State television in Iran committed serious resources to a 22 episode dramatization of Ali ibn Abi Talib's brief and violent caliphate, directed and written by Davood Mirbagheri and released under two titles, Imam Ali and Shaheed-e Kufa, The Martyr of Kufa. The series follows Ali from the end of Uthman ibn Affan's rule through his own assassination in the mosque at Kufa, and it does not skip the episode that sits at the center of Kharijite history.
The Kharijites first emerge in the story as Ali's own soldiers, men who had fought at his side at the Battle of Siffin against the Umayyad governor Muawiya. When Ali agreed to settle that battle by arbitration rather than by pressing his military advantage, a faction of his army broke away on the principle that judgment belonged to God alone, not to human negotiators. The series dramatizes that rupture and Ali's subsequent campaign against the breakaway faction at the Battle of Nahrawan, where the movement was militarily crushed.
The show does not end the story there, and neither did history. Years later, in the Kufa mosque, Ali was struck down by Ibn Muljam, a Kharijite who had survived Nahrawan and returned to finish, alone, what the battle had not. The assassination at the center of the series' own title, Shaheed-e Kufa, was carried out by a member of the very movement its earlier episodes had dramatized.
Made from a Shia Iranian perspective centered on Ali as its protagonist, the series is not a work produced by or sympathetic to the Kharijite movement it depicts. It is nonetheless a rare instance of popular screen media giving substantial, sustained dramatic treatment to a schism most film and television has never touched at all, released on DVD with English subtitles and Urdu dubbing and watched by Shia audiences well beyond Iran's own borders.