And if these rebels have a group capable of resistance, may their retreating fighters be pursued, their prisoners killed, and their wounded finished off? Scholars hold two well-known views on this.

One view is that this is not to be done, because the herald of ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib proclaimed on the day of the Battle of the Camel: “No retreating fighter is to be pursued, no wounded man finished off, and no prisoner killed.”

The other view is that this may indeed be done, because at the Battle of the Camel they had no group capable of resistance. The purpose of fighting was to repel them; once they had been repelled, there was no need for such measures, just as when repelling an aggressor.

It has also been reported that at the battles of the Camel and Siffīn, their practice was otherwise. Those who place them in the same category as rebels acting on an interpretation of religion apply these two views to them. The correct position, however, is that these people are not rebels acting on an interpretation of religion, for they have no defensible interpretation whatsoever. Rather, they belong to the same category as the renegade Khawārij, those who withheld zakat, the people of Tā’if, the Khurramiyya, and others who were fought because of the prescriptions of Islam they had abandoned.

This is a point that has confused many jurists. Those who have written on “Fighting Rebels” have classified the fighting against those who withheld zakat, the fighting against the Khawārij, ʿAlī’s fighting against the people of Basra, and his fighting against Muʿāwiya and his followers as fighting rebels, regarding all of it as commanded. They developed the detailed rulings accordingly, following this view of fighting among people. But they were mistaken. Rather, the correct position is that held by the leading scholars of hadith and the Sunnah and the people of the Prophet’s city, such as al-Awzāʿī, al-Thawrī, Mālik, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal