Constructing “Financial Piety”

This study examines how extremist propaganda constructs gendered economic obligations through the strategic linguistic deployment of Islamic religious texts. Employing feminist critical discourse analysis and van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework, the research systematically analyses a three-page women’s section from Issue 1 of the Rumiyah magazine, which explicitly addresses female audiences regarding “jihad with wealth” through 19 religious citations and five historical exemplars. Systematic linguistic analysis reveals three interconnected discursive mechanisms creating what this study terms “financial piety”, positioning women’s economic contributions as simultaneously an organisational necessity and a means of spiritual salvation. First, commercial metaphorical framing transforms spiritual devotion into measurable transactions through the Quranic concept of tijarah (deal), establishing spiritual obligation as a commercial transaction as the foundational conceptual metaphor. Second, gendered linguistic economy constructs women as inherently sinful through evaluative asymmetry and modal obligation structures, requiring financial atonement for alleged gender-specific moral failings. Third, exemplary narrative structures featuring Islam’s most revered women model extreme financial sacrifice through consistent linguistic patterns. These mechanisms operate through van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies: authorisation, moral evaluation, rationalisation and mythopoesis. The analysis reveals “constrained agency”: women are positioned as capable economic actors through agentive grammatical structures, while modal obligation and imperative constructions channel agency exclusively towards organisational needs. Lexical-semantic analysis points to systematic metaphorical framing through commercial vocabulary, while syntactic analysis exposes how modal structures and evaluative lexis naturalise obligatory giving. The findings contribute theoretically by introducing linguistically grounded concepts explaining gendered exploitation, methodologically by systematically demonstrating the analytical capacity of critical discourse analysis and empirically by revealing precise language-based manipulation tactics across lexical, syntactic and discourse levels

Critical discourse analysis · Legitimacy · Legitimation · Narrative · Obligation · Islamic Studies and History · Socioeconomic Development in MENA · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence