This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Imran ibn Hittan's surviving verse is transmitted mostly through hostile non-Kharijite chroniclers who nonetheless preserved it, a documented irony distinct from poetry that reaches later readers through its own movement's sympathetic transmission. Called the greatest Kharijite poet by the Arabist Michael Cooperson, his lines are among the fullest surviving windows onto how Kharijite conviction sounded in its own words rather than only in the descriptions its opponents wrote of it.
His poetry centers on piety pushed to the point of self-sacrifice, the conviction that armed rebellion, khuruj, against an unjust ruler is owed to God rather than merely permitted, and an unflinching readiness for martyrdom, themes documented across what survives of his corpus rather than confined to any single poem. He wrote in praise of Abu Bilal, a Kharijite leader whose death sharpened his own commitment to revolt.
That the fullest surviving record of Kharijite poetic conviction reached later readers chiefly through the hands of chroniclers hostile to the movement itself marks Imran ibn Hittan's transmission as a documented case where a tradition's own voice survived largely inside the record kept by those who opposed everything that voice was saying.