2 Seeing with the Ear
The centrality of music in early Islamic discourses contrasts with the
marginality of images. Music’s proponents and detractors both described
it through a cosmology of similitudes, ranging from our internal experi-
ence to the physical world, the universe, and the divine. Its therapeutic,
spiritual, sinful, divine, rational, and irrational effects exceed the physical
experience of audition. The symbolic role that the modern episteme assigns
to the outward, visual image may have been addressed by inward musical
apprehension in the Islamic realm. Yet music lies in the blind spot of art-
historical oculocentrism.
This chapter explores premodern Islamic discussions of music to trace
their inheritance of antique understandings of mimesis. First, it examines
the discussions of legality of music–of the type one might have imagined
pertaining to the image if it had been of similar concern. Guilty by
association with disapproved practices such as drinking and fornication,
music was nonetheless recognized as intimately spiritual. It then explores
the production of musical meaning between the worldly and the divine.
2.1 The Legality of Music
Discussions concerning the permissibility of music began in ninth-century
Baghdad, contemporaneous with the compilation of theHadith. Its cul-
tural centrality reflected the Islamic inheritance from both the antique and
Arab traditions.
Thefirst great Islamic philosopher, Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi
(801–866), conceived of hearing as more reliable than sight because of the
propensity to recognize correct rhythm and melody compared with the
fallible judgment of distance, motion, and form.^1 He distinguished
between theory (musiqi) and performance (ghina). Building on recently
translated ancient Greek aphorisms concerning medicine, he considered
musiqias representing a cosmology in which the strings of an instrument
(^1) Wright, 2004 : 361. 57