As Patricia Crone has recently shown in her monumental study The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the broad geographical area of Iran and Iraq witnessed an astounding number of uprisings in the decades and centuries following the Arab conquests. The form which these revolts took was as manifold as their number, and their ideas and claims were just as varied. Yet many of these movements can be usefully summarized under the label of “Khuramiyya” or “Khuramdiniyya.” While Crone explains Khurrami beliefs as “an ancient, widely disseminated“ substratum to Mazdakism, this paper will focus on a particular set of revolts that – at least at first glance – appear to have taken an Islamic form, namely the uprisings of the Kharijites. I will question the extent to which these uprisings reflect new Islamic models of authority and social change, or rather continue older late antique ideas – including those of the Khurramis – in a new guise.
The starting point is the revolt of Qatari b. al-Fuja’a, an Arab from the tribe of Tamim, who in the late 60s and 70s AH established himself as a Kharijite caliph in southwest Iran. Extraordinarily, there are a number of coin issues extant which attest to Qatari’s authority in the areas of Fars and Kirman. Carrying the famous Kharijite slogan la hukm illa lillah (there is no judgment but God’s), these coins include inscriptions in both Middle Persian and Arabic and lead us to ask three main questions regarding the context and content of Kharijite revolts. First, regarding their support, the sources present the main following of the movement as Arab, but the coins are clearly addressed to a local Iranian audience.. Second, regarding the claim to authority of the Kharijite leaders, in addition to the title amir al-mu’minin, there are also a number of Iranian titles and honorifics attested for Qatari (and other Kharijite rebels) such as dihqan or buzurgwari. Finally, regarding the context – both late antique and Iranian – of the slogan la hukm illa lillah, this slogan is usually understood to refer to the struggles of the First Civil War, but may well allude to larger questions of scripturalism and orality. Analyzing both textual and material evidence, this study will seek to shed light on fundamental questions of continuity and social change in the decades and centuries following the Arab conquest of Iran.
