George Makdisi has argued that the madrasa system of attestation paralleled the legal scholastic system in the West, which gave rise to the modern university system. The triple status of "faqih" ("master of law"), "mufti" ("professor of legal opinions") and "mudarris" ("teacher"), conferred by the classical Islamic legal degree, had its equivalents in the medieval Latin terms "magister", "professor" and "doctor", respectively, although they all came to be used synonymously in both East and West. Makdisi suggested that the medieval European doctorate, "licentia docendi" was modeled on the Islamic degree "ijazat al-tadris wa-l-ifta’", of which it is a word-for-word translation, with the term "ifta’" (issuing of fatwas) omitted. He also argued that these systems shared fundamental freedoms: the freedom of a professor to profess his personal opinion and the freedom of a student to pass judgement on what he is learning.