Ghazala
Leader of the Kharijite movement
Ghazāla (Arabic: غزالة زوجة شبيب; died 696 AD near Kufa) was a leader of the Kharijite movement.
Biography
Ghazāla, born in Mosul, was the wife of Shabib ibn Yazid al-Shaybani. Shabib rebelled against Umayyad rule, and Ghazala was actively at his side. She commanded troops, following in the footsteps of previous Muslim women like Juwayriyya bint al-Ḥārith at the Battle of Yarmuk.
In one battle, she made the Umayyad governor Hajjāj ibn-Yūsuf flee, and take refuge in his palace in Kufa. As a result, a poem was composed shaming him for posterity: You are a lion against me, but in the battle an ostrich which spreads its wings and hurries off on hearing the chirping of a sparrow.
Why did you not go forth in the conflict and fight with Ghazala hand to hand? But no! Your heart fled from you (as if) with the wings of a bird. In 696 AD (77 AH), after having controlled the city of Kufa for a day, Ghazāla led her male warriors in prayer as well as recited two of the longest chapters from the Quran during the prayer in the Mosque.
The public source identifies “Ghazala” as leader of the Kharijite movement. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ghazala, Leader and Kharijite.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ghazala” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.