In my paper I intend to explore a body of approximately 50 fatawa in Arabic gleaned from ten fetawa collections of Ottoman ?eyhhlislam. These fatawa are set apart from the other fatawa in the collections by their language (Arabic rather than Ottoman Turkish) and other stylistic conventions. The first fatwa examined in the paper was issued by the famous seyhelislam Kemal Pasazade within a generation or so after the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands (1516-1517). The last fatwa to be examined dates from early decades of the eighteenth century. Although scholars have noticed the existence of these fatawa, these fatawa have not been hitherto studied systematically. The fact that the question and the teyh?lislam's answer were written in Arabic (and preserved in Arabic in the collections) helps us to situate the fatawa in a concrete geographical setting and enables us to examine them along the Istanbul-Arab provinces axis. In this sense, the geographical and chronological context opens new possibilities for understanding the institution of the Ottoman chief mufti and the way this office was perceived by the empire's subjects in the Arab provinces. When read against the backdrop of the Ottoman conquest and incorporation of the Arab lands, the fatawa could shed new light on the some important dynamics that accompanied this process. More specifically, they reveal the attempts made by the Ottoman religious-judicial establishment to establish and consolidate the authority of the office of the ceyhflislam in the newly conquered territories. In my paper also examines several case studies, each of which demonstrate how Ottoman subjects in the Arab lands gradually learnt to make use the institution of the teyh lislam to promote their social, economic, and legal interests. On the other hand, the paper will draw attention to some of the challenges that the Ottoman religious-judicial establishment in general and the office of the imperial chief mufti in particular had to deal with and respond to in the wake of the competition with other local, provincial authorities.