The Khawarij
From the First Fitna to Modern Takfiri Movements
The Khawarij (literally "those who went out") emerged at the Battle of Siffin in 37 AH (657 CE), when a faction of Ali ibn Abi Talib's army left his ranks to protest his acceptance of arbitration with Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. Their founding theological claim was absolute: the arbitration was a sin; acceptance of human judgment in a matter God had decided was an act of kufr (unbelief); and those who accepted it — including Ali himself — had forfeited their right to rule and their status as Muslims. The Khawarij thereby became the first group in Islamic history to deploy systematic takfir (declaring Muslims to be unbelievers) as a political weapon and to justify violence against the legitimate Islamic authority on religious grounds.
This paper traces the Khawarij from their emergence through their major historical sects — the Azariqa (the most extreme, who declared all non-Khawarij to be polytheists), the Najdat, the Ibadiyya (the only surviving Khariji sect, now the state religion of Oman) — to their structural continuity in modern movements. The pattern Imam Ali diagnosed at Siffin in 37 AH — piety-language deployed to destroy legitimate authority — recurs identically from the Battle of Nahrawan through to ISIS/Daesh. The Prophet's documented descriptions of the Khawarij — in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — are examined as the Islamic tradition's own advance diagnosis of this pathology.
Keywords: Khawarij · takfir · Battle of Siffin · first fitna · Azariqa · Battle of Nahrawan · Ibadiyya · ISIS Daesh · Wahhabi Salafi takfiri · Haq Batil · Islamic extremism
The Emergence at Siffin — 37 AH (657 CE)
The Battle of Siffin took place on the banks of the Euphrates in 37 AH between the forces of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph, and Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, the governor of Syria who refused to recognize Ali's caliphate. The battle was proceeding in Ali's favor when Mu'awiya's forces raised copies of the Quran on their spear tips — a gesture calling for arbitration by the Book of God rather than military decision. Ali's commanders, despite his opposition, agreed to halt the fighting and accept arbitration.
A faction within Ali's army — estimated at between 8,000 and 12,000 men — rejected the arbitration as a capitulation to human judgment when God had already decided the matter through the military's outcome. Their slogan was la hukma illa lillah — "Judgment belongs to God alone" — a Quranic phrase (12:40, 6:57) that they deployed to mean: no human arbitration is permissible. By accepting arbitration, Ali had — in their view — elevated human judgment over divine command, and was therefore no longer a legitimate Muslim ruler.
Ali's response to the Khawarij position was the first systematic Islamic refutation of the takfiri logic. He acknowledged the Quranic truth of la hukma illa lillah but argued that the slogan was "a true word used to support a false conclusion" — kalimatu haqqin urida biha batil. The phrase is one of the most precise formulations in the early Islamic tradition of the structural pattern this paper traces: true language deployed in service of a false political conclusion.
"This is a true word by which they intend falsehood. Yes, judgment belongs to God alone, but these people say there is no governance for humans — whereas humans must have a ruler, whether righteous or wicked, under whose governance the believer works and the unbeliever takes his advantage."
Imam Ali's response to the Khawarij is, simultaneously, the first Islamic refutation of political anarchy and the most precise classical diagnosis of the pattern this paper traces: a true Quranic statement (la hukma illa lillah) deployed to support a false political conclusion (no human governance is legitimate).
The Battle of Nahrawan and the Pattern Established
After leaving Ali's army, the Khawarij established themselves at Nahrawan on the Tigris and began killing those who disagreed with their position — including companions of the Prophet. Their method of determining who to kill was theological: they questioned travelers about the arbitration, and those who did not declare it sinful were killed. Ali moved against them at the Battle of Nahrawan (38 AH/658 CE), decisively defeating but not eliminating the movement. The Khawarij who escaped dispersed throughout the Islamic world and continued their theological position for centuries. A Khariji assassin killed Ali ibn Abi Talib in Kufa in 40 AH (661 CE).
The Nahrawan pattern established the Khawarij's historical legacy: a movement of extreme external piety (the Prophet's hadith describes them as praying and fasting far more than ordinary Muslims) combined with maximum violence toward those they declared apostate, a belief in their own absolute righteousness that made them immune to evidence and argument, and a trajectory toward self-destruction as their purism turned even on fellow Khawarij. This pattern recurs in every subsequent manifestation.
Section 3The Prophet's Hadith — The Islamic Tradition's Self-Diagnosis
The most significant evidence for the Khawarij as an identified pathology in Islamic tradition is the Prophet Muhammad's own descriptions, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. These hadith are among the most extensively documented in the canonical collections — indicating that the Prophet anticipated this phenomenon and characterized it with unusual precision for the community's future guidance.
"There will emerge a people from my community who will recite the Quran — it will not pass beyond their throats. They will pass through religion as an arrow passes through game. They will kill the Muslims and leave the idol-worshippers. If I am alive when they emerge I will kill them as the people of 'Ad were killed."
The Prophet's description is structurally precise: external religiosity (Quran recitation) without internal understanding ("not passing beyond the throat"); extreme violence toward Muslims; indifference toward non-Muslims. The inversion — killing Muslims, leaving polytheists — is the pattern Ali diagnosed at Siffin: claiming to defend Islam while destroying it.
Historical Sects — Azariqa, Najdat, Ibadiyya
The Khawarij fragmented into numerous sects in the first Islamic century, differing on degrees of takfir and the permissibility of violence. The major branches:
Azariqa (followers of Nafi' ibn al-Azraq, d. 686 CE): the most extreme. Declared all non-Khawarij — including Muslim women and children — to be polytheists (mushrikun) whose blood was permissible. Practiced isti'rad — testing strangers by asking their religious position and killing those who did not pass the test. Were eventually destroyed by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf's forces in 699 CE.
Najdat (followers of Najda ibn Amir): held that a Muslim who sinned without repentance was a hypocrite but not an apostate — a moderate position by Khawarij standards. Eventually turned on each other in doctrinal disputes.
Ibadiyya (followers of Abdallah ibn Ibad): the most moderate Khawarij branch, rejecting the Azariqa's extreme takfir. The only surviving Khawarij sect — the Ibadiyya constitute approximately 45% of Oman's population and are the majority in parts of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Zanzibar. Ibadi Islam is the state religion of Oman. The Ibadiyya's survival demonstrates that the Khawarij pattern can be moderated; it does not demonstrate that the moderation is the norm.
Section 5Modern Manifestations — The Structural Continuity
The Khawarij pattern — extreme external piety, systematic takfir of mainstream Muslims, violence against the Islamic tradition's authentic representatives, and immunity to correction through evidence — recurs structurally in modern movements that do not always claim the Khawarij label. The structural identification is based on behavioral characteristics, not self-identification.
The Wahhabi-Salafi tradition founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 18th-century Arabia reproduced several Khawarij characteristics: the declaration of contemporary Muslim practice (shrine visitation, Sufi orders, Shia Islam, saint veneration) as shirk (polytheism); the justification of violence against those so declared; the claim to return to a pure original Islam against which all existing Islamic practice is measured and found wanting. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's designation of fellow Muslims as polytheists was explicitly condemned by his own brother and father as replication of the Khawarij methodology.
ISIS/Daesh (the Islamic State) represents the fullest modern actualization of the Khawarij pattern: systematic takfir of all who disagree (Sunni, Shia, Christian, Yazidi), a claim to the caliphate that supersedes all existing Islamic authority, maximum violence against Muslims presented as divine obligation, and the characteristic inversion — the greatest violence directed not at non-Muslims but at the Islamic tradition's authentic representatives. The Prophet's hadith — "they will kill the Muslims and leave the idol-worshippers" — describes the ISIS targeting pattern with precision: Sufi shrines, Shia mosques, Yazidi communities, and Muslim civilians were the primary targets; Western military assets were largely avoided.
Section 6The Pattern Ali Diagnosed — Structure Across Fourteen Centuries
Imam Ali's diagnosis at Siffin identified what makes the Khawarij pattern recur across every epoch: the claim is maximally piety-coded. The Khawarij cite the Quran, invoke God's exclusive sovereignty, and present themselves as the defenders of Islamic purity against compromise. This is precisely why the movement is so effective at recruiting sincere believers — the religious language is genuine and the concerns it raises are real. Compromise with Mu'awiya was genuinely problematic; calls to return to authentic Islam have genuine appeal in any period of institutional decay.
But the inversion Ali diagnosed emerges in what the piety-claim justifies: the destruction of the legitimate authority (Ali himself), the killing of the community's authenticated scholars and teachers, the replacement of genuine Islamic scholarship with the individual's own reading as the sole valid interpretation. The outcome is invariant across every Khawarij manifestation: the tradition is impoverished, authentic voices are silenced, and the community is weakened — by the movement that claimed to be purifying it. The piety-claim generates the recruitment; the structural inversion produces the damage. Ali stated this with a precision that fourteen centuries of subsequent history have not falsified.
Section 7The Funding Architecture — Colonial State-Formation and the Modern Khawarij Infrastructure
The modern Khawarij are not a spontaneous ideological revival. They are the product of a specific state-formation process — the 1744 Dariyya Pact between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab — subsequently consolidated through British colonial facilitation and financed by Gulf petrodollar infrastructure that has globalised Wahhabi theology since 1973. The pattern is the same as Imam Ali's original diagnosis: a piety-coded theological claim (return to pure Islam) deployed in service of a geopolitical architecture whose beneficiaries extend well beyond the community of believers.
The 1744 Dariyya Pact is the founding document of the Wahhabi-Saudi state. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab provided the theological justification for declaring all existing Muslim practice outside Najd as shirk — thereby making military conquest of the Arabian Peninsula religiously obligatory rather than merely politically desirable. Muhammad ibn Saud provided the military force. This is the structural marriage: Khawarij-pattern theology (takfir of the Muslim community) harnessed to a state-formation project. The movement that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's own father and brother condemned as Khawarij-methodology acquired a state sponsor, and with it the capacity to project that methodology at territorial and eventually global scale.
Harry St. John Philby and British Arabia policy. Harry St. John Philby (1885–1960) — British intelligence officer, political agent in Arabia, and later adviser to Ibn Saud (converting to Wahhabism in 1930) — is the documented institutional link between British colonial policy and the Saudi-Wahhabi state's consolidation. Philby was the primary British diplomatic architect of the political structure that secured external recognition for the Wahhabi project during its consolidation phase, and he negotiated the framework that led to the Uqair Protocol (1922), which fixed Saudi-Wahhabi borders under British mediation. His role is documented in Elizabeth Monroe's Philby of Arabia (Faber and Faber, 1973).
The parallel colonial decisions of 1915–1922. The Treaty of Darin (1915) gave the Saudi-Wahhabi state a British guarantor it needed to complete the conquest of Arabia, culminating in the demolition of Shia and Sunni shrines in Mecca and Medina (1925–1932). The same British imperial apparatus that issued the Balfour Declaration (1917) — committing Britain to a Zionist homeland in Palestine — was simultaneously constructing the political architecture of a Wahhabi state in Arabia. Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope (Macmillan, 1966) and The Anglo-American Establishment (Books in Focus, 1981) document the Round Table/Milner Group network as the institutional framework within which these complementary colonial decisions were made for aligned strategic purposes: both projects — Wahhabi Arabia and Zionist Palestine — served British interests in fragmenting the Ottoman-Islamic governance sphere.
Gulf petrodollar globalisation. Post-1973, Saudi oil revenues funded the global export of Wahhabi theology through madrasa construction, mosque endowments, scholarly appointment programmes, and the distribution of Wahhabi-edited Quran printings across Muslim-majority populations. The Muslim Brotherhood's international network, the Pakistani Deobandi seminary expansion, and the global Salafi missionary apparatus are all partially financed through this architecture. The modern Khawarij — ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, TTP — do not emerge from spontaneous ideological conviction; they emerge from a specific institutional and financial infrastructure that did not exist before the Gulf petrodollar system created it.
WP-05 — Haq and Batil: The Quranic ontological context — the kalimatu haqqin urida biha batil phrase (Imam Ali, Nahj al-Balagha Sermon 40) cited in Section 1 of this paper is the primary source the WP-05 analysis of admixture doctrine treats at length.
Ibn Taymiyyah's Anti-Alid Rulings: The jurisprudential infrastructure that transmitted Khawarij-style takfir through the Hanbali tradition into the Wahhabi system — the doctrinal link between 13th-century anti-Alid jurisprudence and the 1744 Dariyya Pact theology.
The Third Temple Movement: The parallel colonial establishment — the British apparatus (Round Table/Milner Group) that issued the Balfour Declaration (1917) constructing the Zionist project in Palestine simultaneously oversaw the Treaty of Darin (1915) and Uqair Protocol (1922) consolidating the Wahhabi-Saudi state. Carroll Quigley documents the institutional continuity between these two complementary colonial decisions.
Safavid Knowledge Civilization: The counter-architecture — the Imami knowledge tradition that the Wahhabi-Khawarij project, from its 1744 founding and the shrine demolitions of 1925–1932 through the Gulf-funded madrasa networks in Pakistan, specifically sought to discredit and physically destroy.
WP-03 — Saqifa and Structural Isolation: The first fitna context — the succession crisis out of which both the Khawarij and the Umayyad dynasty emerged, establishing the structural template the 1744 Dariyya Pact reproduced in a later epoch.
References
- Ali ibn Abi Talib. Nahj al-Balagha [Peak of Eloquence]. Trans. Sayed Ali Reza. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Quran, 1984. Sermons 40, 60, 127 address the Khawarij directly.
- al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari. Kitab al-Manaqib, No. 3610; Kitab Istitabat al-Murtaddin, No. 6930. The Prophet's descriptions of the Khawarij.
- al-Shahrastani, Muhammad. al-Milal wa'l-Nihal. Part 1: al-Khawarij. Trans. partial in A.K. Kazi. The classical heresiographical account of Khawarij sects.
- Watt, W. Montgomery. Islamic Political Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968. Chapter 2: "The Kharijites." Standard Western academic account.
- McCants, William. The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1250080905. The ISIS ideology and its Khawarij structural continuities.
- Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Part VI covers the Anglo-American establishment's role in shaping 20th-century Middle East policy, including the institutional framework within which the Saudi-Wahhabi and Zionist state-building projects were simultaneously advanced.
- Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden. New York: Books in Focus, 1981. Documents the Round Table/Milner Group network as the organized institutional continuity behind British and American foreign policy decisions including the parallel colonial decisions of 1915–1922 in Arabia and Palestine.
- Monroe, Elizabeth. Philby of Arabia. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. The standard biography of Harry St. John Philby — British intelligence officer, adviser to Ibn Saud, and the primary institutional link between British colonial policy and the consolidation of the Saudi-Wahhabi state.
- Bosal, Saad Khizar. "Haq and Batil: The Quranic Ontology of Truth and Falsehood." SCRA Working Paper 05. Alvid Scriptorium, 2026. alvidscriptorium.com/research/haq-batil/