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The Doctrine That Drove the Kharijite Rebellions

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The Doctrine That Drove the Kharijite Rebellions

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No historian has combined the rebellions' many battles and sieges across Iraq, Persia and Arabia into one casualty figure. The surviving record describes individual engagements, the size of a besieging force or a single battle's dead, rather than a war-wide total, and Hugh Kennedy's standard narrative history of the period gives none, so this atlas records the toll as unknown rather than adopting an unsourced estimate.

What is well attested is the doctrine both movements fought for. It held that a Muslim who commits grave sin, including a ruler who governs unjustly, forfeits standing as a believer and may rightly be fought, a doctrine of Kharijite origin first voiced by the movement's founders after the earlier First Fitna. The Azariqa took the doctrine furthest, treating even the wives and children of those they judged apostate as legitimate targets, a position the more moderate Najdat rejected while sharing the underlying claim that piety, not lineage or office, determined legitimate authority within the Muslim community. Both movements thereby stood opposed not only to the Umayyad state but to the broader Muslim community's own understanding of who counted as a believer.

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