97 — Warning against Innovated Devotional Listening Practices

Our discussion continues with an explanation of the guidelines governing prescribed supplication as practiced by the master of the prophets and messengers, and followed by the foremost devoted and righteous servants of Allah among the Companions and Successors. This alone is accepted by Allah, rather than what religious innovators have introduced and those given to affectation have contrived. Such people abandoned the prescribed remembrances and transmitted supplications, replacing them with innovated devotional listening practices and worship through chanting poems and newly composed rhymed verses. They made these into regular litanies, assigned fixed times to them, and claimed that they had a more profound effect upon hearts and stirred souls more powerfully. Their hearts consequently inclined toward them, their souls found repose in them, and they preferred them to the prescribed remembrances and transmitted supplications.

There can be no doubt that this is an innovation in religion and a departure from the guidance of the master of the prophets and messengers. Reports from the scholars condemning it, warning against it, prohibiting it, and explaining that it is among the newly introduced innovations are exceedingly numerous.

Imam al-Shāfiʿī—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “I departed Baghdad, leaving behind something introduced by the heretics. They call it taghbīr, and through it they turn people away from the Quran.”

Taghbīr is a form of remembrance devised by these people, involving a kind of melodious chanting of poetry accompanied by striking a rod against a hide or something similar.

When Imam Ahmad—may Allah have mercy on him—was asked about it, he replied: “It is a newly introduced innovation.”1