Mufti 穆夫提
A mufti (; Arabic:مفتي muftī; Turkish:müftü) is an Islamic scholar who is an interpreter or expounder of Islamic law (Sharia and fiqh). A muftiate or diyanet is a council of muftis.
According to University of Pennsylvania professor George Makdisi's paper "Scholasticism and Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West", https://www.jstor.org/stable/604423, the term mufti is a direct equivalent of the later western term professor, meaning one who is qualified to profess independent opinion on a subject (same as fatwa). According to him, this was the highest level of academic credentials in classical Islamic academic tradition, above mudarris (doctor meaning teacher), and faqih (meaning Master)--a hierarchy later adopted in Western academic tradition.