a minimum threshold. Accordingly, they may say: “The Quran does not prescribe putting an apostate to death.” Thus, in their view, apostates may fall into two categories.

We know the “views of the Khawārij” only through what others have transmitted from them. We have not encountered any book they authored, as we have the works of the Mu‘tazilah, the Rāfidah, the Zaydiyyah, the Karrāmiyyah, the Ash‘ariyyah, the Sālimiyyah, the adherents of the four schools of law, the Zāhiriyyah, the schools of the hadith scholars, the philosophers, the Sufis, and others of their kind. Their views have been discussed in detail elsewhere.

People follow “different approaches” in arranging the followers of deviant doctrines. Some arrange them according to when they first appeared, beginning with the Khawārij. Others arrange them according to the relative mildness or severity of their doctrines, beginning with the Murji’ah and ending with the Jahmiyyah. This was the approach of many followers of Ahmad—may Allah be pleased with him—such as his son ‘Abd Allāh and others, al-Khallāl, Abū ‘Abd Allāh ibn Battah and their peers, and Abū al-Faraj al-Maqdisī. Both groups end with the Jahmiyyah, because their innovations are the gravest.

Al-Bukhārī likewise followed this approach in his Sahīh: he began with the “Book of Faith and Refutation of the Murji’ah” and concluded it with the “Book of Divine Oneness and Refutation of the Heretics and the Jahmiyyah.”