The 19th and early 20th centuries have long been characterized as an era of Islamic revival and reform in which new technologies and new trajectories reshaped the ways in which individuals experienced and expressed what being Muslim meant to them. Amidst the era’s clamor of pamphlets, tracts, and travelers’ tales, fatwas (or, Islamic legal opinions) were also part of this landscape of religious connections and community-making. Yet, as anyone who has read collections from this period knows, the concerns that fatwa-seekers voiced were oftentimes extremely local, dealing with particular issues, in particular places, at particular times. How, then, did answering questions about local affairs, minor disputes, and personal concerns contribute to the making of trans-regional religious networks? This paper addresses that question by looking at how fatwa exchanges established connections across the British empire. Focusing on the fatwa-seekers who sought input and advice from one of Delhi’s most prominent muftis from the first-half of the twentieth century, this paper offers close and distant readings of Urdu-language fatwa literature that traveled around the Indian Ocean littoral. How did these writings help itinerant Muslims make sense of the new spaces they experienced? How did they understand the relationship between the communities they left behind and the new communities they inhabited? And how did connections from back home facilitate their settlement abroad? Bringing together distant and close readings of one prolific mufti’s output, this paper uses fatwas to understand South Asian Muslim migrant experiences in the age of imperial circulations. Reading fatwas as texts of migration, I consider these migrants’ turn toward legal correspondence to forge long-distance social and religious ties. The first part of the paper examines the methodology of using legal correspondence (that is, the act of seeking and receiving legal advice through postal and telegraphic networks) to visualize these migrants’ networks, drawing connections between the muftis they consulted and the sources they referenced. The second part of the paper then turns to specific instances in which legal correspondence played a role in navigating and negotiating local disputes between and among South Asian Muslims living in British Burma and East Africa. These disputes not only reveal the role legal correspondence, specifically fatwas, played in the forging of new migrant Muslim communities but also shed light on the contested histories of religious community and belonging within the context of the British Empire in Asia.