“Muawiya,” “the Kharijites,” “Wahhabism”: One Reality with Three Names

Human beings have complete free will. None of a human being’s actions is compelled. It is free will that sometimes brings a person to a point where God’s chosen one says of that person: “Salman is from us, the People of the House”; Salman is from us, the Ahl al-Bayt. And that same free will is the factor that drags a person down to the lowest depth of Hell. When the scope of human choice is so vast - from the heaven of Salman al-Muhammadi to the pit of the lowest depth - one must know that this choice, despite the sweetness and freedom of action it gives to the human being, is also a great danger if the human being cannot make good use of it.

A being such as the human being, who possesses a capacity of this breadth, must have knowledge by which to distinguish the path of the heavenly from the path of the hell-bound; and the power of choice, if not accompanied by knowledge, destroys the human being. To find the path of good and the path of guidance, and to choose that path through free will, there is no alternative but for the human being to learn from the fate of those who could not fly, who became table-companions of devils in the dust’s lowest pit, and who will live in the lowest depth in the Hereafter.

Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan was born of a mother who was known for immorality and also became famous for liver-eating, in such a way that she put all the criminals of history, until the Day of Resurrection, to shame. No one throughout history has been able, nor will anyone be able, to reach his wretchedness and misery; and Muawiya will be in the lowest depth of Hell, that is, the lowest rank of Hell and the most abased human being tormented in Hell.

This is the statement of Abdullah ibn Umar, who himself was not aligned with the Ahl al-Bayt. It must be said that this is the statement of someone who lived in Muawiya’s party and did not have serious enmity or opposition toward Muawiya and Yazid, or if he did, it ended in reconciliation. Thus his words should be regarded as the confession of Muawiya’s friends concerning Muawiya’s character. But the truth is that Pharaoh and Muawiya cannot be compared, because Pharaoh was never able to kill a prophet or an executor from among God’s prophets and their executors, whereas Muawiya was without doubt a partner, directly or indirectly, in the martyrdom of three infallible Imams, peace be upon them.

Muawiya’s hand is stained with the blood of three members of the Five Pure Ones. He martyred those whose names adorn the Divine Throne and through the blessing of whose names God accepted Adam’s repentance. Muawiya is without doubt accused in the martyrdom of the Commander of the Faithful by a member of the Kharijites. The least that history shows us clearly and plainly is that Kharijite thought was indebted to Muawiya’s policies against Imam Ali, peace be upon him. The existence of the Kharijites began with the Qur’ans raised on the spears of Amr ibn al-As and Muawiya.

In truth, the Kharijites were born from the Qur’an that, through Muawiya’s trickery and deceit, was raised on spears. Although, outwardly, Muawiya’s raising of the Qur’an on spears was to protect his worthless life, in reality it spread this innovation: that the Qur’an, in order to speak, has no need of interpretation and explanation. Therefore, in this view, whoever derived anything from the Qur’an and attributed his own falsehood to the Qur’an was, according to Muawiya’s logic, among the people of truth, and one should not fight such a person. In reality, by putting forward the Qur’an in this manner, Muawiya considered mere attribution to the Qur’an sufficient for being true, regardless of whether this attribution existed in reality and truth or not.

The Kharijites, who found themselves born from Muawiya’s Qur’an on the spear, placed the silent Qur’an at the head of their program on the basis of this very argument and without paying attention to the Qur’an’s need for an explicator, and they set up the sedition of Nahrawan. Thus the result of this intellectual sedition, whose fire was being kindled by the Umayyad apparatus, was the martyrdom of the master of monotheists, the Commander of the Faithful (peace be upon him), on the charge of opposing the Qur’an.

Today, too, many Muslims are martyred through this way of thinking. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, without regard for narrations that exist even in the books accepted by opponents of the Shia, uses a feeble argument from the verses of the Qur’an to prove the unbelief of anyone who seeks intercession through the infallible ones, the great ones, the friends of God, or even the Prophet (peace be upon him). By drawing an incorrect analogy between idol-worship and building over graves, he issues a ruling for the destruction of blessed shrines; and today his followers continue his ugly method and are never satisfied with destroying shrines respected by all Muslims.

Apart from the many critiques that non-Shia scholars have written about his conduct and thought, the point of importance here is that his ideas are rooted in the Kharijites, and the Kharijites themselves came into this world as a parasite of Muawiya’s deceit in raising the Qur’an on spears. Just as the Kharijites could not understand that the Qur’an needs the Prophet’s interpretation and explanation, today’s Kharijites, who have become known as Wahhabis, also do not wish to understand this important matter, and to this day they insist upon this thought of the son of Hind the liver-eater.

1. Waq‘at Siffin, text, p. 217