"Ordinary people began to approach the Dar al-Ulum very early on for rulings on all sorts of matters. Soon enough the demand became so considerable that it could not be handled on an ad hoc basis. In 1892 a separate department was set up for issuing fatwas. By now literally a few lakh matters have been settled by the institution’s fatwas. Initially the fatwa would be issued, and that would be the end of the matter. No copy of the fatwa would be kept, no record would remain. Eventually, copies began to be kept. For decades these were stored merely by the date on which the fatwa had been issued. On a visit to the institution soon after Independence, Maulana Azad, then the country’s education minister and one of the most important figures in Pandit Nehru’s government, himself commended the work which the institution had been doing in this field—it is a great religious service, he said, by which the difficulties of the people are being removed. He urged that a collection of them be published. Grouping the fatwas by subject, weeding out the repetitions, and selecting the ones that settled the more general principles of law on the matter took many years of painstaking effort. It was in 1962 that the Dar al-Ulum began publishing the fatwas in volumes organized around subjects."