Between Sunni and Shia

This doctrine of the imamate sets Ibadism apart from both major branches: against the Shia insistence on the family of Ali, and against the Sunni preference for Qurayshi descent, it grounds authority purely in merit and communal choice. The position descends from the earliest Kharijite critique of the caliphate and shaped the imamates of Oman. It expresses a strongly consultative and egalitarian conception of religious authority that remains central to Ibadi identity.

Ibadism itself represents the moderate wing of the wider Kharijite movement from which it descended in the seventh century: where some early Kharijite factions held that any Muslim ruler who sinned gravely could and should be violently overthrown, and applied this doctrine to justify assassination and civil war, Ibadi scholars rejected that extremism, developing instead a more measured political theology that could tolerate living under an unjust ruler without an imam present, or under a "defensive" imam of limited mandate, rather than treating rebellion as a constant religious duty. This moderation is part of why Ibadism survived as an organised, textually sophisticated tradition into the present, chiefly in Oman and parts of North and East Africa, while the more militant Kharijite factions did not endure as coherent communities.