Fatwā — the Jurist's Opinion

A fatwā is a qualified scholar's answer to a question of Islamic law — authoritative in its reasoning, but advisory rather than binding, and never a substitute for a court's judgment.

At a glance

The everyday work of iftāʾ is unremarkable and enormous: whether a medication breaks a fast, how an inheritance divides among particular heirs, whether a financial instrument is permissible, whether a marriage contract is valid. Most answers are brief because the underlying scholarship is settled; only novel or contentious questions receive the long, reasoned treatment that sets out the sources relied on and the analogy drawn. Historically the questioner came in person or by letter; today the same traffic runs through state iftāʾ offices, university academies such as al-Azhar's, the offices of Shiʿi marjaʿs, and a very large volume of online request forms.

What gives a fatwā weight is the standing of the scholar and the quality of the reasoning, not any coercive power. A questioner unconvinced by one muftī may ask another, and two competent muftīs may differ without either being in error in the eyes of the tradition — an outcome the plurality of the schools makes ordinary rather than scandalous. This is the structural difference from qaḍāʾ: a judge's ruling settles a dispute between parties and is enforced, while a fatwā informs a conscience and may be declined.

That distinction is routinely lost outside Muslim scholarly circles, where the word is often taken to mean a decree or a sentence. Two episodes did most to fix the misunderstanding: Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 pronouncement against the novelist Salman Rushdie, and the declarations of war on the United States that Osama bin Laden issued in 1996 and, jointly with others, in 1998 — the second of which was widely reported as a fatwā. Neither, on the assessment of most jurists, fits the institution. Khomeini's conception of clerical authority was, by the judgement of many scholars within his own tradition, unusual among its senior authorities, and bin Laden held no scholarly qualification for iftāʾ at all — a point on which muftīs across the schools were, and are, in agreement.

The practical safeguards are therefore internal to the tradition rather than external to it: the training a muftī must have, the requirement that an opinion be argued from recognised sources, the questioner's freedom to seek another view, and the long-standing insistence that a legal opinion is not an executive order. Where those safeguards hold, the fatwā is the tradition's ordinary instrument for applying an old law to a new question.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.