The twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of calls for regulating ifta’ in the Muslim world. A specific diagnosis appears today to be almost universally shared: the multiplication of fatwas in the public sphere has led to a “chaos”, causing perplexity among believers and constituting one of the major quandaries facing the ummah. A wide range of solutions targeting the state, religious institutions, media practitioners, and the Muslim community have been proposed. The problem nevertheless seems so intractable that the question increasingly asked is not how to regulate the production of fatwas, but whether regulation is at all possible in today’s media-saturated world. Drawing on a variety of sources (from the proceedings of international fiqh conferences to religious talk shows), and reading them in light of anthropological scholarship on media, religion and politics, this paper makes two main arguments that seek to complicate the narrative of chaos. First, it argues that the narrative conflates a number of different phenomena, including the reflexive circulation of discourse within publics, shifting conceptions of knowledge and authority, the impact of new media technologies, the logics of the marketplace, the politicization of the fatwa, the regulation of deviant juvenile religiosities. These phenomena, however, are governed by incommensurable sets of assumptions regarding the performativity of ethical speech, the agency of Muslim subjects, and the proper relation between religion and politics. Second, the paper proposes to see the urgency underlying current calls for regulating ifta’ as the result of a distinctively modern understanding of the functions of the fatwa itself. I argue that the discourse of chaos presupposes the secular temporality of the modern nation-state, and suggest that efforts to regulate the production of fatwas must ultimately be placed in the context of a secular imperative of clarity – an imperative that continually problematizes the fatwa and its mode of inhabiting the interstitial spaces between the legal, the ethical, and the political. Despite these shortcomings, the narrative of chaos cannot be dismissed because it has become the basis of much public deliberation throughout the Arab world, shaping debates about the threat of international terrorism, the legitimacy of popular uprisings, or the reform of religious and educational institutions. In conclusion, I suggest how we might trace more precisely the performative effects of this discourse, the ambivalence of the media ecology upon which it depends, and the reconfiguration of pious subjectivity that it enables.