He argued that the terrorist attacks of recent years had clearly violated Islamic teaching because they “cause more harm than good,” bringing more bombs, more drones and more chaos to Muslim communities, he said.

“Who has benefited? Please use the intelligence that Allah gave you,” he said. “These radical groups have harmed the image of Islam infinitely more than all of the foreign policy of Western lands combined.”

These scholars ridicule the Islamic State’s claim to have created a “caliphate” ruled by a successor to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad. Instead, in a highly effective bit of rebranding, they call the Islamic State Kharijites, a reviled group of Muslims who killed women and children and rebelled against the caliphs in the seventh century.

The imams named by the Islamic State are based in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. They represent a broad spectrum of Islamic thought — from spiritual Sufis to puritanical Salafis, and even the more militant “Salafi Jihadis.”

To the Islamic State’s propagandists, it does not matter that the imams are fervent Muslims or critics of American foreign policy: They are all “unbelievers,” just like the Shiite Muslims, Christians and Yazidis that the Islamic State has killed by the thousands in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

This is not the first time that the Islamic State has targeted Muslim leaders in the United States, but this is the longest list yet. It includes Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, a Lebanese Sufi now based mostly in Michigan who has been warning for years about rising extremism.