25. Islam’s Violent Anarchists
Atrocities abounded during the Khawarijs’ decades-long terrorism campaign. They ranged from widespread torture and disfigurement of captives to slitting the bellies of pregnant women, to massacring entire villages and towns. Their most extreme sub-sect, the Azariqah in southern Iraq, separated themselves from the entire Muslim community and declared death to all sinners – defined as all who did not share the Azariqah’s puritanical beliefs – and their families.
Their rebellion was eventually crushed, but embers remained, and the Khawarij became the anarchists of Islam’s first centuries, an ever present irritant and menace. Rejecting the Caliphate’s authority, they engaged in an extended campaign of terror and assassinations. They combined that with a low-level insurgency in backcountry regions, that would flare up every generation or two into a major rebellion that required considerable expense and effort to beat down.
