Leadership by the most qualified elected imam

Ibadi Muslims affirm that leadership of the community belongs to the most qualified person chosen by the believers, not to a hereditary line or a divinely designated Imam. The imam is elected for his knowledge, piety, and justice, may be deposed if he fails, and need not be of the Prophet's family or the tribe of Quraysh. Ibadi political theology even recognises that the community may live without a manifest imam in conditions of concealment, or under a defensive imam raised up for a particular need.

Historically the doctrine produced real states: the Rustamid Imamate, centred at Tahert in what is now Algeria, governed by elected Ibadi imams from 776 to 909 CE, and in Oman an interior Imamate persisted, with interruptions, into the twentieth century. Its last independent phase ended in the Jebel Akhdar War (1954 to 1959), when Imam Ghalib bin Ali's forces were defeated by Sultan Said bin Taimur with British military support, folding the interior Imamate into the Sultanate of Oman and ending elected Ibadi imamate rule as a functioning state institution, though Ibadi legal and theological authority has continued within Oman under the Sultanate. Selection traditionally involved a council of qualified scholars (ahl al-hall wa'l-aqd, "those who loose and bind") who vetted candidates and extended the pledge of allegiance, a consultative mechanism Ibadi political theory shares in principle, though not in detail, with early Sunni caliphal selection.

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.