Music: Some facts of the matter

Summary: The article argues that music is generically permitted in God’s law, falling into the same category as other neutral human pursuits. The default covenantal principle is that everything is lawful unless explicitly prohibited, and no such prohibition exists for melodious sound. The commonly cited Quranic verse (31:6) refers to distracting speech, not music, and the prohibitive hadith address a wider culture of indecency rather than music itself. The claim of scholarly consensus against music is flatly rejected — numerous early companions, Madinan jurists, and later scholarly giants either practised music or explicitly permitted it. The people of Madinah maintained it as a living cultural norm. The author’s practical conclusion is straightforward: music is neutral, and its permissibility or otherwise depends entirely on its effect on the individual. Where it leads to harm, it becomes inadvisable; where it is beneficial, it is positively good. The insistence on blanket prohibition, the author suggests, owes more to cultural and sectarian bias than to honest engagement with the sources.

Over a decade, I’ve been asked about music so frequently that I’ve finally written this. I hadn’t done so until now because I didn’t want to engage the cacophony of polemics. However, I hold it that the faithful deserve better than one-sided narratives they’re often presented with, especially when we’re speaking about God’s code. As millennials (and younger) become the dominant generations, we need to be far better informed. Here, I’m not advocating what people should or shouldn’t do as things affect them differently, so it’s up to individual moral agents to decide what’s best for them.

Now, from the get-go it’s important that we distinguish between two things people tend to conflate:

A range of cultures/behaviours associated (accurately or not) with types or genres of music,
Music as melodious sounds and instruments.

Here I am solely dealing with the second: music as melodious sounds (including instruments) and not speaking to certain types of music that might inspire negative behaviour in some. Since I’m dealing with melodious sounds, this discussion doesn’t distinguish between sounds from singing and sounds from instruments, and notably neither did most earlier medieval jurists.

So what’s the crux of the matter? I can’t see how music, singing or dancing is inherently impermissible in God’s law, nor do I find anything to suggest that God finds innocuous melodious sounds offensive or harmful. As such, music is a neutral human pursuit and therefore legally falls under what is generically permitted. In the same category we’d place watching sports, playing computer games, or watching Netflix. Where anything in this category has a malign influence on an individual, then it’s unadvisable for that person.

Now interestingly, as an activity that is generically permitted, I’ve intimated that if a circumstance brings about negative outcomes then depending on the degree of harm, it can be unadvisable or unlawful. And if it brings about positive outcomes, it can be advisable. So for example, if music inspires one to engage in destruction, criminal activity, indecency etc, then that music is impermissible to that person. If music (or a type) inspires someone to be better, such as train harder in the gym or act with a conscience, then that music is not only permissible, but good for that person. As a covenantal issue, it’s as simple as that. The reasoning is based on the following:

The covenantal default rule: All things are lawful unless stipulated by God and instructed by His final messenger as being unlawful.
Music is inherently benign given that Prophets of God to human civilisation enjoyed music. The Israelite King David for example. The Nev’im and Qur’an reference a singing David, and the final messenger of God Muhammad positively referred to the flute (mizmār) of the ‘House of David’.
There is nothing inherently harmful in musical sounds and rhythms, whether originating from vocal cords or an instrument.

So what of the Qur’anic verses and hadith that seem to disparage music?

The verses that are often cited, such as 31:6, do not refer to music but to speech: “But there is the sort of person who pays for distracting tales, intending, without any knowledge, to lead others from God’s way, and to hold it up to ridicule.” Yes, some early exegetes have interpreted “distracting tales” as a reference to singing (ghina’) but the interpretation tends to rely on shaky grounds such as unreliable hadiths (such as the hadith of Abu Umamah on singing slaves). Now the reason for the verse being revealed is not just informative, but critical for context: the verse refers to Nadhr b. al-Harith who would travel to Persia and return with Persian war myths as a challenge to Quranic narratives on the nations of ‘Aad and Thamud. Some exegetes have said it might refer to Ibn Katl and singing slave girls, but as Ibn Ashur points out, the wording of the verse makes that very unlikely and far more relevant to Nadhr b. al-Harith. And let alone singing, contemporary personalities go a step further and say it refers to musical instruments when the verse is very clearly not even referring to instruments!
The seemingly prohibitive hadith people tend to refer to are not collectively speaking solely to musical sounds but a wider indecent culture that employed music – like a nightclub where people consume intoxicants and watch naked performers dancing to music, and where the initial motivation was to attend the performance. But outside of such repugnant contexts we know the final Messenger himself would be musically entertained during celebrations, and his companions saw it as light entertainment (a bit like a TV).

That’s a bold statement! But isn’t there a consensus that music is impermissible?

In the context of the UK, this has been a blatant mistruth peddled by some for years, out of what I can only explain as sectarian and/or cultural interests (the aversion seems to be against western music – eastern music doesn’t seem to attract as much ire). Whenever such preachers assert juristic consensus but then early and later jurists who opined otherwise are pointed out, they divert the conversation or resort to immature ad hominems and anti-western tirades that have little to do with the issue. The truth is, music was part of the early believers’ culture in ancient Arabia.

So why aren’t there loads of historical reports on it?

Well, it’s not reported as some standalone major historical phenomenon because it simply wasn’t a big deal. It’s a bit like a historian five hundred years in the future writing about the lives of Londoners today, s/he wouldn’t make Londoners listening to their car radios a major aspect of their lifestyle, although most do. But we know it was a norm through reports that come together to give us some an insight:

The Prophet and Abū Bakr listened to two young girls singing and playing on their drums.
Hamzah b. Abdil Muttalib had a female singing slave.
Uthmān b. Affān narrates a woman swore she would sing for the Prophet on his safe return and he permitted her to do so.
Abdullāh b. Ja’far b. Abī Tālib (nephew of Ali) listened to music and had his servant play for Mu’āwiyah b. Abī Sufyān and Amr b. al-Ās.
Abdullāh b. Zubair b. Al-Awwām would not only sing himself (as apparently all the Emigrants did), but he had servants who played instruments which he had played for Abdullāh b. Umar who recognised its Levantine rhythmic pattern.
Usāmah b. Zaid would sing and enjoy singing servants.

So what of later scholars? Is there not consensus later on?

No, this is also a mistruth. Many medieval jurists held music to be morally unlawful just as many did not. I can see how they came to that conclusion but I’d assert that their reasoning hasn’t been very strong, in fact sometimes bordering on the bizarre, and either there’s been the conflation I mentioned above between sound and behaviour, or a narrow analysis that fails to consider all the sources holistically. When you look at history, the people of Madinah maintained music as an aspect of their culture (and we see the culture subsequently reflected in Hispania and Africa where the legal school of Madinah proliferated). To argue all medieval jurists held music to be impermissible is highly inaccurate, and to the contrary:

Sa’īd b. al-Mussayab permitted his daughter to play an instrument.
Atā’ b. Rabāh saw no problem with singing as long as it wasn’t indecent.
Muhammad b. Sīrin enjoyed music at weddings.
Abdul Azīz al-Mājishūn, the apostolic student and scholar of Madinah, taught music, and alongside the covenantal disciplines was also a musicologist.
Yūsuf al-Mājishūn: a student of al-Zuhri countenanced by Yahyā b. Ma’īn and Ahmad b. Hanbal. Yahyā said: “We would visit him and he would narrate hadith in one house, and from his house next door he would teach music.” Yahyā also said: “He, his brothers and his nephew were known for musicology; they are trustworthy hadith narrators, included in the authentic compilations.”
Abdul Azīz b. Abdillah b. Abi Salamah, the jurist of Madinah (alongside Mālik b Anas) permitted singing and playing instruments.
Abdul Mālik b. Abdil Azīz, b. Abdillah b. Abī Salamah, also a jurist of Madinah like his father and a companion of Mālik, viewed singing and playing instruments permissible.

Now this is a nominal list. As we go through the centuries there are many more. Some jurists felt so strongly about those who claim a consensus to its impermissibility that they authored retorts. Their works are well known today: scholarly giants such as Ibn Daqīq al-Īd, Abū Hāmid al-Ghazāli, al-Izz b. Abdil Salām, al-Dhahabi, Abdul Ghani al-Nablūsi, Ibn Hazm, and later on al-Shawkāni. To appeal to a juristic consensus on God having forbidden music in the face of all of this is futile. In fact the opposite is true, the vast majority of covenantal societies have had a culture of music and neither saw it universally as decadence, nor counter to God’s code.

Putting aside the behaviour of humans who do impermissible things even with the Quran, such as justifying murder and mayhem, preachers struggle to posit a coherent argument as to why melodious sound, in and of itself, is bad. Either they posit music’s supposed social ill effects when the reality is that the behaviour they refer to is more about a genre or the choices of individuals, or more often, argue a ritualised prohibition which is to say there’s no actual reason other than their claim that “God explicitly said so” when the Lawgiver, the Most High, evidently didn’t.