The strings of your‘ud: O! sage-doctor of the lute–
Are in dearness to the lovers as the jugular vein!^52
Indicating an intertextual culture suffused with an omnipresent Quran
(Q50:16) and yet also experienced in forbidden intoxication, the poem
conceives of music as a bridge between transcendence and transgression.
Critics of music base their judgments on similar premises. The preserva-
tion ofCensure of the Instruments of Diversionby ibn al-Dunya (823–894)
and ibn Taymiyya’sLetter on Audition, Dancing, Shouting, and Listening to
the Recitation of Poetryin a unique 1391 manuscript suggests a limited
circulation. Influential as the teacher of two Abbasid caliphs as well as of
ibn Taymiyya, ibn al-Dunya found music guilty by association with for-
bidden practices such as drinking, gambling, and fornication.^53 Ibn
Taymiyya declares music acceptable as entertainment for the young (as
the Prophet allowed for his young wife A’isha), but censures pleasurable
music as increasing sensual appetites, culminating in drinking and sexual
intercourse. He uses the partial homology ofal-ghina(song/entertainment
music) andal-zina(fornication) to liken them as pleasures absent of
reason, akin to drunkenness. Wine, music and the image analogously
induce a state of drunkenness. He similarly condemns meditative audition
practiced by Sufis, claiming that the ecstatic state induced by music merely
replaces one passion for another and detracts from the meditation on God
enabled through the Quran. A taste for poetry and music would thereby
detract from the pleasures of the Quran, the only audition the Prophet
clearly practiced.^54
Conversely, al-Hujwiri suggests that the permissibility of poetry and
music alike results not from form, but from reception. He chastises those
who forbid them for failing to recognize the Prophet’s emphasis on content
over form in saying,“What is good therof is good and what is bad thereof is
bad,”whether in prose or verse.^55 Conversely, he recognizes that the claim
of seeing God in everything leads people to a false Sufism, in which all
sensuousness becomes facilely equated with the divine. He illustrates this
in relation to music through a parable:
The whole of this topic is illustrated by the story of David, whom God made His
viceregent and gave him a sweet voice and caused his throat to be a melodious pipe,
so that wild beasts and birds came from mountain and plain to hear him, and the
water ceased toflow and the birds fell from the air. It is related that during a
(^52) Ahmed, 2015 : 426. (^53) El-Rouayheb, 2010 ; Nielson, 2012 : 259. (^54) Shehadi, 1995 :95–99.
(^55) al-Hujwiri, 1959 : 398.
Music between Transcendence and Transgression 71