‘I love to hear it from someone else.’ So I recited Sūrat al-Nisā’ to him until I reached this verse:

‘So how will it be when We bring from every nation a witness and bring you as a witness against these people?’

He said, ‘That is enough.’ I looked and saw tears streaming from his eyes.”

This, then, is the listening practised by the early generations of this community and its most excellent generations. The finest spiritual masters advocate precisely this kind of listening. As for listening to poems set to melodies and gathering for that purpose, the foremost spiritual masters did not attend such gatherings: al-Fudayl ibn ʿIyād, Abraham ibn Adham, Abū Sulaymān al-Dārānī, Maʿrūf al-Karkhī, al-Sarī al-Saqatī, and their counterparts among later generations, such as Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir, Shaykh ʿAdī ibn Musāfir, Shaykh Abū Madyan, Shaykh Abū al-Bayān, and other masters like them. They did not attend such gatherings. Some spiritual masters, including prominent ones, did attend them, but subsequently repented and abandoned the practice.

Al-Junayd—may Allah Most High have mercy on him—did not attend them towards the end of his life. He would say, “Whoever deliberately seeks out such listening falls prey to its temptation; whoever encounters it by chance finds relief in it.” That is, someone who purposefully seeks out such listening becomes captivated by it, whereas someone who hears a verse suited to his spiritual state, without deliberate purpose, finds relief in it.

Those who attended the innovated listening gatherings that al-Shāfiʿī described as an invention of the heretics did not gather with beardless youths and women, nor with jingling instruments and flutes. Their poetry encouraged renunciation of worldly attachments and softened hearts.