The Kharijite verdict on grave sin became, in the assessment of historians of Islamic theology, the first great doctrinal question the young Muslim community had to answer, and nearly every subsequent theological school took shape partly in reaction to it. The Murjia answered by refusing the Kharijite claim to judge at all, holding that the true state of a sinner's faith could not be known by other believers and had to be deferred, or postponed, to God's judgment alone, a position whose very name, the postponers, marks it as a direct reply. The Mutazila, working out a more systematic middle position, held that a Muslim who commits a grave sin without repenting occupies neither full belief nor outright unbelief but an intermediate station of its own, a formal category the Encyclopaedia of Islam credits as one of the school's foundational doctrines. The emerging Sunni consensus settled on a third answer, that sin, however grave, does not by itself remove a person from the community of believers, leaving judgment of a sinner's ultimate standing to God in the next life. The Kharijite movement itself splintered further under the pressure of its own logic, producing the extreme Azariqa, who extended the verdict of unbelief even to fellow Muslims who declined to fight alongside them, and the more moderate Ibadis, whose descendants in Oman today explicitly reject the Kharijite label while preserving elements of its early theology.