and that is one of the many proofs of his ignorance of the Sunnah’s jurisprudence, for the hadith means only this: righteous deeds are accepted solely when joined to righteous intentions, as the remainder of the narration itself makes clear.1 This is evident to anyone who gives the matter the least reflection; yet, “the one to whom Allah grants no light—he shall have no light whatsoever” (24:40).

In conclusion I say: if the baneful effects of Sufi singing amounted to nothing more than the statement of one of its advocates,

“Listening to song benefits the spiritual seeker more than listening to the Quran in six—or seven—ways,”

that alone would be enough!

When I first came across this claim in Ibn al-Qayyim’s discussion of samāʿ (1/161), I could scarcely believe that a Muslim had uttered it—until I saw it quoted verbatim in al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ (2/298), expressed there without even the limiting phrase “for the seeker,” to my profound regret. He even reinforced the claim by posing to himself an objection whose gist is:

“If the speech of Allah is undeniably superior to singing, why do those people not gather around a reciter of the Quran instead?”

He answers:

“Know that singing arouses spiritual ecstasy more powerfully than the Quran in seven respects…!”

He then darkens more than two large pages expounding these points. A serious researcher is left wondering how such words could proceed from a jurist counted among the foremost Shāfiʿī scholars—indeed, one whom his students styled ‘the Proof of Islam.’ Yet his treatment of the subject is exceedingly feeble, devoid of true knowledge or jurisprudential insight, as becomes evident from his own statement: