Dissident argan

A dissident argan, within Cairony, is any argan other than those officially recognised by secular states within the Cairan world as being dominant within a particular country. While the term dissident, from the Old Sabamic dissidere, “to be remote; to disagree; to be removed from”, frequently carries a pejorative sense in everyday speech, no such sense automatically attaches to the term as applied to an individual argan, and it is usually merely indicative of their less privileged relationship with their host country’s secular rulers. Perhaps the most prominent dissident argan in modern-day Cairony is the Darnelite Argan, founded in 1877 by Gina Darnel (later canonised by her adherents), which in recent years has come to enjoy a certain “alternative” status to the state-affiliated argans of the countries in which it is active.

However, the term has also been applied in the past to Cairan groups, not all of which have been formally recognised as argans, which hold to interpretations of the Cairan faith which run counter to the officially-propounded form in a particular country. In the past many of these have tended to be Orthodox in Reform countries, and vice versa; such instances have declined in recent decades as many countries have seen the necessity of accommodating the beliefs of those subjects whose adherence is to the other school. However, the term is also attached to groups now seen as interdicted or proscribed by the mainstream church; in the post-Long War period, several of these have been puritan in theology, with this interpretation of Orthodox Cairony having been widely discredited by acts of religiously-motivated murder and violence during the Ceresoran Civil War.