—it beautifies those very vices, rousing the souls to the lusts of misguidance, bringing their dormant cravings to the surface, unsettling what once lay still, driving them toward every shameful act and pushing them to seek union with every attractive woman or man. Song and wine are twins suckled at the same breast; in inciting people to indecency they are two racehorses neck-and-neck. Indeed, song is the counterpart of wine—its twin, its milk-brother, its deputy, its ally, its intimate companion and friend. Satan has bound them together with a brotherhood that will never be severed and has cemented between them a covenant of loyalty that will never be revoked.

Song is the heart’s spy, the thief of chivalry, the whisper inside the mind. It worms its way into the hidden recesses of the heart, peers into the innermost secrets of the breast, and creeps into the seat of imagination, stirring up whatever it finds there of passion, desire, frivolity, triviality, recklessness and foolishness. You may see a man marked by dignity, the radiance of intellect, the joy of faith, the gravity of Islam and the sweetness of the Qur’an; yet once he listens to song and inclines toward it, his reason diminishes, his modesty wanes, his manliness disappears, his radiance departs, and his dignity leaves him. His devil rejoices over him; his faith complains to Allah the Exalted; and his Qur’an weighs heavy upon him, saying, “My Lord, do not gather me and the Qur’an of Your enemy in the same breast.”

He now finds attractive what, before hearing, he deemed repulsive; he divulges secrets he once concealed; he passes from dignity and stillness to excessive talk, lying, silly glee and finger-snapping. He tilts his head, shakes his shoulders, stamps the ground with his feet, smites the crown of his head with his hands, leaps like fleas, spins like a donkey around a mill-stone, claps his hands as women do, and bellows in rapture unlike even the bellowing of bulls. At times he sighs like the grief-stricken; at other times he howls like a madman.

One of its own connoisseurs spoke the truth when he said:
Do you recall the night when we gathered together
to savor sweet melodies until dawn?
The goblet of songs went round among us,
intoxicating the souls without a drop of wine.