This paper seeks to shed light on the nature of fatwas as sources for the study of Islamic legal and ethical thought by drawing some distinctions between various basic types of fatwas and the information we may expect to derive from them. It identifies and provides an account of what are here termed as the ephemeral, the school, the court and the public fatwa. In each case it discusses the type of authority they involve and, in the context of this special issue on Islamic bioethics, their particular relevance to issues of health and medicine today.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.