ABSTRACT
It is well known that the Khārijites rejected genealogical qualifications for the caliphal office. As they saw it, the most meritorious Muslim should be elected whatever his ethnic origins might be; personal merit overruled considerations of descent. Modern Islamicists regularly imply that they also held personal merit to overrule considerations of status libertatis: the Khārijites allegedly held the most meritorious Muslim to be eligible for the caliphal office ‘even if he were a black/Ethiopian slave’. 1 But this has long been known to rest on a mistake. The mistake goes back to Goldziher who based himself on a Prophetic tradition exhorting the believers to obey the amīr ‘even if he be an Ethiopian slave (ʿabd ḥabashī); 2 but as Goitein and Lewis have pointed out, the tradition in question has nothing to do with Khārijite views on the caliphate. 3 So why does the claim persist? The answer is that al-Shahrastānī also credits the Khārijites with the tenet that the imām may be a black slave (ʿabd awḥar), or at any rate a slave (Cureton’s text has ʿabd aw ḥurr). 4 It is usually to al-Shahrastānī that modern scholars implicitly or explicitly refer. But why then do they continue to use the ‘even if’ formulation of the irrelevant tradition? Apparently they tacitly assume al-Shahrastānī’s black slave to be identical with the Ethiopian slave of Goldziher’s tradition. 5 But if they are right, al-Shahrastānī’s testimony rests on the same mistake as Goldziher’s and has to be discounted. There does not in fact appear ever to have been a Khārijite doctrine regarding the eligibility of slaves to the Imāmate: rather, medieval Sunnīs came to identify the Ethiopian slave tradition as a Khārijite statement, and this is what accounts for both al-Shahrastānī’s formulation and the modern claim. Though I should have preferred to pay homage to Professor Wansbrough with research of a more significant kind, it is to this proposition that my humble offering is devoted.
