fatwa

Borrowed from Arabic فَتْوَى (fatwā, "formal legal opinion"), the verbal noun of أَفْتَى (ʔaftā, "to deliver a formal opinion") — the same root that gives us mufti. Variant spellings fetwa and fetwah came into English via Italian fetfà and Ottoman Turkish fetva.

Originally a neutral term for a formal legal ruling, its modern association with a death decree owes much to the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.

It shares its root with mufti, the title of the scholar who issues such a ruling — both come from the same Arabic verb meaning "to deliver a formal opinion."