ISIS: The Taint of Murji’ism and the Curse of Hypocrisy

This paper is an attempt to analyze one facet of ISIS’ discourse in order to understand why the movement chooses the arguments it does and how it uses them to achieve particular goals. One of the most commonly occurring tropes in ISIS propaganda is its critique of its opponents as “Murji’ites.” The Murji’ites were a school of Islamic thought that emerged early on in the history of the Muslim community, and ideas and claims associated with them were critical in debates over Islamic identity and the path to salvation. In the modern era, various movements have reinterpreted the traditional discourse on the Murji’ites in specific ways, and ISIS spokesmen draw on both classical and modern elaborations of an idea of Murji’ism to polemicize against Muslims who resist their claims and fail to support them. Thus, we see that ISIS does not create its rhetoric out of whole cloth, but borrows pieces from Islamic intellectual tradition selectively and engages with older Salafist ideas in the articulation of a new ideology