Islam, Music, And Personal Boundaries
And what is your opinion on the view that music creates hypocrisy in the heart?
For me, music is fundamentally a neutral thing; it isn’t inherently bad, but the issue arises when an imbalance occurs. Until I was about 14 or 15, I always thought songs were haram and never listened to them, but later I realized that isn’t the case. Even now that I listen to music, I have never actually felt my heart slipping away or my spiritual connection weakening because of it. From a psychological and practical standpoint, I see two main issues. First, even if we don’t necessarily like a song, if it catches our brain’s attention, it becomes repetitive on our tongue through “earworms,” though this is easily controlled and isn’t a major problem. Second, and more importantly, the music industry often portrays things that become “normalized” in society. For example, in rap music, slurs are used so often that they have become a natural habit in daily conversation and social media just to seem “cool.” This desensitization is a real concern, but again, it can be kept under control if a person has the capacity to resist that influence.Islam tells us to keep a watch out for these things because not everyone is born with a strong spiritual connection or high self-awareness; these are learned traits. For the majority of people, keeping these influences under control is difficult, and since developing that level of self-regulation takes time, many of our early scholars and Buzrugs advised avoiding music altogether as a major precaution. It wasn’t because the sound itself was evil, but because they wanted to protect people from the psychological and moral “drift” that often comes when one lacks the awareness to filter what they are consuming.