Abstract

It is no surprise that political conflicts reached their peak in the Umayyad era. An era of strife and ideological differences that caused a great rift in Islamic culture, the unity of which began to fragment after the crystallization of parties warring among themselves. Umayyads, Shiites, Zubayrids, and Kharijites. However, no party had the lust for war and blood like the Kharijite party, which arose from a polemical origin based on opposition to the collective structure of Ali’s (peace be upon him) supporters. Until their opposition became a complex opposition, they revolted against Ali and Muawiyah together, and did not approach any of the groups of the Umayyad era, regardless of their differences, raising the banners of war, thinking that fighting and shedding the blood of “the other” were the standard for proving the desired courage and sovereignty, and therefore the specter of death dominated their lives and behaviors. Accordingly, the verses of the Kharijites declared specific manifestations of war and its requirements of courage and strength. Especially since it is - according to their claim - a war of truth, as declared by the aesthetics of jihad, the greatness of martyrdom, and the right of the Kharijites to take over the affairs of the Muslims. But it harbored the patterns of fanaticism, brutality, tyranny, exclusion, and existential anxiety of a party whose members did not know how to rely on peace, but rather remained among the dust of soaking and the battlefields of battle, the specter of destruction lurking over them.
Keywords: The System, The Kharijite Party, War, Death, Exclusion.
Extended Summary
Introduction
Ancient Arabic poetry, specifically the poetry of the Khawarij, is a rich literary material with its explicit and implicit patterns, especially the pattern of war, which occupied the Khawarij’s attention and devoted all their energies to it. They harnessed religious texts and adhered to the literal meaning of the text to serve their combat purposes, which raised them to the explicit level as heroes, mujahidin, seeking martyrdom and immortality, but on the implicit ruins of brutality, injustice, and the violation of taboos. Between this and that, we can say: The declared system and the implicit system are dependent on a third system, or a third text between the present and the absent, which is the “systematic text” that seeks to search for the cultural truth based on the declared literary texts and their aesthetics that hide implicit foci of the flaws that characterized the poetry of the Khawarij and the mechanisms of thinking in the midst of which the poetic awareness of that “gang” grew, which declared a break with all other partisan cultures, despite the diversity of their ideological tendencies, so that Khawarij poetry would thus be the incubator of the intellectual awareness organizing that social segment that gave the war its absolute attention, until its masters lost sight of the sustainable ideological foundation that qualifies them to gain the continuity of social populism.
 
Research findings
Many studies have addressed the poetry of the Khawarij after applying the data of cultural criticism to it, the most prominent of which was "Cultural Systems in the Poetry of the Khawarij in the Umayyad Era (The Poetry of Al-Tirimah as a Model)" by Enas Boubis, in which she focused on the poet's pride of himself and his group, and his keenness to alert the Umayyads to the importance of the Khawarij, so the implicit system showed his rebellion and his feeling of injustice. We also can point to the research "The Rhetorical Tendency in the Poetry of the Khawarij - A Study in the Light of Cultural Criticism" by: Alaa Mohsen Al-Hasani, in which the researcher monitored the human struggle between the dualities: "I / The other", "Life / Death", "Presence / Absence", "Time / Place", trying to monitor the implicit system based on the feeling of injustice in the first place.
Between the declarations of courage and the implications of existential anxiety, "death" is present as a cultural focus revealing the existential anxiety of the Khawarij, their fear and the wavering of their beliefs. War and death often coincided in the poetry of the Khawarij, who, no matter how hard they tried to reconcile with the idea of ​​death as an eternity for them in the paradise that they promised themselves according to their extremist belief, the implicit system indicates their anxiety about death, which carries the unknown trouble after death. In the shadow of the veil that obscured their insight, they suffered a lack of the ideal that guarantees their existence, and this explains their division and fragmentation - despite their small number - into groups and groups. It is known that the absence of an ideal scatters opinion and loses the compass.
Between the declarations of war of truth and the implications of brutality and exclusion of the other, the adoption of the alleged truth in the view of the Khawarij was based on harsh behaviors, depended mainly on exclusion, injustice, brutality, and excommunication of the other no matter how much he defended his right. Within the duality of "truth/falsehood," the Khawarij always tried to push any other to the side of falsehood, even under the edge of the sword that remained raised to the end of the last Khawarij. Perhaps what supports this trend is the absence of the eloquent Khawarij jurist; as history has not recorded - to the best of my knowledge - a Khawarij intellectual debate or doctrinal argumentation that refutes the claims of opponents. Therefore, the Khawarij found that the edge of the sword was more effective in informing than books that they did not have the energy to inform through.
One of the Khawarij poets set conditions for the seeker of truth, which must be embodied in order to attain his desired right. These conditions are: avoiding the temptation of hope, not submitting to fleeting desires, in addition to working to please God and seek His reward, and stocking up on piety, in addition to raising the banner of conquest against who oppose the desired goals. It seems that the implicit exclusionary element is the textual agent that dictated to the poet the adoption of a perspective of truth, tailored to the Khawarij who did not hesitate to dwarf truth to his own dimensions, in which he did not forget the sense of brutality and bloodshed.
Discussion of Results
The research concluded with the following results:
- The poets of the Khawarij tried - in their systematic declaration - to show the courage of the Khawarij who does not fear death, but the implicit system revealed that this courage was a cover for what the subconscious carries of existential anxiety that death was always an obsession to stir. The frequent presence of the words of death in the poetry of the Khawarij is nothing but an implicit indication of their anxiety about its control, so their poetic consciousness raised the banners of its challenge and confrontation.
- The existential anxiety carried data that may indicate the oscillation of the Khawarij doctrine that was imbued with ideological and doctrinal anxiety, which emerged from the womb of the duality of "war / death"; the central duality in the Khawarij thought based on violence and the fanaticism of exclusion and extremism. Accordingly, their thought came as a reactionary thought that disrupted the natural relations that regulate every duality; The duality of “war/death or -as they claim- martyrdom” did not harmonize with the duality of “means/purpose”; war was a means while death did not constitute an end except in their weak declaration.
- The ideal was absent in the literature of the Khawarij, who justified the killing of any caliph or imam who deviated from their goals, which they publicly dressed in the garb of righteous religion and piety. This explains why they killed more than one of their leaders before brandishing their swords in the face of their opponents.