Membership, the Schools and the Restriction of Fatwa

The Council was originally drawn from scholars trained in the Hanbali legal tradition as it developed in Najd, which is the jurisprudential setting of the Saudi religious establishment. That changed in 2009, when a royal order broadened the membership to include scholars of the other three Sunni schools, Hanafi, Maliki and Shafii. The change is often described as a widening of the Council's base, and it also had the effect of making the body formally representative of Sunni jurisprudence as a whole rather than of one school within it.

A second measure in 2010 restricted the public issuing of fatwas in the kingdom to members of the Council and to those it authorises. The stated purpose was to stop the proliferation of contradictory rulings issued through satellite television and the internet by people with no recognised standing. The effect is that a body appointed by the state holds the formal monopoly on public religious opinion within it.

Matters referred to the Council over the years have included banking and finance, medical questions from transplantation to reproductive technology, the rules of pilgrimage administration for very large crowds, and questions of public order. Its published resolutions are numbered and dated and are available in collected form, which makes it one of the more transparent bodies of its kind to study.