From a modern Sunni or Shiʿi Muslim perspective, early Ibāḍī attitudes towards ḥadīth and sīra might seem puzzling, leading the observer to assume that early Ibāḍīs placed little emphasis on ḥadīth, and none on Prophetic biography. For example, ḥadīth, both Prophetic and non-Prophetic, appear in the early Ibāḍī epistles (siyar) but sparsely, and without isnāds.Footnote ¹ Ibāḍīs do not seem to have a formal ḥadīth collection until quite late – Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf al-Warjlānī's (d. 570/1174) sixth/twelfth-century Tartīb al-musnad is the earliest example (though Ibāḍīs have claimed that other, earlier collections existed).Footnote ² Finally, there are no examples of Prophetic biography (either maghāzī or sīra) in the first six centuries of Ibāḍī writings. To be sure, Ibāḍī texts provide details about the Prophet's life, but the first biography – meaning a recognizable account of the Prophet's life that narrates all or some of it in some sort of order – is contained in an Omani sixth/twelfth century text, Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Qalhātī's al-Kashf wa'l-bayān.Footnote ³ Moreover, the term sīra, among Omanis, denotes an epistle, while among North Africans it comes to mean “biography” in general, though none of the North African Ibāḍī kutub al-siyar that were penned before the eighth/fourteenth century contain a biography of the Prophet Muḥammad. So early Ibāḍī usages of these concepts seem far askance of what develops among their Sunni and Shiʿa counterparts, and this is reflected in the ostensible absence of certain genres (like ḥadīth collections and Prophetic biography) among them before the sixth/twelfth century.

At the same time, it is clear from the early to medieval (and indeed, modern) Ibāḍī textual corpus that the group cherished the memory of the Prophet, preserved it amongst themselves, and considered his actions and direction worthy of emulation as sunna. In other words, Ibāḍīs certainly valued what reached them about the Prophet (to play on the title of this paper), but they framed and utilized that body of memory differently from their later Sunni and Shiʿi counterparts in the first six or so centuries of their history. This paper, then, explores early Ibāḍī, mainly Basran and Omani, perspectives towards the Prophetic legacy and its relation to the Ibāḍī community as an opportunity to chart alternatives to the now-dominant and largely Sunni-centric (and perhaps, secondarily, Shiʿi-centric) paradigms of Prophetic ḥadīth and sīra. It will examine a cluster of concepts – namely the concepts of sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab – as they appear in early Basran and Omani Ibāḍī writings in order to arrive at some conclusions about how Ibāḍīs established connections to Prophetic tradition writ large. In particular, the paper focuses on the early Ibāḍī siyar (epistles), as they represent the earliest strata of available Ibāḍī texts, and specifically, it examines the epistle (sīra) of Abū Mawdūd Ḥājib al-Ṭā’ī, an early Basran ʿālim who died some time in the second half of the second/eighth century. Although the Ibāḍī tradition casts earlier figures such as Jābir b. Zayd and Abū Bilāl Mirdās b. Udayya as Ibāḍīs proper, Wilkinson has argued that these figures are better understood as “proto-Ibāḍīs”, or as undifferentiated moderate Khārijites of a sort. Abū Mawdūd, on the other hand, hails from the following generation, in which something recognizable as Ibāḍism proper had developed from the earlier moderate Khārijites of Basra.Footnote ⁴ Abū Mawdūd is thus one of the first recognizably Ibāḍī intellectuals, and his epistle hails from the earliest strata of Ibāḍī writings. His sīra thus allows for a glimpse into one early Ibāḍī thinker's conceptualizations of sunna, sīra, and āthār, and offers a bridge towards understanding how those concepts would shape later Ibāḍī usages of nasab.

Building from Abū Mawdūd's sīra to other pre-sixth/twelfth century Ibāḍī writings (such as al-Kindī's Bayān al-sharʿ), this paper argues that a notion of a communal pedigree underlies and connects these four concepts, such that early Ibāḍī self-fashioning can be viewed as a process of imagining and constructing Ibāḍism as a kind of “thoroughbred” Islam. By contrast, nascent Sunnis and Shiʿis increasingly moved towards an approach to the Prophetic legacy that, on the one hand, atomized that legacy in discrete ḥadīths and, on the other, narrativized it as edifying story (qiṣṣa) qua biography (sīra). In his seminal work on Islamic law, Schacht argued that a notion of “living tradition” preceded al-Shāfīʿī's turn towards a more exclusive notion of Prophetic sunna.Footnote ⁵ Although Schacht's notion of regional schools has been challenged, the underlying insight was that sunna was not initially located exclusively in the person of the Prophet, but rather was assumed by some Muslims to be the purview of the community.Footnote ⁶ Rahman, responding to Schacht, argued that the notion of Prophetic sunna in the early period encompassed interpretation and (an informal and emerging) consensus on those interpretations – a kind of ijmāʿ – but that the ḥadīth movement broke this “organic relationship” between sunna, interpretation, and consensus.Footnote ⁷ In another later article refining Schacht's notion of communal sunna, Dutton notes how certain Muslim groups, such as the Ibāḍiyya, continued to regard the actions (ʿamal) of the community (or of certain members of the community) as authoritative indicators of what proper Islamic action should be.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, Francesca notes how in early Ibāḍī legal works sunna is more often derived from the Companions and Successors of the Prophet (not including ʿUthmān or the Umayyads), or from the early legal luminaries of the Ibāḍiyya.Footnote ⁹ This article builds on the work of these scholars, but draws particular attention to the idea of communal pedigree as critical not only to the socio-legal endeavour of establishing the sunna, but also to the socio-historical endeavour of bounding a righteous community.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, I emphasize how, from an Ibāḍī perspective, the collective genealogy of Ibāḍī scholars, Successors, Companions and, indeed, the Prophet himself, confirms the Ibāḍī community as the purest in belief and practice, thereby guaranteeing that the sunna preserved by it remains untainted.

Before delving into examples of ḥadīth from the Ibāḍī siyar, it is important to address some questions regarding the most widely known Ibāḍī ḥadīth collection. Modern Ibāḍīs consider al-Rabīʿ b. Ḥabīb al-Farāhīdī's (d. c. 175/791) al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ (also known as the Musnad al-Rabīʿ b. Ḥabīb) to be the authoritative collection of Ibāḍī ḥadīth.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the earliest version of this collection seems to be the aforementioned Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf al-Warjlānī's (d. 570/1174) sixth/twelfth-century North African Tartīb al-musnad, so this assumption requires more research. Certainly, some of the material in the Musnad hails from the early period, but it is unclear how much of it, how this material came to al-Warjlānī's attention in the first place, and in what form it did so.Footnote ¹²

Equally unclear is when this Ibāḍī ḥadīth collection became widespread and accepted as particularly authoritative among Ibāḍīs. It is noteworthy that the first commentary on the Musnad (to my knowledge), Abū Sitta al-Qaṣabī's (d. 1088/1677) Ḥawāshī al-tartīb, dates from the nahḍa period (i.e. eleventh–thirteenth/seventeenth–nineteenth centuries).Footnote ¹³ This very same work was one of the first books to be published by the Zanzibar press, which was promoted by the Ibāḍī sultan Barghash b. Saʿīd (r. 1870–88) in the late 1800s. It would appear, then, that the Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ came to be regarded as especially authoritative at a comparatively late date, at least among the Ibāḍīs of Oman and Zanzibar. Undoubtedly, two additional late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century commentaries solidified its status among Ibāḍīs in the modern era: the Sharḥ al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ by the blind Shaykh ʿAbdallāh b. Ḥumayd al-Sālimī (d. 1914), who is widely regarded as one of the most important modern Omani Ibāḍī intellectuals; and the second, the Tartīb al-tartīb by Muḥammad b. Yūsuf Aṭfayyish (d. 1914), one of the most prolific and influential North African Ibāḍī scholars of the late nahḍa period.Footnote ¹⁴

Comparing the appearance and usage of ḥadīth in second/eighth-century Basran and Arabian Ibāḍī epistles (siyar) with those found in al-Warjlānī's collection can illustrate a number of points about the early conceptualization, as well as later development, of the concept of sunna among the Ibāḍiyya. For example, the second/eighth-century sīra of Abū Mawdūd Ḥājib al-Ṭā’ī contains three ḥadīth: two from the Prophet,Footnote ¹⁵ and one from the Caliph ʿUmar.Footnote ¹⁶ Only one of the two Prophetic ḥadīth – the one that reads “whoso commits a misdeed or accommodates a sinner, upon him is the curse of God” – appears in al-Rabīʿ's (via al-Warjlānī) Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, in two different places. The first instance (no. 42) presents it with a variant word order from that in Abū Mawdūd's sīra: “the curse of God on whoso commits a misdeed or accommodates a sinner” (laʿnat Allāh man aḥdatha ḥadathan ow āwā muḥdithan).Footnote ¹⁷ The second ḥadīth (no. 753) places this phrase in the context of a longer narration, and changes the wording in a more profound way: “and whoso commits in Islam a misdeed, or accommodates a sinner, he is not of us” (wa man aḥdatha fī al-islām ḥadathan or āwā muḥdithan fa-laysa minnā).Footnote ¹⁸

Both ḥadīth as they appear in al-Rabīʿs collection also have isnāds: no. 43 traces itself from Abū ʿUbayda (Muslim b. Abī Karīma – who Ibāḍīs regard as the first imam of their group),Footnote ¹⁹ Jābir b. Zayd, Ibn ʿAbbās, to the Prophet. The second (no. 753) traces itself from al-Rabīʿ himself, Jābir b. Zayd, to the Prophet. Both contain Jābir b. Zayd, who Ibāḍīs consider the real founder of the group, as the common link.Footnote ²⁰ The second isnād, however, remains attenuated.

A comparison of these two sources brings to light a few observations about the role of ḥadīth in establishing early Ibāḍī notions of sunna.Footnote ²¹ First, altered word order, apparently, did not pose a problem for Ibāḍīs. This fact is borne out from other sources: Abū ʿUbayda, a contemporary of Abū Mawdūd (who is also the first link in ḥadīth no. 42's isnād), is reported to have said: “it does not matter to change the position of the words of the Traditions of the Prophet or of the Āthār by bringing them forward or putting them back if the meaning is the same”.Footnote ²² He also held that specific knowledge of the ḥadīth was not necessary for a person to be considered a reliable source of knowledge (ʿilm) and legal opinions (fiqh).Footnote ²³ Second, it does not seem as if Ibāḍīs obsessively collected ḥadith, such that two of Abū Mawdūd's examples of it did not make it into the later “definitive” collection. Third, early Ibāḍī ḥadīth rarely have much by way of isnād. In fact, the appearance of isnāds in al-Warjlānī's Tartīb led Wilkinson to suspect forgery (though a more generous assumption would be that al-Warjlānī was simply filling in lacunae that seemed obvious to him).Footnote ²⁴

What, then, might reasonably be concluded about the early Ibāḍī notion of sunna in Abū Mawdūd's epistle? Precision in the wording, collection, or documentation of ḥadīth does not seem necessary to establish it: rather, the impression or the general sense of the Prophetic example is sufficient. It is as if Prophetic sunna is but one thread of a larger tapestry, and this suspicion is borne out in how non-Prophetic ḥadīth also establish sunna. ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb's narration from Abū Mawdūd's sīra does not appear in the Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ. However, the existence of akhbār attributed to the Companions in early Ibāḍī literature is widespread. In fact, in a different early epistle, Abū ʿUbayda's sīra on zakāt, akhbār attributed to ʿUmar appear seven times, Abū Bakr five times, Abū ʿUbayda's “associates” (aṣḥābunā) four times, the fuqahā’ twice, while Ibn ʿAbbās, Jābir b. Zayd, ʿĀ’isha and even ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib receive single citations. Prophetic ḥadīth, on the other hand, do not appear at all.Footnote ²⁵

The notion that Companions and co-religionists (aṣḥābunā) constitute legitimate sources for emulation finds its reflection in Abū Mawdūd's overall conceptualization of sunna. In his sīra it is not something restricted to the Prophet alone, but is also something produced by the “people of justice” (ahl al-ʿadl) and God's awliyā’, who are elsewhere in the sīra defined in reference to Quran 8: 34 as the righteous (mutaqqūn).Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, Abū Mawdūd identifies the awliyā’, along with the “righteous” (ṣāliḥūn), the just imams, and the “forbearers who are worthy of emulation” (al-salaf al-muqtadā bihim) as those who enact God's truths (ḥuqūq Allāh). In so doing, they establish an āthār – a legacy or tradition.Footnote ²⁷ Abū Mawdūd clearly considers this āthār to be a source of guidance for the community alongside the Prophet's sunna and the Quran. In other places, Abū Mawdūd implies that the āthār is the enactment of the Prophet's sunna and the truth of the Quran, as when he mentions the “well known truth of the Book of God, the sunna of His Prophet, and the āthār of the righteous who enact it” (al-ḥaqq al-maʿrūf fī kitāb Allāh wa sunnat nabīhi wa āthār al-ṣāliḥīn al-maʿmūl bihā).Footnote ²⁸

In this way, Abū Mawdūd's sīra presents an example “communal sunna” whereby, as Dutton explains in another article, the actions (ʿamal) of the community (or of certain members of the community) are taken as authoritative indicators of what proper Islamic action should be.Footnote ²⁹ For Abū Mawdūd, as for other early Muslims, the authority of the action (ʿamal) or legacy (āthār) of the community stands beside a notion of sunna coming from the Prophet or the Companions:Footnote ³⁰ Abū Mawdūd provides aḥādīth from both the Prophet and ʿUmar, and invokes the legacy (āthār) of the awliyā’ and ahl al-ʿadl as sources of sunna. The difference, then, between sunna and āthār is not a strong one and much of Abū Mawdūd's usage in his sīra suggests a degree of synonymy between them.

Abū Mawdūd's conflation of sunna and āthār is probably one of the oldest in Ibāḍī writings, as Abū Mawdūd hailed from the Basran Ibāḍīs of the first half of the second/eighth century. Slippage between the concepts of sunna and āthār, however, can be found in another early (and Eastern) Ibāḍī text as well: Ibn Dhakwān, for example, seems to view these terms as interchangeable when he addresses those who “proceed (tasirūn) in the āthār of predecessors who went their ways, some right, some wrong” (tasirūn fī āthār aslāf qad maḍū bayn rāshidin wa ghāwin).Footnote ³¹ Similarly, yet without openly stating it as such, Abū ʿUbayda's sīra on zakāt strongly implies that authoritative examples can be found among the Companions, as does Shabīb b. ʿAṭiyya when (in another early sīra) he condemns ʿUthmān for having abandoned “the sunna of the Prophet of God, and the guidance (hudā) of the two Caliphs after him”.Footnote ³² The synonymy between the concepts of sunna and āthār, then, was widespread among early Basran and Omani Ibāḍīs.

Among North African Ibāḍīs, attitudes towards the synonymy between sunna and āthār are more difficult to discern, in large part because of the nature of North African Ibāḍī sources, which tend towards the historical and prosopographical (and less towards the epistolary). Nevertheless, one of the earliest North African Ibāḍī sources, the Kitāb Ibn Sallām (third/ninth century), quotes the Companion Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yaman, in the context of a discussion about who cleaves to the true jamāʿa, as saying: “if you follow our āthār, then you have arrived at a clear precedent” (in tabʿū āthāranā fa-qad sabaqtum sabaqan mubīnan).Footnote ³³ North African Ibāḍīs, it seems, considered at the very least the āthār of the Companions as a valid source of religious example.

This view towards sunna and āthār simultaneously addresses the Ibāḍīs’ seemingly lax attitudes towards ḥadīth and isnād: it is the collective and accumulated pedigree of the community (meaning, by and large, its scholars) that “guarantees” the veracity of the sunna/āthār that they established. Put another way, it is the extent to which they reflect and enact (ʿamala bi) the Quran and the Prophetic example that makes the scholars and luminaries of the Ibāḍī community a legitimate source of religious guidance and creates āthār that can be emulated by succeeding Ibāḍī generations.

This notion of a communal pedigree finds its reflection in how early Ibāḍīs imagined and presented their communities as the product of pious forebears. Later Ibāḍīs of Oman and North Africa, it seems, both wove the idea of a communal lineage into their writings, but they did so differently. In Oman, Ibāḍīs employed what Wilkinson calls “teacher lines” to establish it.Footnote ³⁴ It is worth noting that Omani Ibāḍīs sometimes use genealogical language, specifically the term nasab al-islām (genealogy of Islam), to describe these teacher lines.Footnote ³⁵ For example, Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Kindī's Bayān al-sharʿ, a sixth/twelfth century multi-volume compendium covering a variety of topics (most of them legal), contains a section on nasab al-islām.Footnote ³⁶ In it, al-Kindī gives the lineage of the religion (dīn) of the people of righteousness (ahl al-istiqāma) – another name for the Ibāḍiyya. This religion, he claims, is the religion of the Prophet Muḥammad, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, ʿAmmār b. Yāsir, ʿAbdallāh b. Wahb al-Rāsibī, ʿAbdallāh b. Ibāḍ, ʿAbdallāh b. Yaḥyā, Wā’il b. Ayyūb, Maḥbūb b. al-Ruḥayl, Ghazān b. al-Ṣaqr, Mūsā b. Abī Jābir, Mūsā b. ʿAlī, and Muḥammad b. Maḥbūb. Examining the personalities on al-Kindī's teacher line, it becomes readily apparent that this is a list of notables considered important to the medieval Ibāḍiyya. Moreover, it is given in genealogical order beginning with the Prophet, the first two Caliphs, a prominent early supporter of ʿAlī (ʿAmmār b. Yāsir, who plays an important role in Ibāḍī versions of the Ṣiffīn narrative),Footnote ³⁷ the first imam of the Muḥakkima (Ibn Wahb al-Rāsibī), and the eponymous “founder” of the Ibāḍiyya (Ibn Ibāḍ, who Ibāḍīs consider to be a kind of subordinate to Jābir b. Zayd, who they posit as their true founder).Footnote ³⁸ Next in the lineage comes ʿAbdallāh b. Yaḥyā, also known as Ṭālib al-Ḥaqq, who was an Ibāḍī rebel leader in the Yemen in 129/746, and then Wā’il b. Ayyūb, an imam in Basra after al-Rabīʿ b. Ḥabīb. The remaining names in the list are prominent ʿulamā’, most of whom were from (or settled in) Oman. Al-Kindī musters them to establish Ibāḍism as a kind of “thoroughbred” Islam, establishing the pedigree of the group in a manner that parallels how Arabs more generally employed the science of nasab to establish nobility (sharaf) and pre-eminence (faḍl) in family lineages. Teacher lines, in other words, are the community's pedigree made explicit, and they reflect and naturally grow from the early Ibāḍī conceptualization of communal sunna and āthār as grounded in the righteous community and its practice.

Although al-Kindī is the first (to my knowledge) explicitly to frame his teacher line in terms of the language of nasab, it is worth noting that earlier Basran and Omani Ibāḍīs employ virtually the same technique in their writings: for example, Ibn Dhakwān provides a kind of proto-teacher line in the second section of his epistle, wherein he connects the true line of Muslims to those who followed the Prophet, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, but who then rejected ʿUthmān and then ʿAlī.Footnote ³⁹ So too, Abū Mū’thir's sīra, written before the author's death in 280/893–4, contains a chapter outlining the “imams of the Muslims from among the Companions of the Prophet, and those after them”, which establishes the authorities and imams of the Ibāḍiyya as a teacher line.Footnote ⁴⁰

North African Ibāḍī writings do not present teacher lines, per se, yet the aforementioned Kitāb Ibn Sallām contains a chapter outlining the merits (fadā’il) of certain Companions, followed by two chapters that outline how the Ibāḍī path (dīn) is the path of Khuzayma b. Thābit and “the majority of the Companions” (al-jamāʿa min aṣḥāb al-Nabī).Footnote ⁴¹ This is not a teacher line, exactly, but it does emphasize the North African Ibāḍiyya's communal pedigree. Moreover, the Kitāb Ibn Sallām anticipates a similar focus on communal pedigree in the distinctive, and somewhat later, Ibāḍī genre of siyar.Footnote ⁴² These prosopographies deploy the concept of sīra or siyar to accomplish what in places further east the ṭabaqāt or even ansāb genres achieved (and indeed, al-Darjīnī's work calls itself a ṭabaqāt).Footnote ⁴³ That is, they create a sense of an Ibāḍī community through the interconnectedness of the persons who appear in the individual entries.Footnote ⁴⁴ Anecdotal piety plays a significant role in how each author frames his accounts, which in its totality frames the community as a righteous community. For example, Abū Zakariyya's account of the first Rustumid imam, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Rustum, portrays the imam as especially devout and ascetic.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this fashion, and on a grand scale, the Ibāḍī community becomes constituted by the pious scholars, students and imams who populate the pages of the siyar works, establishing communal pedigree in a manner parallel to what teacher lines accomplish in Omani Ibāḍī writings.

It is also clear that by sīra/siyar, North African Ibāḍīs meant biography in general (reflecting an early Islamic usage of that term), not Prophetic biography exclusively.Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, only two of these works – both post-sixth/twelfth century – include short sīras of the Prophet Muḥammad: al-Shammākhī's entry on the Prophet is 14 published pages in the 2009 edition of the Kitāb al-siyar;Footnote ⁴⁷ al-Barrādī's entry is 24 lithographed pages in the 1885 Cairo edition of the Kitāb al-jawāhir.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus, early North African Ibāḍī authors did not include Prophetic sīra in their collection of siyar: it is only after the seventh/thirteenth century that they began to do so.

Similarly, in Omani Ibāḍī literature sīra/siyar denotes an epistle.Footnote ⁴⁹ To my knowledge, the first recognizable Prophetic biography in Omani Ibāḍī literature can be found in the second volume of Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Qalhātī's sixth/twelfth-century al-Kashf wa'l-bayān.Footnote ⁵⁰ This account is significantly larger than its North African counterparts at 76 printed pages. Thus, in both the Omani and the North African cases, the term sīra/siyar did not come to indicate Prophetic biography exclusively, and Ibāḍīs from these regions did not write Prophetic biographies until the sixth/twelfth century.

That the sixth/twelfth century is a crucial moment for Ibāḍī engagements with the wider genre of Prophetic biography is hardly surprising. Wilkinson argues, first in an article on Ibāḍī ḥadīth and then again in Ibāḍism: Origins and Early Development in Oman, that in the sixth/twelfth century the process of “madhhabization” (in the earlier article he uses the term “normalization”) among Ibāḍīs significantly accelerated. During this process, “Ibāḍīs began to develop their school into a madhhab” by accepting “the basic methodology of their opponents”, meaning especially Sunni norms of uṣūl al-fiqh.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, the sixth/twelfth century is a period when Ibāḍīs developed a formal ḥadīth collection, more and more engaged with Sunni usūl al-fiqh works, wrote formal heresiographies, and so on. It is understandable, then, why Ibāḍīs begin to incorporate Prophetic biography into their corpus at this time.

Before the sixth/twelfth century, however, Ibāḍī attitudes towards sunna and siyar remain distinct from the approaches towards Prophetic sunna and sīra that developed among the nascent Sunnis and, somewhat later, Shiites. On this development among Sunnis, Wansbrough, building on Schacht, saw an evolution from “loosely structured narrative to concise exemplum”.Footnote ⁵² Bravmann, criticizing Schacht, notes that the terms sīra and sunna originally “designate two different aspects of the same idea” with sīra delineating the manner of proceeding with respect to a certain affair and sunna describing this manner of proceeding by pointing to established precedent.Footnote ⁵³ What Schacht, Wansbrough and Bravmann all point towards is how the genres of sīra and sunna diverge once the figure of the Prophet becomes the focal point for a universalizable Islamic life – a distinctly ʿAbbāsid-era project that is exemplified by al-Shāfīʿī.Footnote ⁵⁴ This divergence characterizes how medieval Sunnis and Shiites positioned their communities in relation to the Prophetic legacy.

Among Ibāḍīs, by contrast (and before the sixth/twelfth century, for the most part), the twin ideas of sunna and siyar remained collapsed, and connected in profound ways to how Ibāḍīs linked themselves communally to the Prophetic legacy. Sunna was not laser focused on the Prophet, but continued to be collective and (we must assume) somewhat informal in comparison to developments elsewhere in the Islamic world. The counterpart to sunna – the thing which pointed towards the recognized manner of proceeding in any given affair – was the āthār, which also remained the purview of the Ibāḍī community. This was reflected in how North African Ibāḍīs developed their biographical (siyar) literature around the community, and in how Omani Ibāḍī teacher lines (later characterized by al-Kindī as nasab al-islām) functioned as a kind of meta-isnād for authenticating the collective endeavour of Ibāḍism. Underlying and sustaining all of these notions was the idea that the Ibāḍī community possessed a religious pedigree that connected it through the generations of righteous luminaries and predecessors to the Prophet himself, providing it with legitimacy as a repository for proper religion.

To be clear: it is not that the early Ibāḍī nexus of concepts that have been discussed here somehow preserve an earlier (and now lost) pre-Shāfīʿite attitude towards sunna and sīra among the Arab-Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁵ While there are undoubtedly some strong parallels between how early Ibāḍīs and early Muslims in general seem to have approached the idea of sunna as something constituted not simply by the Prophet, but also as embodied in the practices and opinions of those who followed him, what this article has hoped to emphasize is how the Ibāḍī notion of a communal pedigree made their claim to preserve right practice at once more explicit and exclusive. A pedigree establishes claims to purity, authenticity, and exclusivity, thereby affording the owner of the pedigree a certain status and, possibly, attendant privileges. The early Ibāḍiyya were certainly interested in presenting their community as the most upright and accurate, and what this meant to them was that they were the sole remaining righteous remnant of the true Muslim community. The idea of a communal pedigree, then, remained vital to early Ibāḍī self-fashioning, shaping a host of concepts towards proving the soundness of islām in the Ibāḍī way.

The value, then, of examining early Ibāḍī attitudes towards sunna, siyar, āthār, and nasab lies, in a narrow sense, in how it illuminates some discursive practices of an early Muslim community. Beyond this, however, there is significance in how understanding this Ibāḍī cluster of concepts can clarify some of the shifts in attitude towards these same concepts that began perhaps as early as the mid-second/eighth century and accelerated among nascent Sunnis in the third/ninth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ That this emerging Sunni view came to predominate – to the point that Shiites and eventually the Ibāḍiyya themselves largely adopted it – makes examining its emergence all the more vital.

It is hoped, then, that this paper might point the way towards further inquiries into the usages, nature, and development of these concepts among early Ibāḍīs. I have focused in large part on the early Ibāḍī siyar, which survive mainly in Oman. There is much in this literature that can still be found to hone or complicate the picture of sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab that I have proposed here. Likewise, there is a vast medieval Omani Ibāḍī literature – largely legal in nature – that spans the third–fifth/ninth–eleventh centuries, offering the potential to chart the development of these concepts through the early stages of madhhabization to its maturation in the sixth/twelfth century. The idea of teacher lines, for example, would benefit from a more systematic study. So too, I have left the North African Ibāḍī materials largely untapped, in part because the nature of this material requires a more far-reaching and detailed approach than that I've attempted to accomplish in this short overview. In outlining the various ways that I view the early Ibāḍiyya as conceptualizing a communal pedigree, my desire is to invite further scrutiny and investigation.