The Council was established by royal decree in 1971, and the manner of its creation is the first thing to understand about it. Its members are appointed by the king, its chairman is the Grand Mufti of the kingdom, and it sits within a state structure that also includes the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and the judiciary. It is not a self-constituting body of scholars who elected one another, and it is not an academy that anyone joins by qualification alone.
Under it sits the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Issuing Fatwas, a smaller standing body drawn from the Council's membership, which handles the ordinary flow of questions from individuals. The division of labour is that the Permanent Committee answers the public while the Council deliberates on the matters the state refers to it, and the published collections of the Committee's answers run to many volumes and circulate far outside the kingdom.
Because it is both, its rulings are read in two registers at once. To a questioner in Riyadh or in Jakarta a Council fatwa is scholarly opinion in the ordinary sense. To an observer of the Saudi state it is also an act of a government institution, and the two readings are difficult to separate, which is a permanent feature of a religious authority constituted by decree rather than an accusation about any particular ruling.