Authority Without Enforcement

Nothing the Council issues binds anyone. A fatwa is a legal opinion given in answer to a question, not a judgment and not a decree, and Sunni Islam has no ordained hierarchy and no European Muslim electorate that could make one body the authority for the continent. Muslims in Europe belong to communities with roots in different countries, different schools and different scholarly networks, and many of them refer their questions to muftis elsewhere or to their own local imam. The Council competes for attention in that field rather than governing it.

Alexandre Caeiro has argued that the interesting thing about the project is precisely this: a body with no coercive power builds an audience by the act of publishing, and in doing so helps to constitute a European Muslim public that did not previously exist as such. On that reading the Council's significance is less in any individual ruling than in the establishment of a European address for the question.

Its rulings are debated rather than received. The most visible case is the calendar, where the Council has favoured astronomical calculation over local sighting for fixing Ramadan and the two Eids, a position with real practical benefit for a minority organising school and work leave, and one that a substantial body of scholarly opinion elsewhere does not accept. That the disagreement is public and unresolved is normal for the genre.