RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESagreeing with them, as an apostate (Ar. murtadd) or unbeliever. Such
people, they felt, must forfeit their membership in the community and
ought to be killed. They were militant, fundamentalist, self-righteous,
homicidal, and suicidal; they were likely to raise the ta~ktm (Ar.) in
a crowded masjid and be instantly torn to pieces by the panicked
crowd.
The Khawarij continued to serve as a vehicle for opposition under
Mu'awiya. Sixteen risings took place at Basra and Kufa during his
reign, beginning with the five hundred I:Iariiri's at Shahraziir under
Farwa ibn Nawfal al-Ashja'i who had escaped from Nahrawan, trans-
ferred their opposition to 'All to opposition to Mu'awiya, and re-
turned to Kufa.^19 Ziyad and his son 'Ubaydullah are said to have
killed thirteen thousand Khawarij between them, and 'Ubaydullah
alone is said to have imprisoned four thousand.^20 By the end of
Mu'awiya's reign, the Khawarijhad abandoned Kufa and centered
their activities at Basra, where the I:Iariiri's had their own masjid.^21
Suppression by Mu'awiya's governors in Iraq led some Khawarij at
Basra to abandon armed opposition in order to survive and to conceal
their true beliefs because it was too dangerous to reveal them.^22 This
was the origin of the argument over whether an unrighteous regime
might be tolerated if there was no hope of overthrowing it or whether
a true Muslim was required to oppose such a regime by force, no
matter what the cost. The quietist attitude of Mirdas ibn Udayya (d.
680-81) of the tribe of Tamim at Basra was inherited by the Sufriyya
sect of the Khawarij. But Mirdas was imprisoned by 'Ubaydullah, his
brother was killed, and in 679 he was finally provoked into leading
a Khariji revolt against the excesses of government suppresssion. With
a small group of only forty men he left Basra for Khuzistan, where
they collected their own stipends.^23
These opposing tendencies within the KharijI movement were crys-
tallized during the second fitna and its aftermath, which served as a
catalyst for so many developments in the seventh century. About twenty
19 Tabari, Ta'rlkh, Il, 9-10; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic
Thought (Edinburgh, 1973), p. 20.
20 Montgomery Watt, Formative Period, p. 459. For 'Ubaydullah's suppression of
the Khawarij in Basra, see Baladhuri, Ansab, IVb, 77-123.
21 Baladhuri, Ansab, IVb, 94.
22 This kind of dissimulation (Ar. taqiyya) was sanctioned by Qur'an 4:101.
23 Baladhuri, Ansab, IVb, 87-89; Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, 'Iqd, 11, 400; G. Levi Della
Vida, "Mirdas b. Udaiya, EI(l), Ill, 514-15; Salem, Khawarij p. 29; Tabari, Ta'rlkh,
Il, 185-787.