Bibliographie complète

The problems inherent to the sources for early Islam continue to challenge scholars when it comes to making positivist statements regarding the formation of early Muslim identity. Specialists have long recognized that the polemical struggles for orthodoxy and legitimacy in the Abbasid period plague the akhbār and ḥadīth. This problem is particularly acute for the Khawārij, the first recognized sectarian division in Islam. The present author examines the sources using social identity theory and the analytical tools of the Biblical text critic, both of which find fruitful application to the early Muslim sources. Further support derives from an understanding of the Late Antique and tribal environments prevalent in the first Hijri centuries. Through careful application of these tools, the present author deconstructs the Khārijī master narrative to separate later inventions or redactions from those more likely to represent the sectarians as they actually existed. Akhbār, poetry, and apologetic literature ascribed to the Khawārij are then analyzed to show how the sectarians’ early self-identity did not stray far from its pre-Islamic heritage, but evolved over time to include detailed religious justification. The author concludes with the suggestion of a new Khārijī narrative in which the sect's dissent stemmed principally from complaints fully coherent with the Arabian tribal milieu, to which members only later developed doctrine to legitimate their separatism.