‘Even an Ethiopian slave’: the transformation of a Sunnī tradition

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’. 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 (‘abd ḥabashī); but as Goitein and Lewis have pointed out, the tradition in question has nothing to do with Khārijite views on the caliphate. 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 (‘abd awḥar), or at any rate a slave (Cureton's text has ‘abd aw ḥurr).