The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains.

• Author: Judd, Steven C.

The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains. By HANNAH-LENA HAGE-MANN. Edinburgh: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. xii + 316. $110, [pounds sterling]85.

In this work Hannah-Lena Hagemann adds to the small but growing body of work on the Kharijites. She does not set out to produce a comprehensive, positivist narrative history of the Kharijite movement and its various offshoots, asserting that such a task is not possible given the state of the sources. Instead, Hagemann analyzes what she labels as "literary Kharijism," focusing on the roles that Kharijites play in the construction of narratives of early Islamic history. Essentially, both collectively and individually, Kharijites serve as adversarial characters to illustrate the positive or negative qualities of those with whom they interact. As a consequence, the sources often present Kharijites as opaque, even generic villains, rather than as complex historical figures. While the use of nondescript villains in heroic stories is a common, even simplistic literary technique, Hagemann demonstrates that early Islamic writers deployed the Kharijites in nuanced ways to achieve their narrative ends.

The book is divided into four parts. The first, "Preliminaries," consists of three short chapters. Chapter one offers a thorough review of the existing scholarship on the Kharijites and explanations for their emergence, which center on tribal nostalgia, economic grievances, and especially militant piety. Hagemann then explains her focus on what the Kharijites signify in the sources, rather than on reconstructing their actual history. In the next chapter Hagemann describes the sources she will examine and the parameters of her study. The list of sources is familiar and includes Khalifa b. Khayyat, al-Dinawari, Ibn 'Atham al-Kufi, al-Ya'qubi, al-Tabari, al-Mas'udi, al-Baladhuri, and others; the analysis in later chapters leans more heavily, however, on al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri, and Ibn 'Atham than on the others. Hagemann excludes later sources, as well as Ibadi works, in order to maintain her focus on the mainstream narrative that developed by the late tenth century CE. The final introductory chapter provides the skeletal narrative of the emergence of the Kharijites from Sifffn through the death of 'Abd al-Malik. The story told here will be familiar to most readers, but provides a necessary foundation for the literary analysis that follows.

The second part of the book...