The Khawārij and religious identity formation in early Islam

Contenu

Thomson, Rodney L. 2016. « The Khawārij and Religious Identity Formation in Early Islam ». California State University, bibliographie, consulté le 3 avril 2025, https://ibadica.org/s/bibliographie/item/28497

Titre
The Khawārij and religious identity formation in early Islam
Créateur
Thomson, Rodney L.
Résumé
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.
Type
Mémoire de Master
Editeur
California State University
Couverture spatiale
Chico
Date
2017
nombre de pages
280
Langue
eng

Thomson, Rodney L. 2016. « The Khawārij and Religious Identity Formation in Early Islam ». California State University, bibliographie, consulté le 3 avril 2025, https://ibadica.org/s/bibliographie/item/28497

Position : 43806 (6 vues)