The modern office of grand mufti, found today in states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, descends institutionally from the Ottoman Empire's Sheikh ul Islam, the empire's highest ranking religious authority, who issued binding fatwas on matters of state importance and whose approval was traditionally sought for major political and legal decisions, including, on occasion, the legitimacy of a sultan's accession or deposition.
When the Ottoman state and its religious institutions were dismantled in the early twentieth century, the successor states that emerged across the former empire and the wider Sunni Muslim world each developed their own national grand mufti offices, generally with narrower and more explicitly state defined authority than the Ottoman Sheikh ul Islam had held, tied to a single country's legal and religious establishment rather than to an empire spanning multiple regions and peoples. Alongside these officially appointed positions, the rise of satellite television and, later, the internet has allowed some independently recognized scholars to build fatwa issuing authority and public followings that rival or exceed a state appointed grand mufti's reach within their own country, a development that has noticeably changed how religious authority in Sunni Islam is exercised and contested in the contemporary period.