My paper is an attempt to explore the encounter of two perceptions of the institution of the mufti that coexisted across the Ottoman Empire during the first three centuries following the conquest of the Arab lands (16th-18th- centuries). According to the first understanding of the institution – the one endorsed by the imperial religious judicial establishment – the muftiship is a state-appointed office. At the same time, mostly across the Arab lands of the empire, other jurists advanced another perception of the muftiship, according to which every jurist who is granted a permit to issue legal rulings (fatwas) was allowed to do so. By exploring this encounter, my paper seeks to reexamine the relationship between two fundamental components of the Ottoman legal system – kanun and shari‘ah (?eri‘at). These concepts are often described as two supplementary components of the Ottoman legal system. My paper will argue that from an institutional perspective, since the chief mufti was appointed by the state as the chief jurisprudential authority of the imperial establishment, the Ottoman ?eri‘at was to a large degree a product of kanun. The second part of the paper is intended to situate the Ottoman definition of the muftiship in a wider context. To this end, I will compare the Ottoman understanding of the institution with the description of the mufti as it appears in an early sixteenth-century Central Asian treatise, Fazl Allah b. Ruzbahan’s (d. 1519) Suluk-ul-Muluk. Through this comparison, I will argue that the Ottoman perception of the muftiship should be seen as part of a new understanding of the institution of the muftiship that emerged across early modern Central Asia and Anatolia.