The Kharijite Rebellions, Two Movements Against Umayyad Rule

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A fourteen-year insurgency by Kharijite militants against Umayyad authority followed the disorder that came after Mu'awiya I's death, distinct from the wider Second Fitna succession war though overlapping and outlasting it. Two rival Kharijite movements rose in that disorder: the Azariqa, led first by Nafi ibn al-Azraq and later by Qatari ibn al-Fujaa, who fought from strongholds in southern Iraq and Persia and sanctioned killing the wives and children of their opponents as apostates; and the more moderate Najdat, led by Najda ibn Amir al-Hanafi, who rose in central Arabia and rejected the Azariqa's extremism.

The Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, and his general al-Muhallab ibn Abi Sufra fought a long campaign of sieges and pitched battles against both groups through the 690s. The Najdat fractured through internal disputes and were suppressed earlier in the rebellion; the Azariqa fought on longest, pushed out of Iraq into Persia, until Qatari's death and the final defeat of his loyalists in Kirman in 699 ended the movement as a fighting force. Kharijite belief itself survived the rebellions' military defeat in smaller, less militant offshoots, chiefly the Ibadis and the Sufriyya, and Ibadi communities persist today.