The Khawārij and a Realm Between Two Realms

Moving on from that to some of the other groups that were around: another was the Khārijīs, the Khawārij, the Seceders. These were a group of overly pious, pietist people who had certain ideas and would then try to implement them on everybody else; people who had extreme understandings of things.

For example, to go back to the Muʿtazilīs: they said that if a believer, a person who considers himself a believer in Allah (swt) and His Messenger, commits a sin, a major sin (zinā, stealing, whatever) and does not make tawbah, this person is in Hell, in a special position in Hell; he is not in paradise. And he is not a believer anymore, but he is not an unbeliever either. He is in between the two. To anyone meeting this for the first time it is very strange; but there were people who believed it. He is neither a believer nor an unbeliever; he is in between the two. They call this al-manzilah bayna al-manzilatayn: an intermediate realm, a realm between two realms. It is a kind of middle, hybrid path; not even a hybrid, actually; it is simply in the middle. This is also one of the main themes of the five fundamentals they believe in.

The Khawārij say that if a believer commits a major sin, he becomes a kāfir, and he goes to Hell. So action, according to the Khawārij, is part of the definition of īmān. Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah say: no, īmān is in the heart. If a person sins, that is a weakness; that does not make a person a kāfir. It makes him deserving of punishment, if Allah so wills, but it does not make him a kāfir. Kufr is only when a person gives up their faith and takes on something else, or does something that denotes that. That is the Khawārij.

They did many things. They are the ones who went after Muʿāwiyah (may Allah be pleased with him), ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ (may Allah be pleased with him) and ʿAlī (may Allah be pleased with him). They succeeded in assassinating ʿAlī (may Allah be pleased with him), and did not succeed with the others. And they had, obviously, many other ideas. So that is one extreme.