Council of Senior Scholars

The Council was established by royal decree in 1971, and the manner of its creation is the first thing to understand about it. Its members are appointed by the king, its chairman is the Grand Mufti of the kingdom, and it sits within a state structure that also includes the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and the judiciary. It is not a self-constituting body of scholars who elected one another, and it is not an academy that anyone joins by qualification alone.

Under it sits the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Issuing Fatwas, a smaller standing body drawn from the Council's membership, which handles the ordinary flow of questions from individuals. The division of labour is that the Permanent Committee answers the public while the Council deliberates on the matters the state refers to it, and the published collections of the Committee's answers run to many volumes and circulate far outside the kingdom.

Because it is both, its rulings are read in two registers at once. To a questioner in Riyadh or in Jakarta a Council fatwa is scholarly opinion in the ordinary sense. To an observer of the Saudi state it is also an act of a government institution, and the two readings are difficult to separate, which is a permanent feature of a religious authority constituted by decree rather than an accusation about any particular ruling.

The Council was originally drawn from scholars trained in the Hanbali legal tradition as it developed in Najd, which is the jurisprudential setting of the Saudi religious establishment. That changed in 2009, when a royal order broadened the membership to include scholars of the other three Sunni schools, Hanafi, Maliki and Shafii. The change is often described as a widening of the Council's base, and it also had the effect of making the body formally representative of Sunni jurisprudence as a whole rather than of one school within it.

A second measure in 2010 restricted the public issuing of fatwas in the kingdom to members of the Council and to those it authorises. The stated purpose was to stop the proliferation of contradictory rulings issued through satellite television and the internet by people with no recognised standing. The effect is that a body appointed by the state holds the formal monopoly on public religious opinion within it.

Matters referred to the Council over the years have included banking and finance, medical questions from transplantation to reproductive technology, the rules of pilgrimage administration for very large crowds, and questions of public order. Its published resolutions are numbered and dated and are available in collected form, which makes it one of the more transparent bodies of its kind to study.