In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pearl trade constituted the main economic activity of the Arabian Gulf. The legal regulation of the pearl trade was complex and layered. Conflicts between pearling actors (divers, captains, merchants) were sometimes settled in local diving courts (sālifa), where experienced merchants from distinguished pearling families officiated as judges. Conflicts could also be settled in other legal forums, including the Emir’s Court, tribal modes of dispute resolution, and the legal institutions of the British Raj. In this legal pluralistic context, Muslim scholars intervened directly in the pearl trade primarily through the production of non-binding fatwas. Since these fatwas were rarely issued in response to questions from divers, the most vulnerable actors in the pearling industry, they inform us primarily about the dilemmas of pious merchants and boat captains. In the first half of the twentieth century nakhodas (boat captains) and merchants reached out to local scholars in the Gulf as well as to muftis in Mecca, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. In this paper, I describe the process through which an “undecided configuration of fact” – the religious status of divers when Ramadan falls during the pearling season - acquired a rule (ḥukm) through a set of interpretive acts in the Gulf and the Arab world over the first half of the twentieth century. I draw on four main Arabic sources: an epistolary exchange between the Kuwaiti scholar ‘Abd Allāh b. Khalaf al-Duḥayyān and the Damascene mufti ‘Abd al-Qādir b. Badrān in the 1910s; fatwas issued by Rashīd Riḍā in al-Manār in response to questions from Arab pearl merchants in the 1910s-1920s; a pamphlet published by a scholar from Jubayl, Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm al-Ṣiddīqī, in Bahrain in 1942; and a fatwa issued by the newly appointed judge of Qatar, ‘Abd Allāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd, in the early 1940s. I argue that seasonal questions about the divers’ obligations during Ramadan led to broader debates about the economic arrangements that structured the pearl trade, in particular usury and labor coercion. These debates mobilized scholars from different schools and orientations. They reflect shifting power dynamics in the Gulf and the impact of new ideas about Islam and capitalism in the age of print and stream.