“Would you like to eat?”
Al Farabi said,“No.”
So he said to him,“Would you like to drink?”
Al-Farabi said,“No.”
So he said to him, would you like to listen [to some music]?”
Al-Farabi said,“Yes.”
So Sayf al-Dawla gave orders for the singers to be brought in and each expert in this
art came in with a variety of musical instruments. But each time one of them played
on his instrument, al-Farabi found fault with him, saying,“You have made a
mistake!”
Then Sayf al-Dawla said to him,“have you any proficiency in this art?”
Al Farabi said,“Yes.”
He then drew from his waist a leather bag, opened it, and drew from it some reeds,
which he put together. Then he played on them, whereupon all who were at the
majlislaughed. Then he took them to pieces and put them together another way,
and when he played on them, everyone in themajliscried. Then he took them to
pieces [yet] again, put them together differently, played on them and everyone in
themajlis, even the doorkeeper, fell asleep. And al-Farabi went out.^19
The mythologized al-Farabi plays the soul through the vehicle of theflute.
Such emotion as an attribute of music occurs in the thirteenth-century
Stories of Bayad and Riyad, a rare Andalusian illustrated manuscript that
survived an edict by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros (1436–1517) to
destroy books with Arabic writing lest they be the Quran^20 [Figure 2].
In an enclosed garden lush withflowering vegetation, a lady asks one of
her slave-girls to sing. A young man, Bayad, already smitten with one of
the slave-girls, uses the festivities as a pretext to discover if his beloved
Riyad, a slave-girl, is as beautiful as he imagines. He takes the lute and
begins to play, eventually confessing of his love to the lady, who is served
wine as she listens. The scene becomes an exchange of twenty-five love
songs between the pair–yet the lady cannot unite them since her father,
the owner of Riyad, wants her.^21 The rhythmic order of the painting
echoes the poetic imagery conflating love, nature, wine, and music. Far
from inciting debauchery, the wine enhances the musical romance. While
the scene is more carnal than transcendent, the affiliation of romance
(^19) This tale is related by Bayhaqi (d. 1169) and ibn Khallikan (d. 1282). See Netton, 1992 :6.
(^20) Garcia-Arenal, 2009. (^21) Ruggles, 2018 : 28.
The Legality of Music 61