The Forgotten Branch of Islam | Ibadism

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]This is a real branch of Islam that most of the world has never heard of. It's not Sunni, it's not Shia, but it emerged out of the same initial political and theological [music] crisis that split Islam. But, this faction took a completely different path. This is Ibadism. They call themselves the people of truth and integrity. Other Muslims might call them heretics. They've been hunted, exiled, driven [music] into mountain caves and deserts, and for long stretches of their history, their leaders literally went underground ruling in secret. And this is a tradition some say they still practice to this day. So much so [music] that you have no idea that they're in the majority religion of a modern day Middle Eastern country. A country so deliberately quiet, so diplomatically [music] neutral that it has negotiated secret peace deals between the United States and Iran. [music] It has brokered hostages out of Yemen and has even hosted Israeli Prime Ministers without anybody realizing. And today we're going to trace how a people [music] formed from a 7th century mutiny became one of the most isolated, secret, and at the same time politically powerful traditions in Islam. We're going to uncover who the Ibadis actually are and what they really believe [music] and why after 1400 years of being called heretics, they might be the [music] ones having the last laugh. So, sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp.

[00:01:23]>> [music] >> What's up, people, and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gabbana and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent as I try to understand what everyone believes. I believe that the best way to understand people is to know the God that they worship and in order for me to become a better human being, and I hope for you, yes, you, the person watching this, you share in that mission, that you want to just, you know, learn more about religions from around the world. Maybe you grew up in this religion, maybe you grew up in an adjacent faith, or maybe you grew up in some totally different faith or no faith at all, but you just want to know what's going on. Cuz I do think in order to understand the current, you know, geopolitical landscape, in order to understand the political landscape, in order to understand really just how people are feeling on a day-to-day basis at the grocery store, knowing the religious background and the theology is fundamental. So, that's what I try to do. Now, today we are diving into a very interesting subset of Islam, and maybe a different sect, some might say. Now, let me just say a few things up top. One, I was not born Muslim. I mean, according to Muslims, I technically was born Muslim, and I I'm, you know, I'm going to revert or something. But, I did not grow up in a Muslim tradition. I grew up Catholic. So, if there's anything I miss here, anything that I overlook, I just want to acknowledge that I'm not a theologian, I'm not a Muslim scholar, I'm just a comedian with a Wi-Fi connection and a will to learn. So, I'm doing this in good faith. If there's anything I miss, please drop a comment.

[00:02:48]Please don't hesitate to correct me. Uh specifically with, uh you know, Ibadi and Ibadism, there are certain things that are difficult for me to get, you know, firsthand clarification on because I don't know any Ibadi Muslims.

[00:03:01]So, I just want to throw that out as a disclaimer. Um I also just want to say before we begin, thank you so much to you. Yeah, dude, you, listening right now, for supporting the show, for clicking on this video, and every time you comment or, you know, like or subscribe or anything like that, you help keep the lights on here at the campsite, and you help keep the fire burning.

[00:03:20]I also want to give a big shoutout to my good pal Kristos, the Greek Freak himself, the uh you know, Orthodox warrior.

[00:03:27]He's a great guy, and he keeps the cameras on, and uh he makes sure that the lights are working, and sometimes he refills my water, and for that, I'm deeply grateful. Thank you so much.

[00:03:35]You're very welcome.

[00:03:36]>> I I we don't have time for a whole bunch of side talk, because today we're talking about the Ibadi.

[00:03:43]Now, where does this story begin? It begins in the year 657 AD. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and let me just give a big peace be upon him right now. Uh just throughout the whole video, just pretend I said it for all the times I've referenced any of the prophets.

[00:03:58]But, uh he at this point in 637 has been dead for about 25 years.

[00:04:03]The Muslim community is in the middle of what they call the first fitna. This is the first Islamic civil war.

[00:04:09]And it is tearing this young empire apart. On one side, you have Ali ibn Abi Talib. This is the prophet's cousin and son-in-law, the fourth caliph.

[00:04:20]And in what would later become Shia tradition, the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. On the other side, you have Muawiyah, the powerful governor of Syria, who refuses to accept Ali's authority and basically creates an army to go against him. Now, these two armies meet on the plains of a place called Siffin, and they fight for days. Thousands of Muslims are killing each other over who gets to basically lead the community that the prophet left behind.

[00:04:49]And then something strange happens.

[00:04:51]As Ali is about to win, Muawiyah's forces raise copies of the Quran on the tips of their spears. And there's kind of a signal that says, "Hey, let's stop fighting, and let's just let Allah and the book and the inspired words of Allah ultimately decide this." And Ali agrees.

[00:05:12]So, he pulls his troops back, and he accepts some type of arbitration. And that's when a chunk of his own army just kind of loses it. They literally just like, "Wait, we're in the right.

[00:05:22]Allah's on our side. You had the victory, and now you're going to just like let human beings like arbitrate and litigate what God has already ruled on?"

[00:05:31]So, their slogan becomes no judgment but Allah's. And so, these rebels basically walk out of Ali's camp, and history gives them a name, the Khawarijites, the ones who walk out. These are the seceders. Now, if you've heard Khawarijites used in modern Muslim debate, it's almost always meant to be a pejorative or, you know, like a like an insult meaning someone that's like an extremist. Now, the Ibadi's that we're talking about are the people who eventually broke away from that extremism and have spent centuries insisting that they occupy kind of like a middle ground. Now, it's worth noting that in talking to my Muslim friends about this specific sect of Islam, the Ibadi's, many of them either were like, "I don't really know much about them. I don't know who they are necessarily.

[00:06:19]Like they're kind of like not super tapped in on what exactly they believe."

[00:06:23]And I've talked to other Muslims that are just like, "Hey, just follow Sunni.

[00:06:26]There's a reason why 90% of the world is Sunni. Like just follow that. Don't dabble or entertain any other sect." So, I just want to put that out there as a preface basically to say that, you know, my first-hand accounts kind of don't you know, most of them are not uh you know, traditional Ibadi's. They they're not necessarily going through this history. And most of them are just like, "Hey, focus on, you know, the the big picture."

[00:06:47]Now, back to the story.

[00:06:49]Ali responds to this mutiny of these people basically leaving his uh you know, his his army in the way that a lot of rulers tend to.

[00:06:59]So, in 658 AD, he meets the Khawarijites at the Battle of Nahrawan and he defeats them decisively. Man, most of the movement is basically just wiped out in a single day in kind of like uh civil civil war, if that makes sense.

[00:07:14]But then a few years later, the Khawarijite sympathizers assassinate Ali himself, stabbing him with a poisoned sword while he's praying at a mosque in Kufa. And that killing helps push the early community towards the divide that would later be remembered as the Sunni-Shia split. Now, the Khawarijites, as small as they are, they change the entire future of Islam in that very moment. But what nobody really talks about is what happens next. Because the Khawarijites don't disappear. They splinter. And in that splintering, you can already see the two futures of kind of like I guess a more radical version of Islam laid out kind of side by side. One faction went violent, nomadic, takfiri. They roamed the empire declaring death to anyone who wasn't them basically, us versus everyone kind of vibes. The other faction did something that if you pay attention, you'll see this community do again and again and again across the next 14 centuries. And it's basically that they just kind of disappeared on purpose.

[00:08:16]Not disappeared as like they went away, they disappeared as like they went underground. Because in Basra, the Harvard of kind of the 7th century Muslim world, a group of moderate survivors from the same movement found a scholar who understood something extremely important.

[00:08:31]He understood that the best thing you can do when you're losing is to outsmart your enemy.

[00:08:36]So this scholar changed the course of Islamic history and his name is Jabir ibn Zayd. And he was from the al-Az tribe and he was born in Oman, which is important. He spent his life studying the Quran, collecting the sayings of the prophet, teaching jurisprudence to anyone and everyone. Even scholars who disagreed with him acknowledged his learning. And you know, for cover, he worked really quietly as a mufti, which is basically like a like an Islamic legal expert. Nobody on the outside would have really clocked him as the spiritual heir of this group of rebels who killed the fourth caliph. And that's exactly what he was. Jabir ibn Zayd, along with his student Abdullah ibn Ibad, which that name Ibad is ultimately what this movement is named after, together they represented the moderates who rejected the most extreme positions of the early Khawarij. They said, "Yes, we believe Ali was wrong in, you know, his acceptance of this arbitration and kind of litigating what the Quran says. Yes, we believe the community should be led by the most pious and learned person, not just a hereditary monarch, but no, we don't believe every Muslim who disagrees with us deserves to die. So, you can see how they're more moderate than the more extreme people that preceded them.

[00:09:53]And that last point is one of the most important theological moves in Ibadi history. The more radical Khawarij that developed a doctrine where any Muslim who didn't belong to their movement was a mushrik and an idolater, basically. Someone that was not a real Muslim and therefore they had to be killed. The Ibadi founders rejected that completely. They said that non-Ibadi Muslims are not, you know, idolatrous and that they're not, you know, necessarily, you know, needing to be killed. They are what they called kuffar ni'ma. This is ingrates. People who have failed to be properly grateful for God's blessing, who are still monotheist, they're still within the fold of Islam. So, you don't, you know, kill them, you don't fight them, you just hold them at a spiritual distance.

[00:10:41]And you can see that it's, you know, a very important distinction. The difference, you know, between being written off as, you know, mistaken and being marked for death is pretty significant. So, as a result, the movement took its name from Abdullah ibn Ibad, who became the face of this entire movement. And over time they started to call themselves the Ahl al-Istiqaamah. And this translates basically to the people of truth and integrity. So, from Basra, the Ibadi network basically spread outward and merchants started to carry their ideas along the trade routes, scholars debated in underground study circles, and when the Umayyad dynasty, you know, these are the Sunni rulers of the empire started to crack down, the Ibadis did something that would become very defining for them in their entire history.

[00:11:28]They kind of disappeared. They ran. And they went in two different directions.

[00:11:32]One group went east back to the mountains of Oman where Jabir ibn Zayd had been born, the other fled west across North Africa into the Berber tribes of what is now Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. And then eventually across the Indian Ocean into places like Zanzibar when Oman built a maritime empire. In both regions, cut off from each other by thousands of miles of desert and sea, the Ibadi's did what every great underdog tradition eventually does.

[00:11:59]They stopped running and they planted down and they built their own states and they wrote their own laws and they trained their own scholars and then quietly waited while the empires that had chased them basically out into the deserts and into the mountains just slowly collapsed. And this community that survived by kind of becoming invisible had now become indestructible.

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[00:13:39]So, on the surface Ibadism and Ibadi Islam looks almost identical to what most of the world just calls regular Islam, right? Like, I guess mainstream Sunni Islam. It's the same prayers, the same fast, same Hajj to the holy land, the same holy book.

[00:13:56]And if you didn't really know what to look for, you weren't like really nuanced in your you know, Muslim scholarship, you might just walk into an Ibadi mosque and not really notice anything different at all.

[00:14:06]But underneath that surface, there are positions that classical Ibadi scholars have held for 14 centuries that the Sunni mainstream rejected, that the Shia mainstream rejected, and that again, if you follow kind of the path all the way through, reframe almost everything about how this community sees God and salvation and each other. And there are three major things, and they start with a question that almost tore early Islam apart.

[00:14:32]So, take an Ibadi, a Sunni, and a Shia, and you put them into a room.

[00:14:37]And most of what they agree on will be louder than what they disagree on. All three of them will pray five times a day. They will all fast during Ramadan.

[00:14:46]They will all recite the Quran and you know, face the Kaaba and accept the five pillars of Islam.

[00:14:51]But there are recurring theological positions in Ibadism that make both Sunni and Shia scholars kind of, you know, raise an eyebrow. And the first one is the Quran itself. So, mainstream Sunni theology teaches that the Quran is the eternal, uncreated word of God.

[00:15:09]It existed before time. It was never made. Classical Ibadi theologians have historically leaned closer to a different view. And my understanding is that they believe the Quran is God's speech and is absolutely authoritative, but it was created by God at a particular point. It's not co-eternal with him.

[00:15:28]And to maybe a you know, a non-Muslim person or just, you know, someone in the West, like that probably sounds like a very nuanced, uh, maybe trivial philosophical argument, but in Islamic history, this is a massive controversy. It was one of the defining fights between the rational Mu'tazila school and the traditional Sunni scholars. And in this case, the Mu'tazila lost. They were crushed and then ultimately discredited. Now, the Ibadi's quietly kept a version of this idea alive long after that fight was over everywhere else. Now, the second position.

[00:16:02]This is that the Ibadi's believe that you will never see God. You'll never see Allah, not in this life, not in the afterlife, not on the Day of Judgment.

[00:16:10]And this deviates because mainstream Sunni theology teaches that the blessed in paradise will one day see Allah directly. This is what they call the beatific vision. It's one of the rewards of heaven, and the Ibadi's reject this.

[00:16:24]God is not physical, he has no form, Allah cannot be perceived by human senses. Any chronic verse that seems to describe God having hands or a face, to them is metaphorical. You will never actually see Allah, not even in paradise.

[00:16:39]And the third position involves eternal punishment. So, classical Ibadi theology generally has been a lot stricter than mainstream Sunni theology here. Sunni Islam generally teaches that even a very bad Muslim will eventually make it out of hell after a period of purification.

[00:16:56]The prophet will intercede on their behalf. Mercy ultimately will win in the end. But, classical Ibadi theology doesn't accept that in the exact same way. There's no guaranteed intercession.

[00:17:09]The verses about eternal hellfire mean exactly what they say, and contemporary preachers may frame this more softly, but the tradition's historical posture has been way stricter. And then there's the doctrine that may be the most distinctive of all. And this is called, and again, I don't speak perfect Arabic, so forgive me here. This is called the walaya and the baraya. Now, this is affiliation and disassociation.

[00:17:32]The idea that a committed believer is required to actively love and associate with those on the true path and actively disassociate from those who aren't, but you know, it's important to note here, disassociation for Ibadi doesn't mean hostility or violence. It's an internal spiritual posture, if that makes sense.

[00:17:52]You withhold the special bond of religious brotherhood from people that you believe have maybe gotten off the path. A principled but distant kind of love, if that makes sense. So, for much of Ibadi history, many classical scholars have argued that the only righteous Ibadis were fully on the straight path. Sunni and Shias were again in grace. These are people who had the blessings of Islam, but failed to fully appreciate it. Not outside Islam, just spiritually ungrateful, and you are supposed to distance yourself from them.

[00:18:23]But, modern Ibadi leaders, especially Oman's current Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad bin Hamad al-Khalili, have substantially softened on this stance. He's publicly said that differences between Sunni and Ibadi Muslims are secondary issues that don't affect, you know, the big picture of eternal salvation, and that Muslim unity matters more than, you know, drawing these petty lines between different sects. And today in Oman, you'll find Sunnis, Shias, and Ibadis praying in the same mosque side by side.

[00:18:51]There are also small ritual differences that you would notice in an Ibadi mosque. So, you know, they pray with hands at their sides, not folded across their chest like many Sunnis. They don't say amen out loud after the opening chapter of the Quran. They end prayers with a single peace greeting instead of two. The little things, but together, you can see a distinctive religious culture that if you were raised Sunni, you might notice as being a little bit different. Small things, right? But together, it creates its own kind of vibe, its own fingerprint of a religious community that kind of developed in isolation. So, you have Ibadis with their own theology and their own laws and their own rituals, and it's own doctrine for what to do when the world goes against them. Because the Ibadis didn't just survive persecution, they sat down through it. They built formal religious frameworks for exactly how a Muslim community should operate when it is being hunted and persecuted. One of the four stages of that framework is hiding, you know, institutional theologically sanctioned hiding. The Masalik ad-Din, the states of the religion.

[00:19:58]This is very important for understanding Ibadism. It's basically a framework that describes four models of a Muslim community and how they can operate depending on how much freedom and power it has at that moment. Each mode comes with its own leadership, its own rule of conduct, and its own way of being a community. Most religious traditions have something like this in practice.

[00:20:18]The Ibadis are a bit unusual in having written it down as doctrine, and for including as one of the four official states a formal category of going underground. And here's how it works.

[00:20:30]The first state is known as Zuhur. This means manifestation. This is just open-air mode, right? Your community is free, you have a independent Islamic government, you've elected a legitimate Imam, he rules openly, he enforces Islamic law, and this is, you know, the kind of like the the the mainstream kind of like chill peace time vibes. The second state is difa. This is defense. This is when you go like fortress mode, all right? Your community is under attack, you elect a special Imam. This is the Imam al-Difa. This is a military commander who has full authority for the duration of the war, and when the war ends, his sort of his his Imam status kind of dissolves.

[00:21:13]It's sort of like a wartime presidency with like an expiration date, if that makes sense. And the third state is Shira. This is literally the selling.

[00:21:22]The word comes from Koranic verses about people who sell their lives to God in exchange for paradise. So, in Ibadi usage, Shira is the martyr vanguard, a group of at least 40 Muslims who voluntarily sell their own lives by launching an uprising against an unjust ruler. And they might all die, but by fighting, they keep the idea of righteous resistance alive. They're the 40 who go out knowing that they will probably not come back. And you can see that there's obviously a high premium on standing up to injustice and martyrdom in that sort of >> [snorts] >> uh that sort of operating system.

[00:21:57]And then you have the fourth state. And that one has actually been a lot more of the operational reality for most of Ibadi history. And this is called Kitman. This is known as secrecy.

[00:22:09]This is the underground mode, all right?

[00:22:11]The religion keeps running, but it's completely out of view. The Kitman is the state that a community enters when it cannot practice its religion openly.

[00:22:19]When persecution is just too heavy and when resistance is impossible. So, if you declare your faith as a Muslim and that means that you are in danger or, you know, there's potentially a death penalty, these people hide their beliefs and they practice prudent, you know, dissimulation to survive. In this state, the community is still led by a leader, by according to Ibadi doctrine, a community Kitman, and this is known as the Imam al Kitman. This is the Imam of secrecy. This is a scholar whose authority is recognized by the faithful, even though his role is never publicly announced. He guides the community spiritually, but never openly. And he kind of waits for conditions to change, and sometimes the Kitman can last for years. Sometimes maybe in this case, I mean full on centuries. Now, here is an element of this that I find very interesting. According to classical Ibadi scholars, the North African Ibadi community entered the state of kidman in 909 AD. And that date's important because this is basically after their last independent Ibadi state, the Rustamid Imamate in what is now Algeria was destroyed by the Shia Fatimid dynasty. And in their own theological reading of history, they have been in this sort of secret underground state ever since. So, right now they have the a cloaked Imam of secrecy hiding somewhere. It depends on kind of how you interpret it, but some scholars treat this as a concrete institution, like a real person known to a very secretive inner circle. Others say that in practice councils of elders called the Azaba have stepped into that role collectively as a tribunal or a council. So, in modern North Africa, the reality is probably closer to the second view. You have community councils and scholars and you know, traditional authority structures rather than just like one single guy that's like kind of running the show. But again, the category is still there. An entire branch of Islam has institutionalized the concept of being hidden in plain sight and they have a formal theological category for doing so. So, now this raises the question of like what does it look like for a Muslim community to be completely operating underground with kind of their own theology and doctrine outside of the mainstream and what happens to them after, you know, like 1,100 years?

[00:24:37]Well, the answer is basically this. A fortified city in the middle of the Sahara that most of the world has never heard of. So, after the Rustamid Imamate fell, the North African Ibadis scattered and some went to the Nafusa Mountains of Libya where they still are to this very day. Some went to Jerba. This is an island off the Tunisian coast, and some made the craziest move of all, they walked south into the desert past the edge of basically any map that they had, and they built cities in a place called M'zab in the M'zab Valley. Now, the M'zab is a cluster of fortified towns in southern Algeria, and it was built starting in like the 11th century on a landscape so harsh that for most of the town's history, the only thing you could do there was just like try to survive. Can we get a picture of these towns? That sounds so interesting.

[00:25:28]I would love to see.

[00:25:29]You got to think, they're just like, "Hey, we're going south, and we're going to go as far down as we can, and then we're just going to try to survive for as long as possible."

[00:25:37]I mean, look at these things.

[00:25:39]Look at Look at that white I mean, it looks like uh like the animated frost of the snowman.

[00:25:46]All right. Kind of, yeah. Like imagine you're just like just strolling through southern Algeria, and all of a sudden you come across this, and you're like, "Who are these people?"

[00:25:55]They built skyscrapers.

[00:25:57]They're very cool looking.

[00:25:59]Wow.

[00:26:00]So crazy.

[00:26:03]And wow. Okay, can you scroll up real fast? The M'zab Valley.

[00:26:07]That is so crazy.

[00:26:09]Wow. It's just like they look wild looking.

[00:26:13]And it's so densely populated. Yeah. I mean, that's crazy.

[00:26:18]So, I mean, you can see from these pictures, they literally just built like these vertical walled towns with these like white and pink houses, which I'm assuming probably helps with the heat, you know, in the hot sun.

[00:26:31]You can think like Mykonos. Exactly.

[00:26:33]Right?

[00:26:34]And they have like underground water systems, they got like palm groves getting irrigated with like water ducts. Like they're building all sorts of crazy stuff, and at the center of each city is this plain kind of unadorned looking mosque with a you know, just a very simple kind of design features that make it kind of just like blend in with everything else.

[00:26:54]And inside those cities they built a social order that was designed to preserve the faith no matter what.

[00:26:59]Remember those councils I was talking about, the Azaba? These are the bodies of the respected scholars that kind of took over the functions of what would have just been done by like one leader.

[00:27:09]They will judge disputes and they will collect taxes and run the schools and keep the library of Ibadi manuscripts safe for all the future generations. And for centuries the Mzab was one of the most guarded religious communities in the Islamic world. Outsiders, even other Muslims like Sunni and Shia, were often forbidden from praying in Mzab mosques or you know, even going into the inner quarters. Marriages outside the community were also like pretty rare for a long time. The community was just like its own religious enclave for I mean hundreds of years. And the irony is kind of funny here is that it sort of worked. Long after their state collapsed, the Mzab Berbers are still a body. Their libraries still hold these manuscripts that exist nowhere else in the world. Their scholars still write commentaries on text that other Muslim communities might have lost centuries ago in wars or just due to time. But here's what's really interesting about this in the modern era is that the Mzab isn't you know, just like an old town that's like a tourist destination people go and look at. It's like a real life zone of tension right now. Over the last two decades as Sunni Arab populations have kind of moved into the region, there have been repeated clashes and sometimes they're deadly between Ibadi Berber communities and the new neighbors moving in. I mean, riots and mosque disputes and deaths. The Algerian state has not always protected the Ibadi people effectively. Meanwhile, the Libyan Ibadi communities in Nafusa and Zuara went through their own version of this exact thing during the Gaddafi era when his regime suppressed Ibadi identity as a part of forced Arab nationalism. So, after Gaddafi's fall in 2011, those communities reasserted themselves, openly flying Ibadi religious symbols, and publishing Ibadi texts, and reopening scholarly networks for the first time in I mean, generations.

[00:29:05]I mean, you you can just imagine, right?

[00:29:06]That you get this, you know, it's not a single frozen Ibadi world, but, you know, a small, proud, embattled community, and many of them in different parts of the world that have spent a millennia basically just surviving in some of the harshest environments in the world.

[00:29:23]Now, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, the Ibadis weren't on the edge of the empire anymore, and as a result, they were actually running their own.

[00:29:32]And they continued to run it through invasions and civil wars and even the arrival of massive oil contracts. Hey guys, we're going to take a break real quick because I got to tell you something that I'm actually stoked about. Now, if you know me, you know I love coffee. I love caffeine. I was also ripping nicotine pouches all the time, like, sometimes going through like a pack a day. And honestly, I started to notice I was like a little wound up, like, my heart was racing. I was like kind of on edge, not sleeping great. I was like kind of anxious. And if you're into into like, you know, wellness and biohacking like I am, that's your body trying to tell you something. And that is why I love Ultra Pouches. I reached out to them because I love the product.

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[00:30:59]And when they ask you about how you heard about us, tell them the good people at Camp Gagnon sent you. It really helps out the show. Now, let's get back to it. So, the last elected Imam of Oman, the country took office in 1954.

[00:31:12]And that's pretty interesting because this is not 1254, 1854. We're talking about 1954. This is the Korean War. We have color TV. I mean, the space race is starting. So, while the modern world is like building all this stuff, the theocratic Ibadi Imam is elected by tribal councils in the Omani interior.

[00:31:33]And this is governed by just your regular classic Islamic law led by a scholar in the tradition stretching back to Basra. And it's still functioning as a sovereign political entity. I mean, this isn't ancient history. This is like happening in your grandparents' lifetime. So, this guy that we're talking about, the last elected Imam of Oman, was a scholar named Ghalib al-Hinai. And Elvis Presley's like recording songs, there is a theocratic Islamic Imam elected by a council into the highest positions in the country of Oman.

[00:32:10]And it's pretty crazy, right? You have this living like kind of ancient institution that is now in the modern era running an entire nation.

[00:32:20]And the way it ended is a story that no one really talks about. So, in 1954, the British-backed Sultan of Muscat and Oman, Said bin Taimur, granted oil exploration rights to a consortium of different companies in the West, including what would later become BP, British Petroleum, and Shell. Now, the problem is this. The best oil was under land that wasn't technically his. It was in the interior. This is the territory of the Ibadi Imam. Now, Imam Ghalib said, "No, no, no. This is our land, and so you don't get to sell drilling rights on our land. This is one nation of Oman.

[00:33:01]We control the borders. I'm in charge, so I'm going to sell the oil that's under your land to these people." And what followed here is a massive war. This is called the War of the Green Mountain, and it runs from 1954 to 1959.

[00:33:17]So, you can just imagine these villages on the side of you know, these like mountains, and you know, like this entire plateau, and they have irrigation channels, like, you know, taking water along the cliffs, and you know, the you have generations of people that have lived their entire lives, and their grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and they're all living in this place, and now it's kind of under attack by the people living in their same country. So, Imam Ghalib and his brother Talib, and a tribal sheikh named Sulaiman bin Himyar, led an army of Omanis, mostly lightly armed fighters in the mountains, against the Sultan's British-equipped coastal forces. And for a while, the Ibadis were winning. They pushed the Sultan's men out of Nizwa, and the British government started to kind of panic because they have a ton of money and oil interests and a global economy on the line. They need this land. So, Britain went in directly. The Royal Air Force and their jets bombed Ibadi villages on and around this mountain, including, by the British government's own later admission, attacks on irrigation systems and entire like infrastructure designed to break the rebels' abilities to feed themselves, which I think is a war crime. I'm not positive, but I don't know if you're allowed to do that.

[00:34:36]Now, when you blow up these areas in the interior parts of Oman, you're not just hitting infrastructure, you're literally just cutting off the supply lines for entire villages. So, ground troops, including elements of the 22 SAS, were deployed. So, in January of 1959, in a crazy operation, British commandos scaled the sheer southern cliffs of what they call Jabal Akhdar at night to basically surprise the Ibadi defenders completely and to break the Imam's resistance to giving up this land. And in the end, the war was over.

[00:35:13]The British won. The Imam, Imam Ghalib, fled to Saudi Arabia, where he lived in exile for decades, quietly appealing to the United Nations, telling them of the atrocities that came from the Sultan of Oman, as well as, you know, from the British. And this is ultimately recognition that never came. He ended up dying in 2009. And in the eyes of many traditionalists, he was the last legitimate elected Imam of Oman.

[00:35:40]Now, Britain had been waging an actual shooting war in Oman for years before British newspapers ever talked about it.

[00:35:46]One diplomat actually wrote privately that the intervention was, quote, "Yet another instance of our appearing to back an unpopular, undemocratic, and selfish potentate."

[00:35:57]The oil kept on moving.

[00:35:59]So, no one really cared. The Sultan stayed on the throne, and the story just kind of got brushed under the rug. And when people say the Ibadis have been hunted and pressured, they don't just mean a thousand years ago. Some of it was within living memory.

[00:36:12]I mean, British jets are literally bombing the Ibadis and their villages and the channels that are feeding them, I mean, in the '50s. And yet, out of that defeat came something that none of the imperial planners or the Western powers ever expected. The Sultan who won the war, Said bin Taimur, was so paranoid and so reactionary that he just banned cars. Straight up, he was like, "Cars are done." He banned paved roads and banned citizens leaving the country without personal permission. His own subjects were now living under a medieval autocracy while sitting on top of millions, if not billions, of dollars of oil. And in 1970, his son, Qaboos, staged a coup and deposed him and spent the next 50 years until his death in 2020 building something completely new.

[00:37:03]Britain thought that it had resolved the Oman question in 1959. What it actually done was clear basically the entire path for the most powerful and maybe the most quiet a body state that has ever existed.

[00:37:18]And this is a state so strategically positioned and so careful and so neutral and so useful to everyone around them that by the time the rest of the world noticed what Oman was doing, it had already been doing it for decades and had already built up a fortified structure. So, in 2015, President Obama signed the Iran nuclear deal. And the public story was Geneva, right? Vienna.

[00:37:40]You know, the the major world powers came to a table and got this deal done.

[00:37:44]But the real story is actually in Muscat. And for years before that signing, American and Iranian officials had been meeting secretly in Oman, flying in separately, meeting in government-provided locations, and working through the framework that would eventually become the JCPOA. This is the basically the nuclear deal. The meetings were so discreet that other Gulf states didn't know that they were even happening. So, when the outline was done, Oman handed it to the bigger players and kind of just stepped back.

[00:38:14]They didn't want any credit, no headlines, no press conference, and that's on purpose. This is a very savvy foreign policy doctrine. And it's what diplomats call the Muscat Channel. And it's become one of the most important backchannel diplomatic mechanisms in the Middle East. Oman has been the only Gulf Cooperation Council country with consistently cordial relations with Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It's the only Gulf state that didn't join the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. And it's even hosted Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018.

[00:38:51]And at the same time, it's maintaining close ties with Iran and Palestinian groups.

[00:38:56]I mean, it's like crazy how politically savvy they are. It's, you know, they've mediated hostage releases, they've facilitated talks between rivals, and they've served as a meeting point for I mean, almost every major conflict in that region. Its foreign policy doctrine established by Sultan Qaboos is often summarized in just six words: friend to all, enemy to none.

[00:39:19]And here's where the religious angle comes back in, because it isn't just being pragmatic. You see, Ibadiism is neither Sunni or Shia. So, it sits outside the main sort of sectarian axis of the Middle East and Middle Eastern politics. So, when Oman mediates between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which as we know is the leading Sunni power and the leading Shia power, it's not seen as like having a slant for either side. It's It has what they call sectarian neutrality. And that is worth an enormous amount when you're trying to get two hostile governments to sit at the same table, that they feel like there's a unbiased mediator that's still technically Muslim.

[00:40:01]Now, the doctrine of walaya and bara'a is principled and it's very non-hostile, and it keeps an arm's length from people you disagree with. And this has long been the Ibadi experience of living as a minority under other people's rulers, and it really shaped the culture that is both kind of uh you know, conservative and you know, ultimately keeps themselves, but is still very against, you know, grandstanding as like the one true version of Islam. So, the same reflex that once told Ibadi's, don't provoke the empire, keep your head down, like keep your community intact, focus on your family, is now working extremely well as like an instinct of a small state in a very dangerous part of the world.

[00:40:43]Like, hey, stay calm, stay neutral, and be open to working things out with anyone that's down to make a deal.

[00:40:49]And that's even a name for Oman's strategy. They call it strategic quietism. This is a deliberate, calculated decision to stay neutral and let people come to you.

[00:41:00]And this is literally kind of what the Kitman is all about. Remember the Kitman? This is the fourth state of the religion translated into a foreign policy doctrine. The same instinct that told persecuted Ibadi's in, you know, 1909 to go underground rather than fight a battle that they can't win is the same instinct that is creating a foreign policy decision in Oman in 2024 to host the meeting and hand off credit and stay neutral and disappear from the headlines. The theology didn't just shape the community and the culture and how the people are operating on a small scale. It became the operating system of an entire state. And this state almost nobody outside the region really pays that much attention to.

[00:41:44]Like, it's not like, oh, it hasn't got enough coverage or whatever. It's genuinely almost intentionally unknown in a way that really reveals something about how religious history gets written and how these stories get remembered. And there's four reasons why Ibadi's and Ibadism is the forgotten third branch of Islam. And the further you go down, the more you really understand about who these people are. First reason is just representation, right? The reason you probably haven't heard of the Ibadi or Ibadism is because they make up less than 1% of the global Muslim population.

[00:42:19]And in a religion of nearly 2 billion people, I mean, that's like so insignificant, right? Sunnis outnumber the Ibadis like 100 to 1. So, when textbooks summarize Islam, they're going to just, you know, be like, Sunni, Shia, and that's like, you know, 90 maybe like 89.9 and you know, like 9.9% of all Muslims, but there's a tiny little thing that are the Ibadi. And, you know, they also mention Sufi, which is not really a separate sect. It's more like a you know, a subculture within Sunni or Shia. Regardless, the other reason you probably don't know about the Ibadi is strategic because they don't want to be known.

[00:43:00]The whole theological apparatus of the kitman is to be quiet and to you know, not proselytize or, you know, be all up in your face. Like, they are intentionally trying to stay neutral and keep their heads down and just kind of go with the flow. I mean, Oman's foreign policy is the same exact thing. They stay low-key.

[00:43:19]They're you know, reliable and they're useful and they're not trying to like get all the credit.

[00:43:25]And, you know, it has made a lot of sense and has been very helpful for, you know, them to survive. And the third reason you might not know about them is labeling. For most of Islamic history, Ibadis were lumped in with the Khawarij.

[00:43:37]And again, the Khawarij are the people that stepped away. They oftentimes have a lot more of a radical or perhaps a violent bent to them. And the Ibadis are, in comparison, much more moderate. So, if you're talking about mainstream Sunni and Shia historical memory, the Khawarij are the villains and, you know, they're the ones that killed the fourth caliph.

[00:43:57]This is, you know, Ali. This is They're They're the proto extremists. So, oftentimes, the modern Ibadi get lumped in with them and they kind of get written off. But, modern Ibadis reject the Khawarijite label forcefully, and they say like, "Hey, we have actually pushed away from radicals, and we've actually like stopped radical movements." But, still, the label stuck.

[00:44:17]And then, the fourth reason is maybe a little bit more political. So, for a long time, mainstream Sunni polemics against Ibadi and Ibadi-isms framed it as this dangerous secretive cult that plays into, you know, kind of tropes about like hidden Muslims, like, you know, practicing taqiyya and like hiding in the shadows and all this stuff. And some of this came from a genuine misunderstanding of what the kitman doctrine was. Some was just propaganda from, you know, Sunni states and, you know, Sunni politicians trying to delegitimize these regions. But, regardless, it kind of came as like a propaganda campaign to kind of like wipe them away.

[00:44:56]And, of course, some of the secrecy was very real, right? Like, the Mzab communities did restrict outsiders for centuries. So, as a result, you know, manuscripts were just passed hand-to-hand through trusted networks and never really published for everyone to know about. So, if you were like a Sunni Muslim in the year 1000, you might might not even know anything about these people.

[00:45:15]Now, you have a combination of all these factors, and it produces a, you know, a real gap in understanding the global religious playing field. Most educated Westerners, they might not know anything about the Ibadi. And many Sunnis and Shias, they might not even really know who they are, or they might see it as like, you know, like a like a cult or something like that. And I think the Ibadi hold a really unique part of religious history.

[00:45:41]Because for most of human history, religion survived by being really loud, right? Like, they'll have cathedrals and missionaries, and their visibility helps them survive. You know, you you it's hard to preserve something that you don't know even exists. So, for Catholics or even Muslims, by having control of the power structures or governments or creating the Holy Roman Empire, or of course, you know, the Muslim caliphates, you're able to really control your destiny and create some type of protection for your people and for your religion.

[00:46:10]But, for the Ibadi's, that wasn't really an option. You know, they moved to the mountains and they built cities in deserts that no one really wanted, and they wrote doctrine for how to lead communities in secret, and they refused to play inside the Sunni-Shia game that defined everyone else's story, and they kind of just made their own in a much smaller, much more underground way.

[00:46:29]And that long practice of silence produced exactly the skills that ultimately Oman would need to thrive in a world where everyone else is trying to get attention, you know? And they are practicing patience and neutrality, and just kind of listening, and you know, kind of playing the game in a lot smarter of a way.

[00:46:48]And this is the philosophical thread that I really like, is that we live in a time that is entirely organized around visibility, right? Like everyone wants attention, they want to be seen, they want to be praised, they want to be rewarded. Every new cycle, an institution, and movement, they they all want to be pushed onto something and to get as much attention as possible.

[00:47:07]And that's where I kind of admire the Ibadi, you know? This is a 14th century tradition, you know, or 14 14th century long tradition, rather, born from a battlefield argument in 657 AD that is still here and still running because of how quiet and smart they could be. The Ibadi's didn't survive history by winning all the time. They survived by knowing how to play the game and working smarter, not harder.

[00:47:38]And that's not just a religion, right?

[00:47:40]In today's day and age, that might be just the the craziest idea of of all of them, you know? Just being like, "Hey, I'm actually above all the attention.

[00:47:47]You guys fight and bicker, and I'm just going to post up on the side and keep things pushing."

[00:47:51]And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history of the the people and a look at their theology, and ultimately what they believe and why they are different than the Sunni and the Shia.

[00:48:02]I mean, fascinating. I would actually love to know. I mean, I know that the Ibadi are less than 1% of the global Muslim population, but how many people are we talking? Could you Google like roughly how many Ibadis are out there?

[00:48:13]And I presume that most of them are in like Algeria, Tunisia, Oman. But what's interesting is I've actually been to that part of Tunisia.

[00:48:22]I went to Djerba.

[00:48:24]I probably met Ibadis and didn't even know it. Isn't that crazy?

[00:48:28]Um when?

[00:48:30]I was just a boy.

[00:48:31]I was just a young lad trying to convert them to Catholicism. No. Was this one of your missionary trips?

[00:48:36]>> No, no, no, no, no.

[00:48:37]>> Uh this was when uh I was with my family. Went to Club Med there. It was amazing. They had a Club Med there? Oh, it was beautiful, dude.

[00:48:44]It was like an amazing time. Roughly 2 to 3 million people worldwide. 2 to 3 million? I mean, that's decent. I mean, is there an Ibadi community in New York City? Can you find that out?

[00:48:55]Cuz that would be kind of fun to like go and learn about them.

[00:48:58]Now again, uh let me just say like most of my Muslim friends are like, "Yeah, don't dance and this is not really relevant. Don't don't look into it." And so I don't even know what like the Christian analog for that would be where like there's some subtle doctrinal differences. They're still considered Christian, but they're like super small and like percentile-wise they're almost so insignificant that it doesn't really like make a huge difference in your day-to-day religious practice, but at the same time they're kind of influencing the politics of modern-day Oman, which is fascinating.

[00:49:25]What do you got? There's no known amount in New York City specifically.

[00:49:30]Should we start it?

[00:49:32]Me and you? Yeah.

[00:49:33]I I'm sold. Let's do an Ibadi meet up.

[00:49:37]Yeah. Any Ibadis watching this right now?

[00:49:40]I would love to know.

[00:49:42]Why don't we just make it a general Muslim meet up?

[00:49:45]>> No, no, no, no, no, no. I want the Ibadis, dude. I want to know what they're up to. I want to know what they're talking about. I'm so curious about them. Yeah? Yeah, dude. I mean, you're not a little curious? I would like to meet one. Be like, "So, what do What do people say about you?"

[00:49:57]I mean, there's got to be one Ahmadi listening to this right now. You know, we made a whole video about them. And if there's not, send it to your Ahmadi friend. Yeah. Your Your How do you bodies?

[00:50:07]Send it over to them. I want to know what they're talking about.

[00:50:10]>> Another shirt. Look at us, dude. I mean, we are just t-shirt legends. We're cooking right now.

[00:50:15]Anyway, what do you guys think? I mean, if you're Muslim, like what is your opinion on the Ahmadi? What is your philosophy of them? Like what are you taught about them growing up? Do you see it as like a footnote or like a almost like a profanity or like a slur almost?

[00:50:26]Or do you see them as like a legitimate Islamic sect that, you know, just doesn't really get a lot of screen time?

[00:50:31]I'm so curious. I truly have like I love learning about like very specific sects of different religions.

[00:50:36]And uh Easy marks.

[00:50:38]>> Are you smiling, dude? I said sects.

[00:50:41]Yep. Oh my goodness. You're 7 years old.

[00:50:44]I would love to know what you guys think. Please, drop a comment. I read all of them on YouTube, Spotify. And uh I have great news, by the way. If you are interested in joining a secret society or a cult of your own, we have Camp Gaganon on patreon.com.

[00:50:58]That is the campfire. That is the inner sanctum where we all hang out, and we chit-chat. You're going to get episodes ad-free. You're going to get bonus episodes. You're going to get live zooms with me and all the other campers every single month. And you can check that out at patreon.com/campgaganon.

[00:51:12]Now, if you're interested in history content, everything that's ever happened ever, great news, we have history camp.

[00:51:16]If you're interested in current events, going on conspiracy deep dives, the occult, the mystical, and everything in between, that is Camp Gaganon. I sit down with people, and I talk to people way smarter than me, and we actually learn something really significant. It's really an awesome channel, and I love doing that show, so you guys should check that out. And uh as always, if you like the religion vibe, and you like learn about what everyone believes, great news, we drop these episodes every single Sunday. So, make sure you subscribe, comment, like, all that stuff, because it really helps us out.

[00:51:42]Thank you all so much. God bless you.

[00:51:45]And I'll see you next time. Peace.