For that reason I felt compelled to compose a treatise explaining the Sharʿī ruling on music, refuting Ibn Ḥazm’s assertion that it is lawful, and laying bare his misunderstandings when he declares the sound hadiths that forbid it to be weak—“so that whoever lives may live on clear evidence” (Q 8:42). In this way the proof will stand against those who lack knowledge, and the seeker of guidance will find in it an argument with which to persuade anyone who desires the truth and fears his Lord.

Damascus, 24 Shaʿbān 1375 AH
Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī

That is what I wrote more than forty years ago, and—alas—the matter has grown even worse, just as I had expected. Trials and infatuation with songs and music have multiplied because listening has become so easy through radios, tape recorders, televisions, and broadcast stations, while many scholars remain silent instead of denouncing it. Indeed, some whom the masses regard as great scholars have openly declared it permissible. Articles defending musical instruments, denying their prohibition, and weakening the hadiths that speak against them have increased and diversified in various newspapers and magazines. In doing so they disregard the hadith masters who authenticated those reports and the legal schools that act upon them, never even mentioning them, so that the ordinary reader imagines they do not exist at all—or else he encounters writings by obscure authors who, as the saying goes, “are neither in the camel drive nor the caravan.” The examples are many, far too many to enumerate, but one will suffice for now: an item published in the Jordanian newspaper al-Ribāṭ, Issue 9–15 (June 1993). It carried three articles advocating permissibility; the most dangerous and reprehensible was by one Ḥassān ʿAbd al-Manān, who set himself up as a critic to rebut the hadith scholars who authenticated the forthcoming report in al-Bukhārī that prohibits musical instruments, using devious methods and alleging fictitious defects that