Ibāḍī Doctrine and Berber Identity in Ibn Sallām’S “Book of the Origins of Islam and the Foundations of the Faith” (Ca

1 Mohamad Ballan “They shall come to you from the West with God’s religion”: Ibāḍī Doctrine and Berber Identity in Ibn Sallām’s “Book of the Origins of Islam and the Foundations of the Faith” (ca. 875) In the traditional framework of Islamic historiography, the Kharijites are constructed within the broader narrative as the very antithesis of a centralizing Islamic polity and an increasingly “orthodox” (Sunnī) religious establishment in the early period. The classical sources often represent the Kharijites as violent rebels, strongly opposed to centralized political authority, whose coming was foretold by the Prophet as inaugurating an era of unprecedented discord and destruction, thereby guaranteeing for themselves the enmity of God and the Muslim community and were thus destined for eternal punishment in Hell.1 Most of these early texts seek to depict the Kharijites as a radical, fringe movement which was both theologically deviant and destabilizing to the proper political and social order. These sources were written during the emergence and consolidation of a Sunnī theological and historical narrative in the ninth and tenth centuries, and as such, consciously portrayed the Kharijites—in addition to other “heretical” sects—as violating “orthodox” Islamic beliefs and practices. As Jeffrey Kenney has noted, the Kharijites, in particular, were represented as a “negative paradigm” and served as a symbol for everything that “orthodox/true” Islam stood against.2 Modern scholarship, largely dependent upon these classical sources, has reproduced these representations and focused on the purported theological deviance and political instability caused by the Kharijites in the early centuries of Islam.3 In other words, the assumption that the Kharijites were indeed disruptive to the “natural course” of the development of early Islamic civilization and theology has been taken for granted as an established fact. This problematic macro-historical interpretation and misrepresentation of such a complex religio-political phenomenon as the rise of the Kharijites is underpinned by the fact that little attention has been devoted to the rich, albeit sparse, textual sources which were composed by the Kharijites themselves during the first three centuries of Islam. As a result, much of the historical writing about this movement and its adherents continues to be represented merely as a chain of wanton violence undertaken by a theologically unsophisticated group of tribal individuals. Moreover, rather than presenting critical historical analyses, many Arabic-language publications in particular appear to be little more than updated heresiographies which reproduce traditional assumptions about the movement and which are intended to reinforce classical arguments. Indeed, these studies are limited by the very 1 Jeffrey T. Kenney, Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 26–28. Indeed, even the term used to designate the movement denotes “rebels” (from khurūj, “rebellion”) thereby reinforcing the association between violent rebellion and the religio-political movement known as the Kharijites 2 Kenney, Muslim Rebels, p. 20 3 Kenney, Muslim Rebels, pp. 20–21 2 fact that their authors have tended to rely disproportionately upon classical heresiographies composed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, rather than upon literary sources which speak directly to the question of the social, political, religious, or even economic context which facilitated the rise of this movement.4 To be sure, there have been several scholars who have sought to provide a more nuanced picture by emphasizing that, although violent and rejected by the Sunnī and Shī‘ī legal and theological schools which would emerge by the tenth century, the Kharijites nevertheless represented a substantial portion of early Muslims and essentially constituted a third major political-theological sect of Islam during the first three Islamic centuries.5 In particular, these scholars have sought to underscore the diversity of the various groups subsumed under the heading of “Kharijtes” by emphasizing, in particular, the emergence of the Ibāḍīs as representing a particularly significant trend in the development of Islamic thought during the eighth and ninth centuries. Moreover, several of these scholars have contextualized the rise of the Kharijites within the various social, economic, political as well as religious- theological developments in early Islam rather than seek, as traditional scholarship has done, to exclusively identify the Kharijites with a singular cause.6 In the past decade, a number of important studies of the Kharijites, and the Ibāḍīs in particular, have been published which have sought to provide clearer insight into the doctrinal, social, and political dimensions of the movement.7 The importance of the history of early Islamic North Africa for further understanding the course of the development of Kharijism is paramount. Not only did Kharijism shape the course of Islamic political and religious history in North Africa during the eighth and ninth centuries, but the movement itself was also transformed in fundamental ways. The importance of the Kharijites in the so-called Great Berber Revolt of 740– 743, which played a key role in weakening and eventually overturning Umayyad political authority in North Africa, in addition to the rise of important Kharijite entities in the Maghreb in the eighth and ninth centuries are two key developments which closely link the political history of North Africa in the early Islamic centuries with the religious development of Kharijism as a distinct, sectarian identity.8 In fact, the first three centuries which witnessed the establishment of Islamic political authority in North Africa can be interpreted in light of a 4 For example, see Nāyef Ma‘rūf, Al-Khawārij fī al-‘asr al-Umawī. Beirut: Dār al-Nafā’is, 2006. 5 Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 191 6 Kenney, Muslim Rebels, pp. 23–25 7 See, for example, Adam Gaiser’s Muslims, Scholars, and Soldiers: The Origin and Elaboration of the Ibāḍī Imāmate Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Latīfah al-Bakkāy’s Ḥarakat al-Khawārij: Nasā’tuha wa taṭawwurha ila nihāyat al-‘ahd al-umawī (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalī‘ah, 2001), Muḥammad Ḥasan Mahdī’s Al-Ibāḍīyya: nashā’tuha wa ‘aqā’iduha. Beirut: al-Ahlīyyah, 2011. This is not to suggest that critical historical writing about the Ibāḍīs is a recent phenomenon. The pioneering work of Tadeusz Lewicki, in particular, during the 1960s and 1970s has been a major influence upon the development of the field 8 Throughout this paper, the terms “North Africa” and “Maghreb” will be used interchangeably to designate the area ranging from Tripolitania to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. 3 succession of religio-political doctrines—Umayyad universalism, Kharijism (both its Sufrī and Ibāḍī manifestations), Fatimid Isma‘īlism—before the eventual triumph of Malīkī Sunnī orthodoxy in the eleventh century.9 The period of Kharijite religious and political ascendancy in North Africa, wedged as it is between the Umayyad and Fatimid periods, has received relatively little attention, primarily due to the lack of literary sources. This paper seeks to modestly contribute to this rather neglected field within the history of early Islamic North Africa by bringing to light and assessing a source which provides important insight into the role of the Kharijites, particularly the Ibāḍīs, in the political and religious development of Islam in the Maghreb. The text in question, the Kitāb fīhi bad’ al-islām wa sharā’i‘ al-dīn (“The Origins of Islam and the Foundations of the Faith”) by Ibn Sallām (d. 887), was most likely composed in the Tripolitania region, around 875 during the height of the Rustāmid dynasty (776–909) and provides historians with the earliest surviving Ibāḍī text from North Africa. The text provides historians with nothing less than a detailed historical and doctrinal overview of Islam from an Ibāḍī perspective. The importance of this work is magnified when one considers that it is also the earliest extant history of Islamic North Africa written from an indigenous perspective. Quite surprisingly, since it was edited and published by Werner Schwartz and Shaykh Sālim ibn Ya‘qūb in 1986 it has attracted little attention from modern scholars. Due to constraints of space, I will neither be able to undertake a comprehensive historiographical overview or an in-depth historical analysis of Ibāḍism in ninth-century North Africa, despite the fact that this would be essential for a proper framing and contextualization of the text. Rather, in this paper I will undertake a brief analysis of the Kitāb, indicating in particular its importance for understanding the historical and religious development of Ibāḍism in North Africa while also underscoring its significance for historians of early Islamic North Africa in general. Islamic North Africa and the Kharijites (ca. 730–909): A Brief Historical Survey In order to understand the broader social and political background which informed Ibn Sallām’s historical perspective, it is necessary to briefly revisit the history of Kharijism in North Africa between the eighth and early tenth centuries. By the early 730s, Berber dissatisfaction with the discriminatory fiscal and social policies of the Umayyad authorities in North Africa, in conjunction with a number of other factors, culminated in the outbreak of a major rebellion in 740.10 It has been suggested by several scholars that the increased da‘wa (religious propagation) activities of Ibāḍī and Sufrī missionaries among the Berber tribes since the 720s was intimately 9 Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretative Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 105–106 10 Khalid Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihād State: The Reign of Hishām ibn ‘Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads (New York: City University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 199, 204–206; Abdelkader El-Ghali, Les États Kharidjites au Maghreb (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2003), pp.

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