ABSTRACT
The most important primary sources on the Kharijites include Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi, al-Masudi, al-Shahrastani, and Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari. According to al-Baghdadi, the initial Kharijites were mostly from the tribe of Tamim, and they elected two leaders: Abdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi and Harqus ibn Zahir al-Bajali. For the Kharijites, the fate of authority in the post-Muhammadan period may be characterized as the dissemination of charisma, they equally rejected the rontinization that the Prophet's charismatic authority had assumed under the Muslim majority. One of the major doctrinal characteristics of the Kharijites was their strict moral austerity, their total rejection of the doctrine of justification by faith as opposed to justification by act. Both the Sunnite and Shiite theories of authority, in their gradual and historial formation, were either immediately or subsequently translated into a particular form of what Weber would call a political association.
