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Islamic Philosophers

On Music

AmirAli Maleki listens to music from an Islamic perspective.

Perhaps the most important pre-requisite for doing good philosophy is awareness, depth and precision concerning our everyday lives and surroundings. In this, the philosopher is like a shopper who stands in front of a shelf in the local supermarket, constantly spotting new things that might be of use. That shelf is our life, and everything in philosophy depends on this care in studying what might otherwise be routine. Therefore, we should learn to philosophize at the peak of being alive; and that time is every morning when we wake up.

Islamic philosophers of the middle ages paid a lot of attention to the most basic aspects of life in the times in which they lived. Music is one of those basic facts still today – perhaps especially so when it seems that it’s present in every street and you can’t escape it (especially listening to music on the subway on the way to work).

From the point of view of many Muslim theologians, music is forbidden in Islam, because it can stupefy or hypnotise a person; but there were also many Islamic thinkers who sometimes tuned the instrument of their philosophy and thought with music – in a completely conscious and self-aware way! For example, Avicenna, in his most famous work on medicine, The Canon of Medicine (c.1025 CE), talks about the therapeutic use of music in calming children. He believes that listening to certain music, like a mother’s lullaby, makes the child’s mood more balanced and calmer.

A little earlier, Al-Farabi tried to establish a connection between philosophy and music. In The Great Book of Music (c.900 CE), he divides this art into three parts: enjoyable music, impressive music, and imaginative music. He considers imaginative music to be the highest level. Al-Farabi thinks of music, heard with melodious sounds, as like a game moving between the pleasure and pain of human perception. This philosopher also said that music can be a carrier of thought, since it is a part of human intellect, imagination, and language. This means we should listen to Bob Dylan’s words more carefully next time!

Like Pythagoras, Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi believed that the voice of the cosmos can be heard through music. For Suhrawardi, music was also a way to reach perfection of the soul. He imagined the soul as a bird imprisoned in a cage that finds its way to escape and reach the free sky by hearing the passionate sound of music. In a treatise called Childhood (c.1180 CE), Suhrawardi depicts a situation in which a shepherd is playing a reed, and this causes one of the other characters to experience a unique transcendental feeling of freedom and liberation. In other words, for this thinker music is a way to elevate human thought beyond its limited concerns, and so promote the growth of the human spirit. So for Suhrawardi, listening to music is a form of worship, because if a person listens carefully to the music of the world around him, he will understand what God and the world are saying to him.

Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra (1571-1635) talks a little more clearly about the relationship between music and worship in his works, and discusses ‘hearing the inner voice’. He believes that this inner sense – that is, one’s journey into thoughts and ideas – is a window to all human emotions, and beyond, because a person can communicate with himself in the purest possible way by listening to the inner voice. And one of the ways to activate this sense is to listen to music, because paying attention to the tones and rhythms of music is not just about listening to ordinary instruments, but can also be God’s voice to communicate with believers. In other words, Mulla Sadra’s position is basically about paying attention to the surrounding world and giving importance to all aspects of life, including music. This is because although many things may appear to be in conflict with each other, inside there is a unity and understanding between all of them, which one must search out.

Mulla Sadra sees this as related to dance, too, because he believes that although a dance is made up of many different movements, in the end, they are collected together as a whole which displays the order and proportion, and which also makes people happy and entertained (perhaps like what Michael Jackson does in the video for Smooth Criminal!). This is why Sadra sees music and dance as a shadow of the unity of nature; because the world is made up of different notes and movements that want to talk about one thing, that is, the importance or sacredness of life.

I think now would be a good time to listen carefully and think about the messages of music: why, for instance, from Graham Nash’s point of view in The Prison Song, is buying freedom a high price for the poor? Listen now.

AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the field of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy and hermeneutics.