INTRODUCTION

In the early Islamic period, the Khārijite sects were comparable in number and significance to those of the Shī'ites. In the long run, however, they were far less successful. Within a few centuries, the only surviving Khārijite sectarians were the Ibādīs, and they are consequently the only Khārijite group whose doctrines can be investigated systematically on the basis of their own writings. The pattern of distribution of the Ibādīs was similar to that of the medieval Zaydīs: having died out in the centre of the Islamic world, they gradually came to be confined to two widely separated peripheral regions. In the Ibādī case, these were Oman in the east and parts of North Africa (Jerba, the Jabal Nafūsa, and the Mozab) in the west. Unlike the Zaydīs, the Ibādīs survived the centuries in both their peripheral habitats, and today each of them preserves an Ibādī literary heritage. Of the two heritages, that of the eastern Ibādīs is by now the more extensively published, in large part thanks to the existence in Oman – as not in North Africa – of an Ibādī state.

One implication of this is that we know rather little about the views of non-Ibādī Khārijites on forbidding wrong. What we are told in non- Khārijite sources is, however, very consistent: the duty is regularly associated with Khārijite political activism.