A critical aspect of modern Islamic law is the shift in meanings of taqlid and ijtihad. In the latter half of the 19th century, these two key concepts ceased to be enmeshed within the interpretive structures of fiqh, as they had been historically, but instead were recast as mutually exclusive approaches to legal and religious authority. This paper focuses on this shift through an analysis of the interaction between legal discourse and broad changes in Islamic education, specifically the link between legal and educational reformism. This research shows how in this period educational reform helped transform notions of legal and religious authority. Using a diachronic study of texts on fiqh and education from the Volga-Ural region between 1800-1920, particularly polemics for and against reform, this paper will trace the evolution of discourse surrounding religious authority. Of particular importance is a manuscript describing an 1897 debate between Abu Naqib Tuntari, defending taqlid, and ‘Alimjan Barudi, supporting ijtihad. While couched within terms relating to the religio-legal aspects of the issue, the debate substantively engages with questions of education: how someone could become knowledgeable enough to engage in legal interpretation and what kinds of knowledge are required. The debate is remarkable due to its participants’ relationship to educational reform—Tuntari is most famous as an opponent of reformed schooling, while Barudi operated an important new-method madrasa in the region—but also that their arguments illustrate the shifts in legal discourse in progress. Barudi’s case for ijtihad revolves around an understanding of legal knowledge that shows how education reform had already reoriented notions of fiqh reasoning, and Tuntari’s defense of the madhhab reflects how key elements of the legal tradition were increasingly undermined. Nevertheless, both Barudi and Tuntari are still arguing within a shared frame of reference in fiqh, something that will cease to be the case in later debates. The spread of education not based in the Islamic scholarly tradition—i.e., European and European-derived—spurred questions over that tradition’s continued viability and relevance and led to large numbers of Muslims educated within other epistemic frameworks weighing in on religious and legal matters. This occurred under the banner of ‘ijtihad’, recast as an ethos of reform per se, as ‘taqlid’ became “conservative” adherence to, and defense of, the tradition—both equally divorced from the specificities of fiqh. In this way, debates within the legal tradition gradually gave way to debates about the tradition.