From a Private Scholar to a National Institution

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.