Is listening to singing and poetry (sama') a devotion on the spiritual path?

"Hearing" (sama') is the twelfth of the stations in Madarij al-Salikin, and in it Ibn al-Qayyim sets out one of his longest discussions: is listening to songs and poems with instruments part of the wayfarers' path, a means of drawing near to God? This card gives his position first, then the permitters' arguments as he himself reports them. It does not decide between the two. The other legal rulings on hearing are in the card Sama'. ¹

Ibn al-Qayyim begins by noting that God commanded hearing, praised those who hear, and made it a sign that He knew good in them; "hearing is faith's messenger to the heart", "but the whole matter lies in what is heard, and there people have stumbled and differed". He defines its reality as alerting the heart to the meanings of what is heard and moving it by them – to seek or flee, to love or hate. ² He divides listeners into three – those who hear by their nature and desire, by their state and faith, and by God – and says the ruling on hearing can be settled only by knowing the form of what is heard, its reality, its cause and its fruit. ²

He divides what is heard into three: what God loves and commands; what He hates and forbids, praising those who turn from it; and the permitted, which He neither loves nor hates, judged like other permitted sights and foods. Of the third he says: "whoever forbids this third kind has said about God what he does not know", and whoever makes it religion and devotion "has legislated a religion God has not permitted". ³

For Ibn al-Qayyim the hearing God praised is that of His recited verses, in three kinds – hearing by the ear, hearing with understanding, and hearing with understanding, response and acceptance – each supported by verses. ³ On al-Tawba 47 he prefers reading "listeners to them" as those who accept and respond to them rather than spies, and gives his reasons. ⁴ The hearing of the elite of the elite, he says, is hearing the Qur'an with perception, understanding, reflection and response: "hearing the verses (ayat), not the verses of poetry (abyat)". ⁴

Blameworthy hearing, for Ibn al-Qayyim, is hearing whatever harms heart and religion – all falsehood, unless heard to refute it or take warning, and the idle talk from which God praised those who turn away. He cites Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya that idle talk is singing, and Ibn Mas'ud's saying that singing grows hypocrisy in the heart as water grows herbs. He describes what he has seen of the Qur'an weighing on devotees of singing, and quotes verses mocking those who droop at recitation and dance at song. ⁵ He cites the report of "Satan's Qur'an", whose chain as a Prophetic hadith the editor notes al-Haythami judged weak. ^{6 5}

Ibn al-Qayyim lists, without naming those who held them, the arguments that sama' belongs to the Sufis' path and is permitted: it is naturally pleasing; a fine voice is a blessing; God blamed the most hateful of voices and described the delights of Paradise; the hadiths on beautifying the Qur'an with the voice and the Prophet ﷺ's praise of Abu Musa's voice. ⁷ The Prophet let A'isha hear the two girls singing on the feast day, permitted entertainment at weddings, and heard chants and rajaz verse at the Trench and on the way back from Khaybar. ⁸ He heard Ka'b ibn Zuhayr's ode, asked to hear the poetry of Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, and prayed for Hassan. ^{9 10} Ibn Umar, Abd Allah ibn Ja'far and the people of Medina allowed it; saints attended it; birdsong is agreed to be permitted; hearing moves love towards its beloved and so is a devotion for one whose love is for God; and the ear's pleasure is like that of the eye, the nose and the mouth. ¹⁰ The editor documents these hadiths from the two Sahihs and others and refers to his notes on Talbis Iblis. ⁸

For Ibn al-Qayyim these arguments "swerve from the point and dodge the place of dispute": that something is pleasurable shows neither that it is permitted nor that it is forbidden, since pleasure is found in all five legal categories; he compares it to arguing for the permissibility of forbidden things from the pleasure they give. ¹⁰ No one, he says, forbade poetry as such, to say or to hear, so the hadiths on poetry are not where the dispute lies; and comparing singing with instruments to birdsong is of the same kind as the comparison reported in al-Baqara 275 of those who equated trade with usury. ¹¹

Ibn al-Qayyim sets three rules which, he says, settle the dispute:

1. Taste and state are judged, not judges: making tastes and ecstasies judges over the texts is, for him, the root of the error of those who corrupted the Sufis' sound path; tastes differ with beliefs – every group, even believers in the unity of being and Christians, has its taste and state – so truths cannot be weighed by them. He cites Umar, "the one spoken to", who ignored his own taste when a report from the Prophet reached him. ^{11 12}
2. In a dispute the reference is revelation: what it approves is accepted, what it rejects is rejected. ¹²
3. Look to harm and fruit: what carries a preponderant harm and is a road leading to what God forbade is, for him, certainly forbidden; he argues that the Lawgiver forbade even a little intoxicant because it leads to more, and quotes Ibn Mas'ud that singing is "the charm of fornication". ¹³

All these judgements are Ibn al-Qayyim's in his book and are presented here as his.

Al-Harawi's degrees of hearing and Ibn al-Qayyim's commentary on them (PDF pp. 412–414), his section on "the trial of singing being greater than that of wailing", the permitters' arguments from their own works (such as the Sufi treatises on sama'), and the legal schools' positions on singing from their own sources have not yet been added. Al-Harawi's text itself is also not yet included.