This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Kharijites had an answer to the question of the grave sinner that was simple and severe: a Muslim who commits a serious sin has left the faith, and may rightly be fought as an apostate. Murji'a arose largely as a refusal of that severity, in the unsettled decades after the first civil wars split the early Muslim community.
Its answer inverted the question rather than softening it. Rather than deciding here and now whether a sinning Muslim remains a believer, the position held that the judgment should be deferred, irja, to God alone, in the next life. In the meantime, a professing Muslim's inward faith and confession, rather than the record of sinful acts, is what defines them as a believer.
Classical heresiographers were not kind to the position. Al-Baghdadi, writing centuries later, catalogued Murji'a among the deviant sects, and Mutazilite theologians developed the competing view that a grave sinner occupies neither the category of believer nor unbeliever but an intermediate position of its own. The critique on both sides was the same: deferring judgment, opponents argued, cuts the link between faith and practice and hands a grave sinner an assurance scripture never promised.
What later Sunni orthodoxy actually settled on complicates any simple verdict that the position was refuted and dismissed. Mainstream theology came to hold that a sinning Muslim remains a Muslim, not an apostate to be fought, which sits closer to Murji'a's core instinct than to the Kharijite position. Watt reads the eventual mainstream settlement as having absorbed a moderated form of exactly what the condemned extreme had argued, which is why historians treat the label with more care than a flat list of rejected sects usually receives.