Kharijite political theology was, by the standards of its time, strikingly egalitarian. Where Sunni tradition looked to the tribe of Quraysh for legitimate leadership and Shia tradition to the line of Ali's descendants, the Kharijites held that any pious, capable Muslim could lead the community, including, in principle, a freed slave, and that an unjust or sinning leader, whatever his lineage, could and should be removed. This was paired with an uncompromising view of sin, that a Muslim who commits a grave wrong ceases to be a Muslim at all and becomes a legitimate target of judgement, a doctrine that in its most extreme forms, notably among the Azariqa sub sect, justified violence against fellow Muslims who declined to join the movement. This severity brought sustained warfare with the Umayyad and later Abbasid states, which suppressed one Kharijite revolt after another through the 7th and 8th centuries, and by the 9th century the main militant line had been effectively destroyed.
One branch, the Ibadiyya, had broken away early from the movement's more violent wing and adopted a considerably more moderate, quietist political stance, and it alone survived. Ibadi communities continue today chiefly in Oman, where Ibadism remains the majority tradition, along with Zanzibar, the Mzab valley of Algeria, the island of Jerba in Tunisia and the Nafusa mountains of Libya, the last living inheritors of a movement that began as the first sect within Islam.