . Second edition. Vol. XS 765b.
  8. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, p. 55.
  9. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, p. 29.
  10. ↑ Cf. Ṣāliḥī 355–361.
  11. ↑ Cf. Brünnow: The Kharijites among the first Omayyads. 1884, p. 11.
  12. ↑ See Kenney's book.
  13. ↑ Citation Kenney 166.