Music in the Islamic Tradition – Abdal Hakim Murad

cambridge muslim college training the next generation of Muslim thinkers miss Miller hamdulillah also led to a stellar more other us will alert the hero softly he or men were that rather thoughtful difficult of the unsatisfying kind of subject not least because it's one of those sort of issues where Muslims get kind of agitated and jumpy very quickly be interesting to actually make a list of those subjects where and somebody in has to press a button and everybody starts jumping up and down going halal or Haram or whatever and her dad issues gender interaction issues are a famous one and this seems to be another for whatever reason even though it's kind of historically and good Anna clione the sort of outer edge really of what is actually explicitly treated and also surrounded by a good deal of classical discussions that were not resolved in the Classical period and unlikely to be resolved by are less ourselves but if we're looking more generally at the question of sound there are certain things that we can say where we can perhaps make some progress without getting into the minutiae of the FIP sound is the sense whereby revelation first reaches us the Quran is a book a key tab but the if crap was about that one of the five senses that is to do with the ears it's oral and the production of a sound which is only perceived by people who can hear that is the modality of communication human subjects engaging with each other in creation which has been chosen preferentially to be the level on which the elemental principle of the divine speech operates revelation as a herd next that means that we are dealing with a human faculty which is to do with hearing depth and engaging even with the infinite because when we hear the divine speech we are hearing something that is created with all of these theological paradoxes about the uncreated antiquity of the word area to happen in a Rachmaninoff tothat on Adam Adam zertal mal Sophie Bilka Demi it's verses from the merciful which are renewed but which are ancient whose ancientness is the quality of he who is ancient so when we hear the sound and the letters and the cadences and the syncopations of the book what we are hearing is something that predates hearing itself so already there is something about this that is mysterious paradoxical hard to figure out that whose impact is profound and music using the word in the largest sense anything beautiful that we like to hear partakes of that scientists argue about it psychologists argue about it it's not just for perhaps everybody is not sure what is going on here why is it that when human beings not really very much animals or anything else as far as we can tell but human beings listen to certain types of sounds certain measurable neurological and physiological and behavioral consequences tend to occur when we listen to other kinds of sounds we get other sorts of responses that are often their opposite what is it about sounds that can have this profound effect on us that affect us more immediately than say seeing certain things or touching sort of things sound is something that the ear is a deep part of us what is happening here and that the neuroscientists have tried hard to figure this out the octave for instance the kind of mystery and they think they may have understood it but perhaps they didn't why is it that when you have middle C and then you go up to the C above it every culture in the world recognizes that those two notes are different but the same so if you go up to the D people are less happy it's not an octave something else is happening why is that what's the nature of the octave why should the human brain the human ear be attuned to that is such a fundamental basic thing in Chinese music Indian music Islamic music western music is something that's in US it's not just a product of culture why should that be answer not sure but they're doing some interesting work and now with various sophisticated electric resonance scanners so forth they can see things happening in the brain when certain sorts of sounds are produced and we don't quite know how that works just as we don't quite know why a certain cadence is considered to be harmonic was other cadences not so if you have the first and the third and the fifth note of an octave or a major octave it makes a nice harmony if you have say first and a minor third and then a fifth it becomes something that can shock us and a lot of modern music is exploiting that because it's interested in of exploring why we are shocked by certain particular sounds not a very pleasant experience listen to a lot of it but it is challenging us to think about why we have this assumption about the nature of beauty and certain symmetries and the study of that goes back almost as far as to study of anything that ancient Greeks were very interested in music they had musical instruments they had voices Greek drama which was their principal cultural production was essentially like an operatic performance with lots of choruses and it was musical and we have an awareness of some of the modes that they use the Dorian mode mixolydian some of which have their cognates moving on into it Islamic music and even Plato and others was thinking about Pythagoras why is it that some of these modes of a particular effect on us and of course they couldn't really work it out but in ancient times a particularly Pythagoras thought that it was because within us there is the capacity to resonate with things that intrinsic in the universe that are part of the mathematics and the geometry of the universe so the idea that the celestial sphere actually make a particular sound or hit a particular note as they glide along the music of the spheres something that came into medieval Christian theology as well very often Plato was sure of this so the idea that harmony and our resonance with certain intervals certain possibilities is best explained in terms of it resonating with the musical instrument that is creation itself something that has very long history and that goes into the Islamic discussions with Al Farabi and his great book of music and is developed so if something human beings have always been interested in and we still can't quite explain it but still it is it has such a significant impact that music therapy is now a big thing that you can get on that NHS and all the major hospitals will offer things for a wide range of complaints if you look at any big medical website and you look up music therapy you'll see this almost everything is covered by the forms of music therapy which are known to have positive clinical outcomes otherwise NHS wouldn't pay for it if it was useless just somebody listening to music and not going to pay for that it has a clinical outcome and we all think well it's probably mental illnesses that is true because the certain forms of schizophrenia are routinely treated with music therapy now sometimes forms of chronic depression are treated with music the major hospitals will have people who work through people with music instrument rhythms sometime it just we don't quite know why it works but we can see that it does work and a lot of mental health care actually uses therapies whose actual mode of operation is not really understood but since it works we go at it because the brain consciousness is such a subtle difficult thing were really in the infancy of neuroscience still so mental health issues for sure demonstrably certain types of music release endorphins in the brain reduce anxieties give people a sense of serenity everybody knows certain types of music certain harmonies help us to chill who doesn't know that and in certain focused scientific ways this is effective in treating certain forms of mental illness obsessive compulsive disorder sometimes can be usefully treated with music therapy certain allergies even also heart disease it's been shown that the the pulse is regularized by music and that also the blood pressure is lowered amongst people who are listening to music why exactly how where for again scientists aren't there yet but it's so demonstra belen clinical trials that it is regularly regularly used so we know this and Islamic civilization has already known that for a very long time if you've ever been to for instance the town of Adira net in Turkey which was the big hadith city of the Ottoman Empire great fall on that near the door of hadith there's also and the hospital for treating mental patients with music therapy and they turned it into a nice kind of Museum now and you can see they have these rather sort of awkward looking wax works and Turkish outfits and droopy mustaches and it's not terribly well done but you get a sense of how the building was used that the patient would be brought out by the physician and the symptoms would be read out and the musicians would play something that was believed to be beneficial and there's a famous one in Damascus as part of classical Islamic civilization and that still is alive you can go to Istanbul and you can buy CDs of music that is used in the treatment of mental disorders it's still a living tradition and the Turks of other things to do with rhythms as well and to do it the eat of a horse's hooves which is a very ancient therapy that they have from pre-islamic times that they believe that somebody with a mental disorder can be helped by the rhythm of riding on a horse of a particular kind and again something that is still available in certain corners of turkeys or Turkey in a strange way very modernized but still has retained a lot of these things quite well so we have these ancient things that do seem to have some contemporary clinical benefit and terms of singing singing of all of the forms of quote-unquote music or recitation is thought to have particular benefits so for instance forms of Acts ma often dealt with by cleaning people's voices in a kind of to sing because it affects the larynx that affects the the vocal chords it opens up certain things that may have been twisted or disoriented speak very and scientifically here but by certain modern urban habits diet things in the air dust mites whatever it might be that the regular practice of singing actually does seem to have some demonstra book clinical benefit in cases of asthma and so on and this is not very surprising because these are very ancient practices singing some anthropologists paleontologists will say actually singing is before speech for human beings very very ancient secular view of course but it's the speculation that they offer something elemental human beings have always sung there is no culture ever known among human beings where they haven't been traditions of getting together around the campfire and singing together reciting the terrorism ancestors talking about God or the gods and collectively celebrating it's something very antique and therefore something that's natural to the species and therefore has positive health outcomes nowadays figures of electricity and CDs and iPods and AI players and the rest of it we tend to be passive in our consumption of music historically that was not the case toric li people generally were generated of their own music and this helped to bond families to bond neighborhoods to bond church communities to bond or different religious communities through the human sharing that comes about by jointly making a sound it's a little bit like sharing a meal together you're doing something bodily and as it were the breaths come mingle and everybody has to be on the same page and it's always been in Elizabethan England it was what you did when he went to visit somebody you bring along sheet music and it was specially printed so it could one sheet of paper for poor people as it was expensive could be put on a table and people could read it wherever they were on the table with different parts and they were really good because didn't have TVs they didn't have iTunes passwords it was just their own music and because it was what they did they were often it's thought really good and it was a major form of cultural production which nowadays we've lost most of us had really done other people listening to us singing we do it kind of quietly in front of the shaving there or something cuz we're not good at it we're not trained but historically human communities would sing and would sing well and very few people are naturally tone-deaf occasionally people just can't hit a note so it's maybe one in a hundred people usually if people don't seem well it's because they've lost a certain knack of listening to others and individualism the self-centeredness of modernity tends to make us less good at listening to subtler things of what's going on in environment and the fact there's so many sounds going on simultaneously in the modern world doesn't help either the traditional society that the mcdeere donkey could have somewhere around the corner and one's life might be shrieking at the children might be a few recognizable sounds but the modern city which is a real cacophony of thousands of cars and sirens and other stuff is something that seemed to be blunting a capacity to do recognize pitch so people nowadays are not so good at singing as least and of course with the secularization of society they don't learn the carols didn't know the hymns and we're kind of passive in our consumption of music partly also because people can make money out of us being passive whereas if we're generating it ourselves kind of capitalistic system isn't quite so good at making money out of that so there's something about modernity that makes us passive consumers of music rather than active producers of it so what what ifs fairly evident is that the production of music and beautiful sounds and singing in particular is as old as human beings and is also something that's particularly important in religion I think there's a single religion that hasn't cultivated the beauty of sound the holy prophet al Assad said to one of his companions who was beautifully had a beautiful voice reciting Quran Luckett ot turn is Maron another near hardly doubt you've been given one of the pipes of david because according to the biblical text David played pipes and danced in front of the Ark of the Covenant that's in the story but we have this idea of beauty in called an agressor tation being important - we'll put em at the astrological make the Quran more beautiful through your your voices and this is something that everybody's experienced if you're in the Moscow and Terah wave and the Imam with a lot of kosher who knows the maqams and knows the Maharaj and descending beautiful it's an amazing experience the most beautiful thing on the planet but if his kind of got a smoker's cough and his kind of always knocks a semi turn off the right note at the end of each verse it's kind of you give to it completely didn't experience actual sound if it was gained by computer might seem very similar that the human soul can tell that there's a world of difference between a beautiful tej weed and that ugly tej weed and clearly the doubt work requires that we present the beauty of the text with with beauties so none of that is particularly controversial but in Islamic civilization then the awareness that music is an axiom and the Quran is itself musical it's not something anybody's contested nobody said you have to recite the Quran in an ugly way although sometimes certain Puritans are anxious about certain very elaborate forms of the Iran for instance a friend of mine was at Islamic University in Medina once and the normal modes in he said at the university mosque had emphysema and a really terrible crack horrible voice so every time you get this kind of crackling and this nightmare sound would say of your ears and that went on for years and then one day that guy was ill and one of the African students did it instead it was beautiful and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia was there at the time and asked to see this point it didn't ever do that again they ever do that again because their tradition in nudged is that as on is listen to Saudi radio from real artists that's what they do and the Maliki tradition also to be fair has real reservations about a very ornamented as on the golden mean is what is is required but in many parts of the Islamic world you find that the azan is itself an art form with different maqams being used at different times a day and they really know their stuff the traditionally trained Egyptians or Turks or Bosnians Indonesian they know this it's it's something that maybe hundreds of people are getting here and if it really is beautiful and gets into their soul it's going to make it more likely for them to come to the message it really will now it's not like music I mentioned that Greek music has them as the modes a few basic modes the Freudian mode also we don't know too much about how that worked although some modern music colleges have reconstructed what ancient Greek music sounded like pentatonic scale and certain that the lyre that they had and also a pipe with with two two pipes and we could kind of reconstruct what it sounded like but one of the features of Islamic music including Ted Reed is the gigantic multiplication of the modes which become the principal form of aesthetic expression in the oral dimension of Islamic civilization that everybody had to know the modes I remember when I was living in Cairo the great there were certain great opportunities for the wouldja waves the Quran reciter really - in France and intoxicate his audience and make them cry the really good ones were really good even though the microphones oh my god just as an aside and the Ministry of al-kahf at the time said all the mosques have to have microphones and sound systems what's the cheapest microphone in the world and they found the system that he's used on Russian Railways in fact the cheapest and of course also it sounds the cheapest so every mosque in Egypt has one of these clunky things and actually in those mosques there's a little button on those things which I've seen and if you press the button it goes in dong this is to announce the next train so that is really a problem because the Islamist beautiful subtle thing has been really coarsened and reduced by the poor quality of the sound system anyway great experience in Cairo they still do it is at the the tomb of the Moscow tin man chef a document of la la before the court where there is the best most popular reciter in Egypt who is there for about an hour doing his stuff and because this is for connors earth people go along and they really know what he's doing and they know the maqams and it's very interactive so people here Allah Akbar Aloha Lake at the end of each verse is quite noisy and the reciter can see what's working what's what not working and which way he's going to go next and then they'll call out asking for a mock on so they always begin with makan so that then if he goes into na komm corridor makan Neha burned they'll say give us some corridor give us some Hejaz and he'll often respond and it's a very interactive kind of experience because that is the essence of Islamic musical civilization the maqams not so much tuned over there rhythm there's another whole world which is much more developed in Islamic music than in western music because you have strange things like nine beats in a bar and bars that go on for thirty-one beats and things that we thought would have been driven up the wall by it's 3/4 time or 4/4 time or comment on its western music is rhythmically pretty simple by comparison with what the Turks and the Indians and others were doing but far more subtle than that is the modal system which is one of the great achievements of Islamic civilization most of the modes which they use will actually derive by Muslims in the medieval period I don't miss this guy came to me recently and said my Sheikh says the maqams are Haram well the Ottoman Empire for 600 years nobody ever thought the maqams were Haram and somehow great I found something new to make Haram system that meant mindset some people have you know all those all on that that were listening to they were wrong and now I shut up right even the maqams that were composed by other than that and I gave him some examples and he kind of didn't think he really believed it was just kind of trying it out it was shocking nothing no deli possibly that could challenge the fact of the makan system in which one of the masterpieces uncontroversial masterpiece achievements in our civilization but the the McCombs as you will know are about the intervals between the different pitches in the octave and whereas in Western music you've got eight notes in an octave twelve semitones in an octave and that's it that's all that's allowed except in modern music that does atonal things if you listen to Stockhausen sort of modern concerto for violin and for helicopters for instance he doesn't stick with the octaves of keppa phonic stuff that they like nowadays but Islamic music doesn't use the conventional divisions equal pitches in an octave but far more subtle things because it says between B and b-flat there's something else going on and it may not even be halfway between the B and the B flat a quarter tone so that's part of the artistry of Islamic musical civilization is that it isn't restricted to the strict rules of twelve quarter tones in the octave but it has all kinds of complex things like one marcom where you've got seventeen intervals going up and there's sixteen coming down and you really have to listen very carefully or be brought up in all of those civilizations where people just are familiar with that kind of music really to understand it and it's Nam ecclesia is quite difficult for a lot of Westerners relita to hear because they're waiting for the kind of one two three four one two three four and under kind of crumpit comes in and it's a bit simple great Beethoven great but still simple compared to the basic assumptions and methods of Islamic music which is much more subtle and has much more room for improvisation and and and exploration that it's it's hard to get the point of that if you're not used to a notice between the B and the B flat it just sounds like the singer is out of tune millions it's a different way of experiencing music but it's actually common in some of the Celtic fringes so the traditional hybrid Ian and Shetland music in England for instance there's a lot of quarter tones Indian music which historically is interacted a lot with islamic music because the great musicians of India very often they were Muslims and still the case met in many ways more sense what were the Masters in that but there's indigenous Indic traditions of music that are distinct but they also a modal they have all kinds of rules like what mode what raga do you play at what time of the year or what kind of occasion or what time of day because the music and the node has to be very subtly calibrated to the spiritual atmosphere that prevails with the audience at that particular time that's a very subtle thing you can see why it's often used medicinally and in Islamic world also these is dozens of Mekons which became really hundreds of mccombs particularly the hands of the Ottoman Turks they came whole universe of quite verifying often quite difficult difficult inaccessible elite music sometimes because most of them are arms are not used for something like tej Reid for instance said Reid might use about 15 more coms maximum so if you go for instance to the 30th Mosque in Istanbul for Tara wave after the Asia the Salah Watts and so forth then the first two records will be in a particular makan and again they usually start with na komm saba all the busy humanists shape on the altar Raji interval never witnessed up so it starts and then after two rakahs they'll be at SP for the Tim deed and then another two records and then there'll be an alaki in a different mo calm there'll be a group of men who are singing and the different calm and then the next four records of the Tarawa called the end that knock on and it will go back usually not always I think usually two maqams are but according to this this traditional progression but they won't use some of the very rarefied things that we use Ottoman court music sort of private soirees and it's those aren't usually used for Ted Reed it's not Haram is just not not customary to make people think this sounds a bit new or strange when they really should be concentrating on sound earth or em the the subtlest question then is if we know and the neurologists tell us that music has an effect on the brain waves and an effect on the physiology and something deep that goes within us can we look at each makan and say this makan produces this kind of mood and this na komm suppresses that kind of mood and historically the Muslims have said yes so it said I'll be he wrote the first big book of music in our civilization early Arabic philosopher famous lutenist as well the story goes that with his lute he could make an audience laugh he could make an audience cry just through the going through the maqams so there is a theory in our civilization that identifies particular maqams with particular mood which is like some we use funerals for instance and others weddings of obvious things but there's more subtle more subtle things as well and what happens on the of a subtle liminal level when a great practitioner of Ted Reed or solo act or knowledge is taking people up through the maqams in a particular order at a particular time of day when it's raining or when it's not raining or the other things that are affecting the psychic environment of the people and then taking them back down again it's probably beyond words as music is anyway but those who are in that environment particularly those who are really familiar with the tradition for them it's a finer deeper more amazing experience than listening to Dame Kiri at the London Coliseum the belting out Verdi it's something that is deep so we know that we have this this amazing civilization in Islam at the question of instrumental music I didn't really want to get into the circuit and I mentioned that this is a kind of panic button issue for a lot of Muslims it is the the consensus of the force on these schools that instrumental music which they argue of the exact definition of it is Haram and that's the normal view but if you start to go looking if you're interested in minority views safest thing in Islam is always to take what seems to be the consensual view I mean even idyllic Alberni really unexpected voice you know the idea of kobane uses his big saudi preacher cell Athene who has sometimes unusual and controversial views and sometimes it's leading the prayer in Makkah and then sometimes it so softly and we find somebody else is kind of thinks to himself he's the one who last year did the famous tweet about Isis who may recall that you can got into the English press saying we had to admit that Isis comes from our own Salafi al Qaeda and there's a huge thing and Saudi Arabia and people say nothing to do with us this is what he said his tweet men he went on Saudi television to explain we generated them but the other controversies got himself involved is about six years ago when he really went in a kind of za hurry toothcomb way to all of the relevant hadith and said that he doesn't actually think that the instrumental music is haram gamma took p.m. police not jumping up and shouting and stalked a lot but insofar as you can see a kind of pattern emerging on the landscape of all of that with their different positions huge ugly generalization but maybe there's something in it the more you move towards the kind of Arkell side of the silk spectrum the Hannity's the more people are inclined to prohibit and the more you move towards the knuckles or the hadith based area the more you're going to find people who will allow it the Zahir is for instance who are more literalist than the humble is generally allow most instrumental music so it been hasn't as I hurry the most literalist of all says everything that isn't explicitly forbidden in the Quran and the hadith is alright and you didn't have the right to do PS or to extrapolate in any way and if this particular type of Spanish flute is not there in a specific hadith and forbidden forbidden forbidden it's not within the human powers to say that that thing is forbidden that is his well-known view and some of the some of the malik is also interestingly particularly some of the rather austere original medina Mallika's will report views from in that malik that he won out certain types of stringed instruments certain types of salute that's not the measure the usual view and of my pad which is ha dhamma forbidding but there is that position molarity also reports of some of the disciples in i'm sure thing that they would that among chef a would allow certain types of instrumental music but if you moved at a kind of alkyl ends sort of matter ad rationalizing thing as the Hannity's generally produced the fewest exceptions so there's even a journey for instance has his long discussion in his bday asana the Hanafi firk about all the different kinds of instruments which if somebody has been found listening to them means that he can never testify in ana Sharia Court for instance so tough that's an interesting circumstance I don't know what we can make of it that it's the kind of rationalizes of the Fulco hat who have inclined most of the view that easily and the literalists who tend to produce this minority that says that it's permissible that's just just an aside and also of course the reformist tendencies so in Egypt normal teleport circle around the 1950s said it's fine Seattle Hopkin the early 1980s when I was living in Egypt did a more complex settler looking at the classical views and saying it's not a matter of consensus it's a natural majority hokum that instrumental music music is not allowed and essentially it depends on the knock acid in other words if you're playing a violin in a nightclub on pyramid Road and there's some dancing going on that's not really something that Sharia is going to be terribly overjoyed about that if it's in a different context where it doesn't lead to or isn't conventionally associated with the acceptability of corrupt practices then it's something else so part of the rationalizing tendency in recent times has been to link it to the mock acid and to say it's really about what sort of behavior music will we'll need to and you do get some odd discussions in the medieval period about certain types of pipes that it always are associated with with fish egg and therefore that's why they're Haram or pipe is just a pipe it's not necessarily the Association most use of God are we of course has a long title in which he authorizes instrumental music so that kind of reformist school is there as well the other issue that is interesting is what you do with certain types of electronic music okay so for instance if the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has a ringtone on his phone or if he has a doorbell that goes ding dong yeah it's a serious issue is that music or not what is the definition of music if it's just dong is that music what does it have to sound like if it sounds kind of like an electronic sound what about a police siren what about a fire engine what about music in the supermarket where exactly is the boundary so it's never quite clear-cut there's always errors which using an electronic music which kind of surrounds us every time you turn your computer on it goes ah it's my it's my new my new Mac computer stuff for the right it's got some kind of symphonic thing at the beginning maybe some people are agitated by that but that's convictive shitty a rather strange thing that's not really there for entertain there just silly to press the on button so these are also issues and what do you do with certain types of synthesized music that sound like music that's been generated by these beautifully forbidden pipes and stringed instruments and so forth not eating what do you do with a human voice that is so well claimed that it can sound exactly like a violin so a lot of gray areas but my teachers usual preference was to err on the side of caution and there's wisdom in that because what is unmistakably and unambiguously and unanimously halal is the use of the human voice and the human voice is actually the most profound and subtle and beautiful of instruments this is part of the gift that Allah has given us that despite the complexity of the guitar and the lute and the piano and organ it doesn't compete with the beauty of a great singer this is part of the Technium the honoring that's been given to Benny Adam which means that to some extent you can have the fullness of a musical experience without having to get into those filk controversies and things with harmonies and the fullness of the mahkum system and also the sense that the human voice is coming from the human depths unlike the sound of the pipe or a violin or the organ at the chapel next door which is something mechanical if there's something more human about it and hence more humanly interesting so that is I think where we are at the moment in the Amba even the very sort of jumpy and power noise time where people are very hyperventilating about things which I will honey nebula see what was his book called I can't remember that it's about Sonata air let something peaceful not a tear let's he was this great 17th 18th century sage of Damascus one of the great all amount of the Ottoman Empire with hundreds of books very profound person who again gives you a long explanation of why the use of musical instrument it is not connected to belly dancing industry is fine so that does exist those books are there whether it's Nablus leave Ben hasn't two very different life forms that opinion is verily on them but thanks to stay with the uncontroversial because the world is full of minds ready to be stepped on and the human voice is hundred about the best of all instruments and we do know now the scientists have told us collective singing releases those endorphins and gets us going and helps us to bond and there's a primordial and ancient human practice and a sacred practice so that's all I wanted to say except commercial break we are selling some of our fine CDs and DVDs at knockdown prices only to participants in CMC annual retreat we have already a compliant fingers off the panic buttons not the violin in sight we have the molded of ballad energy we have the you can see them being held up now by my assistant there is that gleam from the rather Shahadah which is mostly in english which is a recycle in celtic harmonies of the history of the national debate there's sufi songs of andalusia which is flamenco and traditional Arabic and Spanish songs from the time of the Inquisition and there's the null lid of borrows Angie perhaps the best of all knowledge recorded live in the Azalea mosque in Cape Town got into some very beautiful African harmonies that they use there and all kinds of other goodies that you can get and every penny goes to the Cambridge new mosque project so so that will be after this session which other and before the before then the mouse

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

Views: 111,865

Rating: 4.8642383 out of 5

Keywords: islam, islamic, muslims, britishmuslims, britishislam, cambridge, cmc, faith, faithinscholarship, tjwinter, abdal hakim murad

Id: 5qJdhhOCv04

Length: 41min 2sec (2462 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I didn't watch the whole thing, but he makes an interesting (and valid) point that generally speaking, those jurists who emphasize more on the intellectual ('aqli) methods of jurisprudence (Hanafis etc) tend to be more to the view of total prohibition of instrumental music without exceptions, while some of those more tradition-based (naqli) approach are among those most permissive on the issue (Zhahiris being the clearest example). Probably the opposite of what most would expect.

[u/[deleted]]

IIRC I remember reading an article or listening to an interview by the shaykh where he mentions that Turkish Sufi music plays a big role in his life.