From the Seventh Century Succession Dispute to a Doctrine of Survival

Wilferd Madelung's study of the early caliphate traces Ibadism's origins to the political and theological disputes that followed the assassination of the third caliph Uthman in 656 and the subsequent Battle of Siffin between Ali and Muawiya, disputes that produced the Kharijite movements from which a more moderate current, ancestral to today's Ibadism, eventually distinguished itself by rejecting the harsher Kharijite positions on takfir, declaring other Muslims unbelievers, while still holding that leadership should rest with the most qualified believer rather than pass through any particular lineage or clan. That minority and frequently persecuted status across the following centuries, under a succession of rulers who did not share Ibadi theology, is the practical context Ibadi jurists developed the kitman doctrine to address, and the doctrine's usefulness outlasted the immediate disputes that produced it: Ibadi communities survive today chiefly in Oman, where the tradition eventually became the majority faith under sympathetic rule, and in smaller minority communities in the Mzab valley of Algeria, on the Tunisian island of Djerba and in Zanzibar, each shaped by long periods in which the question kitman answers, how openly a minority community may practice under rulers it does not control, was not a theoretical concern but a daily one.