The Azāriqa and Violence among the Khawārij Nathan Spannaus A.M. Thesis Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Harvard University 2007 The Khawārij are the great villains of early Islam. They are remembered as violent, antisocial, intransigent, stringent, moralistic zealots, who did little more than curse and terrorize their coreligionists. 1 While this characterization is not wholly inaccurate, it is a better representation of the impact of one particular Khārijite sub-sect than a description of Khārijism as a whole. This sub-sect is the Azāriqa, who enjoyed a brief and murderous existence at the end of the first/seventh century. It was they, not the moderate Khawārij, who were responsible for the terrific infamy surrounding Khārijism. Focusing on the Azāriqa, this paper will attempt to show that it was their excessive violence, or, perhaps more importantly, the memory of this violence, which influenced the greater Muslim view of the Khawārij as a whole. Heresiography is a useful indicator of the community’s views, particularly in terms of theology, where it explicates what is and is not religiously acceptable (which may not be the same as what is popularly or socially acceptable). The heresiographical writings of Baghdādī (d. 429/1037) and Shahrastānī (479/1086-548/1153) are representative of the Sunni tradition of heresiography. As Ash‘arites, they are members of one of the primary Islamic theological schools, and by their lifetimes the tradition had 1 For an example of how their historical memory has lived on into the modern era, see Jeffrey T. Kenney. Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. © 2007 Nathan Spannaus 1