Early Islamic heresiographical works, due to their nature, considered Ibadism to be one of the extremist divisions of the Kharijite (Khawarije) movement.
[3] The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of European colonization in the Near East, which produced explorers’ accounts of the places they visited.
During this period, travellers’ reports, politician's writings and scholars’ works on geography, politics and social life spread and proliferated.
Works of French and Italian scholars focused mainly on North Africa, where the Ibāḍī communities spread over scattered locations in the Sahara.
Additionally, the scholars who devoted some works to East Africa were from a variety of European countries for example: the French, A. Imbert (1903) and Gabriel Ferrand (1928), the German Albert Friedemann (1930), the British, W. Ingrams (1967) and the American, Michael Lofchie(1965).
Modern historians hold that Wilkinson's writings on the religious, social and political structures of the Sultanate of Oman are the most important in this field.
The first consisted in an attempt to understand Ibadism through the translated texts, whilst the second involved the compilation of bibliographic lists of Ibāḍī literature, most of which focused on historical works.
[5] This is apparent from George Badger’s The Imams and Seyyid in Oman, the translation of the K. al-Fath al-Mubiyn fī sīrat al-Sadah al-Bus’īdiyīn by Ibn Ruzayq, published in 1871.
In 1874, Charles Edward Ross published Annals of Oman from early times to the year 1728, and the translation of excerpts from the K. Kashf al-Ghuma by al-Sarhanī.
Al-Barrādī’s work presented a different view of early Islamic history after the battle of Siffīn and the development of Ibadism in North Africa.
Certainly, Motylinski's broad interests have promoted North African studies in the European academic disciplines of linguistics, history and theology.
[6] In addition, several publications by the Italian orientalist Roberto Rubinacci are remarkable contributions to the study of Ibāḍī theology and religious history.
[6] In the field of bibliography, A. Motylinski produced the first list in 1885, containing the manuscripts of the Wadi Mzab in Algeria, after he had the chance to visit some private Ibāḍī libraries.
Later on, Motylinski, having verified the authenticity of the work, introduced the “Tārikh” of Ibn al-Saghir and produced a short monograph on the Rustumid state.
[6] Finally, there was the famous article by German-English Orientalist Joseph Schacht in 1956 after his visit to Wadi Mzab, which provided further impetus to the publication of philological works in Ibāḍī libraries.
The geographical and political isolation of Oman at the beginning of the 20th century deprived scholars of access to Omani works and early Ibāḍī writings.
The exploration of Omani literature started only in the mid-1970s, when John Wilkinson and G. Rex Smith published a number of writings on Ibadism in Oman.
[7] In the 1980s – 90s, the French scholar, Pierre Cuperly, published remarkable works focusing on the methodology for studying the early Ibāḍī theological epistles.
His work triggered the emergence of a new generation of American researchers in the field of Oman and Ibāḍī Studies, such as Valerie Hoffman, Mandana Limbert and Adam Gaiser.
These developments changed many previous concepts and introduced the notion of intellectual reformation process in the scholarship on Ibadism and the contributions of the scholars of Ibadism, such as, Nur al-Din Al-Salmi, and Muhammad ibn Yusuf Atfayyash, the author of “Sharh al Nail”, and Sulayman al-Baruni, all of whom advanced the field of Ibāḍī studies in recent years.
[8] The critical text editions by Abulrahman al-Salimi and Wilferd Madelung, as well as a recent annotated translation of two theological primers by Ibāḍī theologians of the late thirteenth and the early nineteenth century respectively, namely the ʿAqīda al-wahbiyya by Nāṣir b. Sālim b.