Listening and Ecstasy is Book 18 of al-Ghazālī’s Revival of the Religious Sciences, the eighth book of the Second Quarter, The Customs of Daily Life.

Is music forbidden? Every Muslim has an opinion. Al-Ghazālī has a proof — then he asks what the sound does to you. He settles the quarrel as a jurist first: al-Shāfiʿī, Mālik and Abū Ḥanīfa against; Companions, the people of the Ḥijāz and al-Junayd for. A beautiful voice is a bounty. Poetry was sung before the Prophet. ʿĀʾisha watched the Abyssinians dance in the mosque on Eid. He answers the prohibitionists one by one. Only then does he turn to the heart.

Five conditions that turn lawful listening into forbidden. Three stages: understanding, ecstasy, movement. Book 17 took the religion onto the road. This one takes it into the ear. A sound is neither ḥalāl nor ḥarām on its own. It becomes one or the other by what it stirs, and by whom.

This English is taken from the classical Arabic of the Iḥyāʾ, not rebuilt from an older translation. It can be read straight through, or studied beside the original.

Read it before you next press play.