The First Kharijite: 'Be Just, Muhammad'

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

As the wealth was given out, the Bedouins mobbed the Prophet ﷺ for money until his cloak caught on a thorn-bush; he said, "Return my cloak, had I camels as many as these thorns I would share them all among you, and you would not find me miserly." His irritation there was only the strain of a human after many days, no fault. But then a man with a scraggly beard and jutting brow came and said, "O Muḥammad, be just in this!", accusing him of unfairness. This was no longer rudeness or greed; it struck at his very office. The Prophet ﷺ answered, وَيْلَكَ، وَمَنْ يَعْدِلُ إِنْ لَمْ أَعْدِلْ, "Woe to you; who will be just if I am not? Will you not trust me when He who is in the heavens trusts me?"

ʿUmar asked to strike off his neck, but the Prophet ﷺ refused, "lest people say I kill my companions" (a maṣlaḥah: forgoing a right for the community's good, as he later left the Kaʿbah on its Qurayshī foundation lest new Muslims be shaken). And he foretold that from this man's ilk would come a people "who recite the Qurʾān but it does not pass their throats; you will think your prayer poor beside theirs, yet they will pass out of Islam as an arrow passes through its target", the Khawārij, the fanatics who make bloodshed trivial while priding themselves on worship, and who arise until the Day of Judgement. Their prototype thought himself holier than the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ himself.