Jami' al-Rabi'

Ibadism traces its roots to a quietist current within the wider Kharijite movement that took shape in Basra in the seventh century CE, distancing itself from the more militant Kharijite factions while keeping their emphasis on the moral qualification of a leader over descent from the Prophet's family. Jabir ibn Zayd, based in Basra, is regarded as the school's founding scholar, and his teaching passed to his student Abu Ubayda Muslim ibn Abi Karima, who in turn taught al-Rabi' ibn Habib al-Farahidi, the figure credited with transmitting and organizing the hadith that make up the collection bearing his name.

Structured by legal and doctrinal topic in a manner recognizable from other early hadith collections of the period, it gathers rulings and reports understood to preserve Jabir ibn Zayd's teaching as it passed down this short chain of named transmitters, giving Ibadi Islam a hadith foundation independent of, and largely non-overlapping with, the Sunni six-book canon and the Shia collections that developed in parallel. Jabir ibn Zayd himself is said to have studied under several companions of the Prophet directly, a claim that, if accepted, would place the ultimate roots of the collection's authority within a single generation of Muhammad's own lifetime, comparable in kind to the earliest layers of Sunni and Shia hadith transmission alike.

Specialists in early Ibadi literature have debated exactly how directly the collection in circulation today reflects al-Rabi' ibn Habib's own compilation versus a later re-editing of his teaching material by subsequent Ibadi scholars, a question complicated by the relatively sparse contemporaneous documentation surviving from Ibadism's early centuries compared to the larger Sunni and Shia traditions. Whatever the precise editorial history, the text has functioned continuously as Ibadi Islam's central hadith reference into the present. Oman is by far the largest home of practicing Ibadi Islam today, where it has been the majority tradition for over a thousand years, and smaller historic Ibadi communities persist in Algeria's Mzab valley, Libya's Nafusa mountains and on the island of Djerba in Tunisia, along with a community with roots in Omani migration on Zanzibar.

Across all of these, Jami' al-Rabi' remains the shared textual anchor, distinct from and largely unread outside the Ibadi communities that treat it as foundational, much as the Sunni and Shia canons remain largely unread outside their own traditions. Ibadi scholarship in Oman has continued to produce commentary and study literature on the collection into the modern period, taught in Omani religious institutions alongside the country's broader legal and educational curriculum, keeping the text in active use rather than treating it purely as a historical artifact.