Mufti

The most important thing about a mufti is the thing most often lost in reporting: a fatwa is an opinion, not a verdict, and it binds nobody.

The nature of a fatwa

A mufti issues fatwas, reasoned legal opinions in answer to questions put to him. A fatwa has no enforcement behind it, the questioner may seek another and act on it, and two qualified muftis may answer the same question differently without either being in error. What a fatwa carries is the authority of the reasoning and the reputation of the man giving it, and nothing more. A mufti must be trained in the sources and in a school of law, and there is no ordination; the qualification is scholarly and recognised by other scholars.

The contrast with the judge

The clean contrast is with the qadi. The qadi decides a case between parties and his judgment is enforced; the mufti answers a question and his answer is not. Many states now appoint an official Grand Mufti, which places state authority behind particular opinions and makes the office political in a way the classical role was not, but the underlying character of the fatwa as advice rather than command is what the modern use of the word, and the alarm it often causes, tends to obscure.

For most of Islamic history the mufti was typically an individual scholar consulted privately, and a questioner with access to more than one might simply ask several and weigh their answers, a genuinely decentralised system of legal opinion with no single office at its head. The Ottoman Empire departed from that pattern by creating the office of Sheikh al-Islam, a state-appointed chief mufti whose opinions carried official weight across the empire and who could be consulted by the sultan on the legality of state acts, an institutionalisation of the fatwa that several modern states have inherited in spirit.

A number of Muslim-majority countries today maintain an official Grand Mufti or a national fatwa council, such as Egypt's Dar al-Ifta or Saudi Arabia's Council of Senior Scholars, whose rulings carry a state-backed authority well beyond that of an independent scholar, even though the classical, non-binding character of the fatwa as advice rather than command remains formally unchanged. The rise of satellite television and the internet has also transformed the office's public visibility, since a fatwa that once might have reached a single questioner can now circulate globally within hours, occasionally provoking international controversy over a ruling its issuer intended as a narrow answer to a specific and local question.