The doctrinal divide that sealed the fate of Qatari’s burgeoning Azariqa statelet in Kirman was not the first instance of such internal strife. When al-Azraq was driven out of Basra by the Zubayrids, not all of his followers went with him to Ahwaz. A group under Najda b. Amir al-Hanafi disagreed with al-Azraq’s leadership and moved south-west to join the Kharijites of Abu Talut in Yamama, a region from where Najda hailed.
Upon moving into Yamama, Abu Talut had established himself on a large tract of agricultural land called Jawn al-Khadarim, distributing the land and its resident slaves amongst his followers. And when Najda’s group arrived in the region it brought with them considerable loot taken from a caravan heading to Mecca from Basra. He had this look distributed amongst the Kharijites of Yamama and advised them to continue using the freed slave labour as a basis for their power in the region. Such a move proved successful and popular, to the extent that when Najda suggested that he be the leader of Kharijite Yamama, he was unanimously accepted, even by Abu Talut himself. This led to this group being called after its new leader – the Najdat.
Using his new leadership position and the solid agricultural base provided by his lands, Najda was soon on the warpath. Before 685 was out, he raided Bahrayn in eastern Arabia, winning a great victory at Dhu’l-Majaz and capturing a large amount of corn and dates that had been looted from a nearby market.
This raid was followed up a year later by the forcing of a more permanent Kharijite presence in the region. Intervening in a tribal conflict, Najda took control of the major port city of Qatif, which became one of his major headquarters. The claiming of Bahrayn was to be the first in a series of victories that would stretch the Najdat statelet to much of the Arabian Peninsula and threaten to split the Zubayrid caliphate in half. And the Zubayrids were not idle in confronting this threat. The caliph’s son and governor of Basra, Hamza, sent an army of 14,000 men to challenge the Kharijites, only for it to be ambushed by Najda and put to flight.
Najda followed up this victory by sending his lieutenant Atiyya b. al-Aswad to Oman, where he defeated its chieftains to bring the region into under Najdat control; however, this only lasted a few months as Atiyya’s deputy was defeated and ejected from the region. This defeat and Najda’s unequal distribution of reward and possible communication with Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad caliph, led to growing divide between Atiyya and Najda. This would culminate in 687 with Atiyya taking a group of supporters to Sistan, on the Iran/Pakistan frontier, where they established their own Kharijite faction – the Atawiyya.
This was only a momentary bump in the road for the Najdat, as their control over Bahrayn was tightened, another deputy marched to Hadhramawt and Najda himself led an army into Sana’a, with the capitulation of both making the entirety of Yemen tributary of the Najdat. These successes actually made Najda more powerful in Arabia than al-Zubayr, although the victory over the Alids in mid-April 687 had greatly expanded the territory that recognised al-Zubayr as caliph.
This did not perturb Najda, with Kharijite raids striking into the Hejaz. Perhaps only religious concerns over attacking the holy sites of Mecca prevented the Najdat from making more headway than they did at this point. And even with this hesitation, it did not stop Najda from blockading much of the Hejaz.
However, one thing did make into Mecca – Najda himself. In mid-687, in a true testament to the perception of Najdat power, its leader was ‘allowed’ to lead a group of his Kharijite followers on the Hajj pilgrimage. If he tried to stop him, al-Zubayr proved powerless to prevent such an incursion into what was his capital city. With this demonstration, the Najdat appeared the equal of the Zubayrids and the Umayyads.
Despite worries over using violence towards the holy sites, Najda forged on into the Hejaz after returning from his Hajj. His forces approached Medina, but when it refused to capitulate without a fight, Najda again withdrew from attacking a holy city. Instead, Najda moved against Ta’if, near Mecca. Here, he received a more open welcome, with the Ta’if leadership giving their allegiance to the Najdat. By 689, the Kharijites controlled enough of the southern Hejaz to appoint their own governor over a region taking in Ta’if, Sarat and Tabala, while also collecting tribute from even further south. Virtually all of Arabia was under Najdat control. It would seem to only be a matter of time before Najda looked to finish off the Zubayrids. And yet, this was to be the peak of Najdat power.
As al-Hajjaj arrived in the Hejaz in late 691, he may have been surprised by the lack of Zubayrid opposition, but that does not mean that there was significant Kharijite opposition instead. Bypassing Medina and Mecca due to orders from caliph Abd al-Malik not to attack the holy sites (yet), the Umayyad general moved against Ta’if, his hometown, and quickly removed whatever allegiance it owed to the Najdat.
Indeed, during these initial Umayyad moves and even their subsequent attacks on first Medina and then Mecca itself through 691 and 692, attacks brough an end to the Second Fitna upon the death of al-Zubayr in late 692, there was no mention of Kharijite resistance to the Umayyad incursion.
For a statelet at the height of its powers, it seems peculiar for the Najdat to be so inactive during the battle for the Hejaz. How had it come to be that Najda and his followers were absent from this climactic end of the second Muslim civil war?
Abd al-Malik had clearly recognised the Najdat threat as dealing with them appears to have been part of al-Hajjaj’s remit as governor of the Hejaz, Yemen and Yamama, a remit that encompassed significant lands under Najdat control. However, it appears to be Abd al-Malik’s diplomacy that undid the Najdat statelet more than the military actions of al-Hajjaj or the Zubayrids.
We have already seen how contact with the Umayyad caliph had led to a schism in the Najdat with Atiyya’s departure to Sistan in 687 and it appears that a similar episode happened again in around 690. Almost certainly knowing exactly what he was doing, Abd al-Malik reached out to Najda, offering amnesty and the Yamama governorship in return for recognition of his caliphate. Najda rejected the offer, but maintained cordial relations with Damascus, with this being enough to cause dissension in the Najdat ranks.
Being a faction built on what they saw as ideological and religious purity in the face of the corruption of Islam, this Kharijite dissension quickly turned into a full split between those supposedly open to negotiations with the ‘usurper’ Abd al-Malik and those hardliners who now saw Najda as irrevocably tainted ideologically and religiously. It is likely that there was more at play than just dissent at Umayyad dealings – there was dispute over the dissemination of pay to certain parts of Najdat military, while Najda reputedly gave preferential treatment to his close associates despite reports of their religious impropriety.
This split redirected Najdat attention and then drained away Najdat power at a time when a potential victory was in the offing. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that opposition to the Umayyads amongst Zubayrid supporters could have seen Najda’s ranks swollen to an extent when they could have challenged the forces of al-Hajjaj.
As it was, instead, the cunning diplomacy of Abd al-Malik had not only neutralised the Najdat but ultimately destroyed it. Even before the final defeat of al-Zubayr in Mecca, Najda had been murdered by Najdat radicals under Abu Fudayk in Bahrayn.
It was quickly proven how much the Najdat statelet had relied on Najda’s leadership abilities and reputation. Abu Fudayk tried to take up the mantle of Najdat ‘commander of the faithful’ and was initially successful in repelling an Umayyad invasion from Basra in 692; however, this was only delaying the inevitable. The following year, a combined army of Basran and Kufan forces defeated Abu Fudayk at Mushahhar, just south of Qatif, before capturing the last major Najdat holdout by the end of the year. The Najdat Kharijites themselves did not completely disappear, surviving in some form for another two centuries or more, but they were never the same coherent threat they had been under their eponymous leader.
Given the solidity and indeed power it had managed to accrue under the leadership of Najda, it is somewhat surprising that the Najdat collapsed before its much less secure sister statelet in the Azariqa. But only somewhat. It can never be surprising that a faction whose identity was formed through an extreme even fanatical conformity to religious practice and tradition sees its leadership, no matter how successful, or even the very faction itself overthrown by the necessity of adherence to an impossibly strict code of conduct and belief.
The Kharijites as a whole survived the Umayyad destruction of the Najdat and the Azriqa in the 690s, but they were significantly weakened. There would be a significant Kharijite rebellion across the caliphate in the 740s and 750s, although the leading roles was taken by more moderate Kharijite groups – the Sufriyya and Ibadiyya, with the more militant groups gradually eliminated by the Abbasid caliphate. These moderate groups would have some ephemeral success in the caliphal heartlands, capturing major centres like Kufa, Mosul and even Medina and Mecca for a time, only to be ejected; however, they both saw more lasting success on the fringes of the caliphate – a Sufriyya dynasty ruled Morocco for 150 years from 750, while the Ibadiyya enjoyed similar success at around the same time ruling Algeria and Oman, with the modern population of the latter made of a majority of Ibadi Muslims.
While modern day Ibadi in Oman and North Africa (where they absorbed their Sufriyya brethren by the 11th century) are ultimately the descendants of moderate Kharijites, they strongly condemn the extremism and violence of Kharijites such as the Najdat and Azariqa, even though those groups came close to upsetting the established caliphal order during the Second Fitna.
Bibliography
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Gaiser, A. Muslims, Scholars, Soldiers: The Origin and Elaboration of the Ibadi Imamate Traditions. Oxford (2010).
Hagemann, H-L. The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains. Edinburgh (2021).
Watt, W.M. ‘Khārijite thought in the Umayyad Period,’ Der Islam 36 (1961) 215–231