Extract
Background
Islam is a way of life. It is a religion which all Muslims are born into and which you have to actively reject if you want to belong to another faith. For a good Muslim, all aspects of life are subject to the rules laid down by the Qur’an, their holy book revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century, and the hadith which report the Prophet’s sayings and actions. The Hadith are a body of literature, roughly equivalent to the Christian Gospels, which were written down as much as two centuries after the Qur’an was revealed. These can be divided into those thought to be sound, it being possible to prove a direct line of transfer from the prophet to the hadith writer, and those that are considered to be unsound.
Music itself is not referred to in the Qur’an some scholars believe that the phrase ‘idle talk’ refers to music but this can only be speculation. Where the hadith are concerned there are various places where music is mentioned – none of them favourable. For example, al Bukari, an accepted writer of hadith wrote:
At some future time there will be people from my umma (community) who will seek to make lawful fornication, the wearing of silk by men, wine-drinking and the use of musical instruments… Singing sprouts hypocrisy in the heart as rain sprouts plants
This seem fairly conclusive in its condemnation of both singing and musical instruments, but what you have to remember is the circumstances in which he is writing. There are three important considerations when it comes to deciding whether something is haram, illegal, or halal, legal, and these are, zakan the time, makan, the place and ikhwan, the association. For example, it is never permissible to take part in any form of music if you spend so much time doing it that you do not fulfil your religious obligations. Secondly, however acceptable the music which is being played or sung, if you are in a place which has other haram activities such as a brothel, or a place with alcohol, then it makes the music haram as well. Thirdly, if you are associating with the wrong kind of people then again the music will be corrupted.
Current Views About Music
At a conference I organised in London in 2002, Tariq Ramadan spoke about how music is bound up with culture. He emphasised the point that there is only one Islam but many ways of interpreting it. He said,
It’s not only about the issue of law or jurisprudence in Islam, it’s more than that. It’s also about culture, about the way we are dealing with the culture, and especially about the cultures of origins… We are saying, for example, as Muslims, that Islam is a universal message. It means that when we speak about a universal message we are speaking about different cultures and when we deal with different cultures we have to know what is the context we live in, in order to link the universal message with the context of the specific environment.
End of extract
Comments
Teaching Music to Muslim Pupils
The issues raised in this excellent article can be explored further in Robert Bunting's resource on www.teachingmusic.org.uk - Adventures in Muslim Music.
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