Fitzroy Morrissey is a historian and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he teaches Arabic and Islamic Studies courses. A specialist on Sufism, modern Islamic thought, and Muslim-non-Muslim relations, his most recent book is A Short History of Islamic Thought (Head of Zeus 2021). The following is an edited summary of his remarks at the July 2022 Windsor Dialogue conference.
The status of music in Islam has long been controversial. Writing in the twelfth century, the Islamic jurist Ibn al-Jawzi observed that “people have talked on and on about singing (al-ghinaʾ): some have said that it is forbidden, others have deemed it to be permitted, while others have deemed it to be permitted but disliked.” These debates, which have covered the permissibility of both singing and musical instruments, and have featured some of the most important names in the history of Islamic thought, have gone on into the present day. They offer an illuminating perspective on the relationship between law and religion and freedom of religion in Islamic contexts.
One of the reasons for the controversial status of music in Islam is that the Qurʾan contains no explicit guidance on the question. This has not prevented the opponents of music from citing scripture in support of their views. To take a contemporary example, the Darul Uloom at Deoband in northern India, the centre of the influential Deobandi movement, has ruled that “the most important reason” why music is forbidden in Islam “is that the Quran and Hadith have prohibited it.” They cite Qurʾan 31:6, which condemns those who “indulge in frivolous talk (lahw al-hadith),” a phrase historically understood by the opponents of music to refer to singing.
As the Deobandi fatwa indicates, opponents of music have also sought justification in the Hadith, or sayings ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, the other most authoritative source of Islamic law. One of the earliest and most influential anti-music treatises, On the Condemnation of Instruments by the late-ninth century ascetic Ibn Abi al-Dunya, is largely a collection of the sayings of the Prophet and the early heroes of Islam against music. These indicate, among other things, that the widespread use of musical instruments will be one of the signs of the End Times, that Muhammad had been sent “to annihilate the stringed instruments and the reed-pipes,” and that he would put his fingers in his ears when he heard the sound of the shepherd’s pipe (the zammara or mizmar). Musical instruments are condemned as malahi, “instruments of frivolity,” which, like other idle pastimes such as backgammon, chess, and wine-drinking, distract a believer from a life of devotion and piety.
Ibn Abi al-Dunya’s treatise was one of several anti-music tracts to appear in the late-ninth and early-tenth centuries. These treatises, which often associate music with femininity, drinking, and illicit sexual activity, were probably a reaction to what Amnon Shiloah, the great authority on music in Islam, has described as “the great passion of the ruling class, the nobility and wealthy people for music . . . as an indispensable means of expression and communication.” The attitude expressed in such works persists, in some quarters, into the present day. For instance, the leading Shiʿi religious authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah ʿAli Sistani, rules in a fatwa that all singing (al-ghinaʾ) is haram, where ghinaʾ is “the entertaining expression by way of tunes that are common to those who provide entertainment and amusement.”
Some have sought to translate these attitudes into reality. As Michael Cook has shown, those who have enacted the Qurʾanic principle of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (al-amr bi’l-maʿruf wa’l-nahy ʿan al-munkar) have often targeted their ire at musical instruments, destroying forbidden instruments like the ʿud and tunbur (respectively, the short- and long-necked lute) and the flute (mizmar) wherever they could. In modern times, this attitude has found expression among the Wahhabis of Arabia, who made a bonfire of stringed instruments during their occupation of Mecca in 1803, and, more recently, among the Taliban, who forbade instruments including the piano, the flute, and the lute during their first period in power in Afghanistan (1996–2001), and ISIS, who likewise sought to eradicate “un-Islamic instruments” like the saxophone, drums, and keyboard in Syria and Libya.
This is by no means the full story, however. For one thing, many so-called opponents of music have allowed the playing of the tambourine (duff) at weddings or religious festivals, the singing of ascetic poems (zuhdiyyat), and the melodic recitation of the Qurʾan. Since the 1970s, even Islamist movements, including jihadist groups like ISIS, have made heavy use of a genre of a cappella religious songs called anashid, though they generally do not consider these to be “music.”
More significantly, there have also been prominent Muslim voices—both Sunni and Shiʿi, medieval and modern—who have argued assertively for the permissibility of music. A famous example is the chapter on listening to music (samaʿ) in The Revival of the Religious Sciences by the great Sunni jurist, theologian, and mystic al-Ghazali (d. 1111). He argues that the Qurʾan and Hadith prove that listening to music is allowed in Islam and attempts to refute the scriptural proofs cited by the opponents of music, arguing, for example, that although Qurʾan 31:6 condemns “frivolous talk” that leads people astray from the path of God, not all kinds of music lead people astray.
Al-Ghazali does, however, concede that certain kinds of music are incompatible with Islam—for instance, if the lyrics of a song are obscene or offensive to Islamic belief, or the listener is motivated by lust. This attitude, that music is conditionally acceptable, is a common one in Islamic thought. In recent decades, it has been expressed by, among others, the Egyptian cleric Gadd al-Haqq, who served as Grand Imam of al-Azhar—the leading religious educational institution in Sunni Islam—between 1982 and 1996; by Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt from 2003 to 2013; and by the prominent Lebanon-based Shiʿi cleric Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. For all of them, music is permissible so long as it does not provoke sin.
Perhaps the most vehement defenders of music in Islam have been the Sufis, the mystics of Islam. (It is no accident that al-Ghazali was a Sufi.) A key component of their religious practice is the samaʿ. This term, which literally means “listening,” refers in a Sufi context to ritual concerts at which devotional verses are sung, a practice that seems to have originated in the ninth century. These songs are often accompanied by instruments such as the tambourine or flute, and sometimes by dancing. The most famous Sufi dance is that of the whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order in Konya, which is believed to symbolize the turning of the celestial spheres and the ascent of the mystic’s soul to the supramundane realm. For the Sufis, as a defence of music (wrongly) attributed to al-Ghazali’s brother Ahmad puts it, samaʿ is a form of “spiritual nourishment,” whose purpose is to induce ecstasy (wajd) and so draw the individual into the presence of God.
In keeping with this view, many Sufi authors also wrote about the benefits of music as a form of psychological or medical therapy; as the seventeenth-century Ottoman author Katib Çelebi observed, the Sufis used music much as physicians used drugs. Here they were drawing upon a tradition that went back to ancient Greek thought and was elaborated in greatest detail in the Islamic world by the practitioners of Greco-Arabic philosophy, many of whom were deeply interested in the theory of music. In the view of the pioneering ninth-century Islamic philosopher al-Kindi, for instance, the four strings of the ʿud corresponded to the four elements (air, earth, fire, and water) and the four humours of the human body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile); hence, when played in different combinations, they could be used to treat particular ailments or to enhance certain character traits. This idea has persisted in some parts of the Islamic world up until the modern period.
This brief survey of Islamic views on the legitimacy of music suggests the following conclusions. First and foremost, it is wrong to imagine that music is absolutely anathema to Islam. There is a range of views on the acceptability of music, from those who would ban almost all singing and musical instruments to those who make music central to their religious devotions and use it as a form of spiritual nourishment or medical therapy. Indeed, the key question in Islamic thought is not so much whether music is acceptable as what kind of music is acceptable. Even those who forcefully state their opposition to music accept certain things that most of us would understand as music, while those who defend music are often critical of those kinds of music that they deem to be immoral. Second, given the key role of music within Sufism, the question of the legitimacy of music has implications for religious freedom. Those who would ban most forms of music would prevent Sufi Muslims—and other religious groups in the Islamic world for whom music is central, such as the Yezidis and the Ahl-i Haqq in the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Iran and the Alevis in Turkey—from fully practising their religion. Finally, we should recognize that although its status in Islamic law is uncertain, music has long been an almost ubiquitous feature of Islamic cultural life. As the late Shahab Ahmed argued, to understand Islam we have to pay attention not only to the writings of jurists but also to how people have lived and thought as Muslims. For many—perhaps most—Muslims over history, this has undoubtedly included music.