KHĀRIJĪ LAW 261

One of these consequences was that women and minors, who accompanied the army on a raid, had a right to a full share in the booty.¹ This was also the opinion held by Auzāʿī, and it was expressed in an informal tradition, without an isnād, on the history of the Prophet. That this doctrine was held by the ancient Khārijīs is shown by the counter-tradition, quoted by Abū Yūsuf against Auzāʿī, in which Ibn ʿAbbās refers the Khārijī leader Najda b. ʿĀmir to the decision of the Prophet to the contrary.² But the official doctrine of the Ibāḍī branch of the Khārijīs—the only one on whose law there exists detailed information—reproduces the doctrine of the other orthodox schools, that women and minors receive no share but only a remuneration.³ The legal consequence of the ancient Khārijī tenets was obviously never part of a legal system recognized by the Ibāḍīs; when these derived their law from the orthodox schools, the ancient Khārijī decision, and presumably also Auzāʿī’s corresponding doctrine on the orthodox side, had been forgotten.

The doctrine of the Ibāḍīs on five dirhams as the minimum value of stolen goods, to make the ḥadd punishment for theft applicable, is derived from an ancient Iraqian qiyās.⁴ Whereas the political history of the Ibāḍīs goes back to the middle of the first century A.H., their law was derived from the orthodox schools at a much later date.

A later development of legal theory is projected back into the Khārijī movements of the sixties and seventies of the first century A.H. in the report that some Khārijīs, including the followers of Najda, acknowledged ijtihād al-raʾy, whereas others, the Azraqīs, rejected it and confined themselves to the outward and obvious meaning (ẓāhir) of the Koran. This statement presupposes a secondary Iraqian terminology.⁵

But a predilection for the interpretation of the Koran according to its ẓāhir meaning seems indeed to have been a feature of the ancient Khārijīs.⁶