what was more complete and preferable—much like someone who, while walking along his way, hears a group engaged in unlawful speech and therefore plugs his ears so as not to hear it. That is the better course, yet if he does not plug his ears he incurs no sin, unless the very act of hearing would cause religious harm that can be averted only by blocking the ears.

Second: It seems that Ibn Ḥazm imagined the flute-playing shepherd to have been standing right before the Prophet ﷺ so that he might command or forbid him. Nothing in the ḥadith suggests this; on the contrary, it rather hints that the shepherd was at a distance, his person unseen and only his sound heard. For that reason the scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, after citing words to the effect of Ibn Taymiyyah’s conclusion, said:

“Approving of the shepherd does not prove permissibility, for it is a single, context-bound incident. Perhaps he heard him without seeing him, or the shepherd was far away on a mountaintop or in a place one could not reach, or perhaps the shepherd had not yet reached legal responsibility, in which case censure was not obligatory.”¹

Third: The prohibition of singing and musical instruments is certainly no stricter than the prohibition of wine. We know that the Prophet ﷺ lived among his Companions for as long as Allah willed while they were drinking wine before it was made unlawful—yet who would claim that he approved of them and failed to forbid them? In the same way we say—granting, for argument’s sake, that the ḥadith indicates permissibility—that it may have occurred before the prohibition, and once such a possibility exists the proof is invalidated.

Fourth and finally: Even on that assumption, the permission applies only to the shepherd’s pipe, a primitive and simple instrument whose ability to arouse the emotions and disturb one’s equilibrium is minimal. How incomparable it is to other instruments such as the lute or the qanun.