State Religious Institutions And Fatwa Councils

Many Muslim-majority countries have developed formal state institutions to house and support the office of Grand Mufti and issue fatwas on a more systematic, institutional basis than an individual scholar working alone could readily provide, reflecting the practical demand for authoritative guidance on a continuous stream of new questions in modern economic, medical and technological life; Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, founded in 1895, and similar national fatwa councils elsewhere process large volumes of individual questions from the public alongside issuing the Grand Mufti's own more prominent, publicly announced rulings on major questions of national or international significance.

The absence of a single central authority across all of Sunni Islam means Grand Muftis in different countries can and do reach differing conclusions on contested questions, a plurality of legal opinion Islamic legal tradition has historically accommodated through its recognition of multiple schools of jurisprudence, the four principal Sunni madhhabs, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali, each with its own accepted methods of legal reasoning, rather than through any expectation that a single ruling should bind Sunni Muslims everywhere in the way a Grand Mufti's fatwa binds only within his own country or institution's specific sphere of recognized authority.