Ever since the rise of Islamic terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, moderate Muslims, for lack of a better term, have sought desperate measures to exonerate Islam from the crimes of these terrorist organisations and ultimately discredit ISIS on Islamic grounds. Muslim scholars and leaders such as Hamza Yusuf and Yasir Qadhi, for example, have spread the narrative that these terrorist organisations are the modern day “Khawarij” that Muhammad reportedly foretold in the Islamic tradition. They argue this by quoting hadiths that talk about a group of young, foolish people who recite the Quran, but have nothing to do with the Quran because it doesn’t go beyond their throats and that they go through the Religion of Islam as an arrow goes through the target. Here a few examples of the Hadiths that they cite:
“Narrated `Ali: I relate the traditions of Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) to you for I would rather fall from the sky than attribute something to him falsely. But when I tell you a thing which is between you and me, then no doubt, war is guile. I heard Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) saying, “In the last days of this world there will appear some young foolish people who will use (in their claim) the best speech of all people (i.e. the Qur’an) and they will abandon Islam as an arrow going through the game. Their belief will not go beyond their throats (i.e. they will have practically no belief), so wherever you meet them, kill them, for he who kills them shall get a reward on the Day of Resurrection.” — Sahih al-Bukhari 3611.
“Abdullah [bin Mas’ud] narrated that the Messenger of Allah (s.a.w) said: “In the end of time there will come a people young in years, foolish in minds, reciting the Qur’an which will not go beyond their throats, uttering sayings from the best of creatures, going through the religion as an arrow goes through the target.” — Jami` at-Tirmidhi 2188.
There are more Hadiths that say similar things. There are also Hadiths that say that the Khawarij are the dogs of hell:
“It was narrated that Ibn Awfa said: “The Messenger of Allah said: ‘The Khawarij are the dogs of Hell.” — Sunan Ibn Majah Hadith 173.
Muslims believe that ISIS is the people that Muhammad described in those Hadith.
ISIS in particular has been labelled as Khawarij because ISIS is the most brutal Jihadist group. Interestingly enough, Al Qaeda has also jumped on the bandwagon of accusing ISIS of being Khawarij because they have their own Jihadi civil war. So it’s not just moderate Muslims who have labelled ISIS as Khawarij.
Now, before we examine the claim that ISIS are Khawarij, I will need to go into more detail about who the Khawarij are because the Hadiths that I quoted don’t give much information, so it’s important that we understand our terms.
So who are the Khawarij? Well, in order to find out, we’re going to have to take a look into early Islamic history. Here is what Graeme Wood has to say in his book about ISIS:
“The history of Kharijism is brief and bloody and Muslim sources tell a partisan tale about the group’s misdeeds. In 657, a quarter century after the death of Muhammad, two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim community fought the Battle of Siffin, in present-day Raqqah. On one side was ʿAli ibn Abi Talib—cousin of the Prophet, husband of his daughter Fatima, and Muhammad’s rightful successor according to the Shia—and on the other was Muʿawiyya, who was not from the Prophet’s household but was favored by the Sunni. The battle was bloody, killing 25,000 of ʿAli’s men and 45,000 of Muʿawiyya’s in three months of intermittent fighting. Eventually, the rivals spared their armies further slaughter and agreed to arbitration.
A third group then arose from within ʿAli’s camp. Called the qurra’, or reciters of the Koran, they came from the Tamimi tribe of Iraq and were well-known as dangerous idiots. They opposed the arbitration because they believed debating the issue at all displaced God’s will with human judgement. This group left ʿAli’s camp to follow an obscure tribal leader named ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb al Rasibi, also known as “the callused one” [Dhu’l-Thafinat] for the thick pads of skin on his forehead and knees from intense prayer. Because of this exodus, history remembers them as “those who departed” [Khawarij], or Kharijites.
They are now among the most despised groups in the history of Islam. Opposing both Sunni and Shia, they unleashed a wave of killings across Arabia. Edward Gibbon described it in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“In the temple of Mecca, three Charegites [Kharijites] or enthusiasts discoursed of the disorders of the church and state: they soon agreed, that the deaths of Ali, of Moawiyah, and of his friend Amrou, the viceroy of Egypt, would restore the peace and unity of religion. Each of the assassins chose his victim, poisoned his dagger, devoted his life, and secretly repaired to the scene of action. Their resolution was equally desperate: but the first mistook the person of Amrou, and stabbed the deputy who occupied his seat; the prince of Damascus [Muʿawiyya] was dangerously hurt by the second; the lawful caliph [ʿAli], in the mosque of Kufa, received a mortal wound from the hand of the third. He expired in the sixty-third year of his age, and mercifully recommended to his children, that they would despatch the murderer by a single stroke.”
Slaying ʿAli, a rightly guided caliph, during his prostration before God is an impressive trifecta of sin. Being ornery bastards prevented the Kharijites from making alliances and friends, and both Shia and Sunni leaders killed them when they got the chance. The Kharijites ruled isolated pockets of Arabia, dispensing a harsh justice to those who chose to immigrate to their land, or who happened to live there. The most extreme among them— followers of a Kharijite warrior named Nafiʿ ibn Azraq—treated all nonKharijites as infidels, and stressed the obligation of all Muslims to make hijrah to the Kharijites’ small territory in southern Iraq and western Iran. According to one source, making hijrah to join the Azraqites entailed a brutal hazing ritual that required each aspirant to slaughter a non-Kharijite Muslim. Their command to piety brooked no failure: if a Muslim sinned, he could be considered an apostate even if the sin was minor, such as drinking. The Kharijites took a literalist approach to scripture and worship. Instead of praying five times daily, as all other Muslims do, they pointed to Koran 11:114 (“establish prayer at the two ends of the day”) and prayed only twice. Within a century they were reduced to a few minuscule communities that had given up on recovering worldly power.
The slur “Kharijite” has recurred many times in Islamic history, usually as a catch-all term for “Muslim who does not get along well with other Muslims.” As an insult, it associates any irritable pietist sect with sin. In fact the Kharijites followed a fairly specific and idiosyncratic program, almost universally regarded as deviant by Muslims ever since. They shed blood freely—according to some sources, they would split people in half and vivisect pregnant women—and did not distinguish in battle between soldiers and civilians. Their cavalry attacks and guerrilla tactics made them famous for blitz-like seizures of towns, before authorities could prepare themselves.
Few Muslim sources pay these fanatics any compliments. But to remember them only for their irascible bloodlust risks forgetting appealing aspects of Kharijism, which no doubt account for the success it briefly enjoyed. Later sources may disparage them, but in some ways the Kharijites were preserving the earliest impulses of what became Islam. They stressed reading of the Koran, hijrah, asceticism, takfir, and al wala’ wa-l bara’ [loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of infidels]—all core principles and practices of the early religion. Muhammad had come to power as a unifier of warring tribes—the Ansar originally welcomed him to Medina as a mediator—and by the time of the Battle of Siffin, Muʿawiyya and ʿAli had come to resemble squabbling hereditary kings. The Kharijite emphasis on piety promised to re-abolish the importance of tribe, race, and lineage. (They even denied that their caliph needed to come from the tribe of Quraysh.) Kharijites believed in equal opportunity—opportunity to lead, to get beheaded, to assume responsibility for one’s soul. The hadith about following your emir, “even if he is an Ethiopian slave with a head like a raisin,” has long been taken as a Kharijite slogan of racial equality. Most Muslims may revile the Kharijites of history, but aspects of Kharijism are inescapably modern. To those who believe in the equality of man, the evil of despotism, and freedom to determine one’s own fate, the Kharijites offer much to appreciate.” — The Way of The Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, pages 210-212, by Graeme Wood.
So that’s who the Khawarij were. They were a group of rogue Muslims that emerged and rebelled against the main body of Muslims some time after Muhammad’s death. They were notorious because of how violent and brutal they were to other Muslims. They made takfir on other Muslims (i.e. excommunicated them out of Islam) for committing major sins like theft and drinking alcohol and killed them for those sins. They even rebelled against Ali ibn Abi Talib and assassinated him. Ali was not only the 4th Caliph of Islam, but also a Sahabi i.e. a close companion of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. The Khawarij were also known as the Kharijites, or Khariji in singular.
Muslims who oppose ISIS, and other Jihadist groups by extension, believe that they are ideological descendents of the Khawarij of old, thus labelling them as modern day Khawarij or even Neo-Khawarij. Graeme Wood explains why ISIS has been labelled as Khawarij in his book, here’s what he says:
“The common bonds between Kharijism and the Islamic State scarcely require explanation. Both groups rejected authority and created chaos; they urged revolt against unjust rulers as a matter of principle, despite a general preference in Islam for obedience, even to unjust leaders. The Kharijites practiced mass excommunication; the Islamic State cuts off the heads of “apostates” daily, and it declares whole classes of Muslims (e.g., the Shia) infidels. The Kharijites broke off or departed [kharaja] from the Muslim mainstream; the Islamic State has stated that it defies mainstream Islam (and thus returns to real Islam). Most of all, both groups are just really mean.” — The Way of The Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, pages 212, by Graeme Wood.
In other words, moderate Muslims like to compare how ISIS violently rebels against the main body of Muslims to how the Khawarij violently rebelled against the main body of Muslims, including many Muslim rulers and scholars. Both ISIS and the Khawarij made takfir on Muslims that didn’t agree with their interpretation of Islam, including Muslim scholars and leaders.
This might seem like a compelling comparison when thinking about superficially, but a closer examination reveals the comparison is just a false analogy that’s reliant on obfuscation and deception. ISIS members and supporters have refuted this comparison many times, as Graeme Wood shares in his book:
“One consequence of calling the Islamic State modern Kharijites is to affirm that they are also, by implication, Muslims: the Kharijites tried to cast other Muslims out of the religion, but most of their enemies did not return the favor. Second, because the Prophet is supposed to have prophesied the emergence of a Kharijite group and commanded his followers to fight it, as soon as anyone calls others Kharijites, he implies that he must fight them. It can’t be just an insult. Because they are Muslim, however, infidels should not be the ones to fight them: that is the job of Muslims. At dinner, Qadhi assented to both points: the Islamic State is a Muslim group, not infidel, and Muslims must denounce and fight them. He would be happy to see the Islamic State defeated by Muslims, just not by a non-Muslim army.
The Islamic State’s supporters deny that they are Kharijites. Turki al Binʿali rejected the comparison point by point, in a recorded sermon. “We don’t excommunicate people for major sins” such as drinking alcohol or theft, he said. The Kharijites would take alcohol consumption as evidence of apostasy. But the Islamic State has not executed anyone for drinking, eating during the Ramadan fast, smoking, or stealing. Nor, he said, does the Islamic State “practice mass excommunication on the basis of false assumptions.” Instead they judge people as apostates only if they have individually committed clear acts of disbelief, such as fighting against Muslims, or other classic Wahhabi faith-nullifiers. Then he anticipates the next point on which the Islamic State’s enemies claim it is Kharijite—isn’t “fighting against Muslims” what the Islamic State does every day? Again, Binʿali says no. “We don’t consider it legitimate to rebel against a leader who is Muslim and monotheist,” he says. The Islamic State has fought only against non-Muslims and polytheists. (This point is valid only if one accepts his expansive category of people who are apostates.)
Other defenders of the Islamic State point out that the Kharijites’ egalitarianism included abolition of the Quraysh requirement for the caliph. The Islamic State, by contrast, has observed and emphasized that requirement—therefore they cannot be Kharijites. They did not, these defenders say, revolt against an unjust ruler or “leave” Islam. Instead, they seized uncontrolled land and remained in the religion, strengthening it. They note that the Kharijites partook in other odd heterodoxies—such as requiring women to pray while menstruating, changing the daily prayer schedule, and editing certain verses out of the Koran—that no one accuses the Islamic State of doing. Periodically the Islamic State claims to discover and punish Kharijite sects within its own ranks. Finally, the Islamic State attempts to hoist its Muslim enemies by their own petards: those who say “the Islamic State are not Muslims” are themselves committing takfir on Muslims—which is something a Kharijite would do.
As a rhetorical move, calling the Islamic State “Kharijites” hits its followers hard. They compare themselves to the Companions of the Prophet; instead, their opponents say, we should compare them to the first goon squad in Islamic history. But the Kharijite accusation also concedes to the Islamic State the idea that modern disagreements are best resolved by appealing to theology or ancient history, rather than to basic decency or a shared modern morality. On the other hand, the accusation infuriates the Islamic State, so many Muslims continue to fling it around on that basis alone.” — The Way of The Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, pages 212-214, by Graeme Wood.
Here’s a summary of ISIS members’ objections to the Muslim critics who have labelled them as Khawarij:
- ISIS hasn’t made takfir on other Muslims and killed those Muslims for committing major sins like theft, smoking, drinking alcohol and eating during the Ramadan fast. The Khawarij on the other hand, excommunicated and killed Muslims who smoked, drank alcohol and committed theft. It’s also worth acknowledging that making takfir on other Muslims is also not exclusively a Khariji trait.
- ISIS doesn’t make takfir on Muslims on the basis of false assumptions, they only make takfir on Muslims who individually commit acts that amount to disbelief, which as far as ISIS is concerned, would be fighting against other Muslims (specifically ISIS members) or committing “Wahhabi faith-nullifiers” (i.e. violating the Salafi creed, which is the creed that ISIS follows).
- ISIS only rebels against Muslim leaders they deem to be non-Muslims and Polytheists… This point is one of their weaker points and is only worth considering if you already are an ISIS supporter, so I can’t comment any further on this.
- ISIS points out that they observe and demand that being a Muslim Caliph requires the Caliph to be of Quraysh lineage, the tribe that Muhammad came from. The Khawarij on the other hand, abolished the Quraysh requirement for the Caliph.
- ISIS argues that they didn’t start their Caliphate by rebelling against a local Muslim ruler, but by seizing uncontrolled land in Iraq and Syria.
- ISIS points out that the Khawarij partook in “odd heterodoxies” e.g. requiring women to pray while menstruating, changing the schedule of the 5 daily prayers and editing verses out of the Quran. ISIS has never been accused of committing any of these heterodoxies, despite being subjected to such scrutiny by innumerable Muslim critics. This is evidently because ISIS isn’t guilty of participating in these odd heterodoxies!
- ISIS claims that they have discovered and punished Muslims in their own Caliphate for having Khariji traits, meaning that they are keen and attentive enough to notice Muslims who actually have Khariji traits and deter them. This doesn’t make sense if we grant the assumption that ISIS are the modern day Khawarij.
And that’s just the objections that ISIS members have, it’s worth remembering that there are other Jihadist groups that have been labelled as Khawarij, including the likes of Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and many others. After all, not all Jihadis are affiliated with ISIS. But I wanted the focus of this article to be on the claim that ISIS are Khawarij, so I’ll end this here.
In conclusion, the argument that ISIS are not Islamic on the grounds that they’re the modern day Khawarij is full of false assumptions, ignorance and outright lies.
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