After the assassination of the third caliph Uthman in 656 and the subsequent division of the Muslim community into two camps, early Islam saw the emergence of a religious-political opposition movement known as the "Kharijites". Kharijites was an exonym that is still used today as a container term for very different movements and phenomena of great diversity in regards to ideas, followers, audience, and size. What they have in common, however, is that they are seen as a historical starting point of a chain of extremist fundamentalists that extends to the contemporary period. In her lecture Dr Teresa Bernheimer (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) tells the story of the Kharijites and aims to define this diverse movement by looking at literary as well as material sources.
Teresa Bernheimers' research project "Extremism in Early Islam - The Kharijites in comparative perspective" was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation as part of the special programme Islam.