Singing and music are the wird (a section that is recited) of Satan. It can never be mixed with the wird of Ar-Rahmān in the slave’s heart! So whenever one of the two takes control of the heart, the other one is removed, for they are two opposites that cannot be combined whatsoever!

[Singing & Music in Islamic Perspective by Shaykh ‘Abdullah Al-Athari pg. 22]

Heal your heart with Qur'an

Ibn al-Qayyim رحمه الله:

“If you read (the Qur'an) with contemplation, even if over a (single) ayah, it is a key to healing your heart. Even if repeated a hundred times and for the (whole) night.

Reading an ayah with contemplation and understanding is better than reading to completion without tadabbur and understanding. It is more beneficial for the heart and ensures gain in faith, and in tasting sweetness of the Qur'an.”

مفتاح دار السعادة (٥٥٣/١)

Cat Stevens photographed by Jack Mitchell, 1971.

2015: Gisele Marie, a Muslim heavy metal musician, plays guitar during a concert in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Marie, 42, is the granddaughter of German Catholics, and converted to Islam several months after her father died in 2009. “People do not expect to see a Muslim woman who uses a Burqa, practices the religion properly and is a professional guitarist who plays in a heavy metal band, so many are shocked by it,” said Marie. “But other people are curious and find it interesting, and others think that it’s cool.”

Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

This is the Shulamit Music School in Tel Aviv. This school began in Jaffa in 1910 but soon moved to Tel Aviv. It was named after Shulamit Rupin, co-founder of the school, who passed away in 1912. 100% a Jewish music school. Arabs welcome, but not a Muslim business.

This photo was taken in 1914 by Avraham Soskin.

Dua

some notes on sufism

The other day I went to the Harvard Divinity School Muslims iftar (the meal that breaks the fast during Ramadan), which was followed by a concert of Turkish music that is traditionally performed in Sufi lodges in Istambul. Before the music began, the professor I’ve been auditing Islamic literature classes with read some verses from Rumi’s Masnavi and offered a meditation on fasting through an interpretation of the lines: “If you have closed this mouth, another mouth is opened, which becomes an eater of the morsels of mysteries.” That is the nature of mystical knowledge—gnosis (or maʿrifa) is not understood intellectually, but tasted (dhawq). The closing of the bodily mouth is an opening of the spiritual mouth. He asked us to listen to the music with the inner heart.

I went with my friend S, who has been nudging me toward conversion. I’ve been allergic to religion most of my life because I’m not really much of a joiner. I distinctly remember being in (Catholic) Sunday School as a child and thinking to myself: This sounds fake to me. As in, made-up, irrational. The people who treated the fanciful stories like fact seemed like crackpots to me, even to my child-mind. I don’t think I ever believed in Santa either—I guess my disposition was innately skeptical; perhaps that contributed to my identification with anarchism from when I was 13 or 14. Yet at the same time, my feeling for the invisible, for the world of the dead, was always quite strong, even when it was unstitched from a belief system. As a kid I would wander the house alone at night, thinking I could hear my dead parakeet chirping from a shoebox in the garage.  

I hated Sunday School. While I was always good at school-school (at least when I was a child, before I became an incorrigible truant), I was terrible at Sunday School. Because it seemed like hocus-pocus to me, none of it stuck. My classmates had internalized all the stories I thought were outlandish. During mass I would think exclusively about donuts, the ones we would buy from the ladies who would sell them as a fundraiser. I’ve thought about returning to Catholicism, but sadly, after the post-1970s political realignment in the US, all the leftist Catholics (the Marxists who loathed the Vietnam War and exposed the FBI’s COINTELPRO) are gone. As much as I love reading Catholic mystics (St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Angela of Foligno, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and others), Christian mysticism is more individualist than Islamic mysticism—asceticism and separation from the group is the way to commune with God, while Islamic mysticism is rooted in communal practices like sama (singing, dancing, reciting poetry, playing/listening to music) and dhikr (communal prayer for the remembrance of God). While Christian mysticism bears the imprint of the Neoplatonist trajectory of ascent, for Sufism, the trajectory is shaped like a paisley. After fana (annihilation of the ego/union with God/dying before you die), there is baqaa or subsistence, a return of sorts. 

I also much prefer the Islamic orientation to the created world than the Christian one, for in Islam, everything in creation can be understood as the breath or speech of God. The Hadith on which Sufi cosmology is based reads, “I was a hidden Treasure and Loved to be known, so I created the world that I might be known.” All of creation is a mirror to reflect God (this is why you must polish the rust from your heart, for the human heart can manifest all the names and qualities of God). In the Islamic mystical tradition there is an affirmation of the created world even though God and creation are not the same (as is the case in Pantheism). Everything has ontology. Nothing has ontology. The Sufi metaphysicians ask us to see with two eyes. The drop is not the ocean at the same time it cannot be separated from the ocean.

7 years ago I read Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History. After sampling the platter of world religions I joked to myself, Hmmm, if I had to pick the one I vibe with most, I guess it would be Sufism (Islamic mysticism). I didn’t know anything about Sufism other than the Rumi and Hafez poetry I read as a teenager, but the way Aslan described Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of 'wahadat al-wujud' (or Unity of Being) reminded me of Spinozism. I guess what I’m trying to say is...I just think Sufi metaphysics is...right. Or, it speaks to how I tend to think about reality. It’s not something I can prove (that I don’t exist, while at the same time I am part of the ALL that is God), but it makes the most sense to me.

In the Sufi literature class, S jokes to me: “You’re the only non-Muslim in this class.” The same was probably true at the iftar + concert. S points to someone from the class: “The Maoist is a recent convert. This is their first time fasting for Ramadan.” “Is [our professor] fasting?” “Of course. I saw him at the iftar last night and talked to him about translation. I told him it’s ghastly to try to fit Persian verse into an English rhyme scheme. He agreed with me.” (We are clearly partisans of blank verse translations… yet so much of what’s out there has been poorly translated or not translated at all.) 

Much of the lyrics sung with the gorgeous music were verses written by the great Turkish-language Sufi poet and mystic Yunus Emre ("the Dante of Turkey," I whispered to S). S was ecstatic listening to the haunting ney (a kind of flute). We just so happened to be sitting in the same row as the professor. I tapped S and whispered that it looked like he was really enjoying the music. He was smiling with his eyes closed and swaying his head from side to side. He looked like he was having...a profound experience. This prof usually has what I guess you’d call ‘resting bitch face’ (which I always found funny because it runs counter to his sweet and gentle personality). But not at the concert. Pure bliss was painted on his face. It was then that it dawned on me that Sufism, for him, was probably something more than a scholarly interest. I thought about what it must have been like to discover something so beautiful and profound, and to know, in that moment, that your life will be changed forever—you might go off to Iran and devote your entire life to studying medieval texts. 

Of course this Ramadan I am thinking continuously about the genocide in Gaza, how an entire population is being starved to death by the sadistic leaders of Israel, how terrible it must be to be bombed and shot at during the holy month, or to break your fast with boiled grass and animal feed. I feel truly ashamed to come from a country that is complicit in this violence. I hope everyone continues to apply pressure to end this war—it feels hopeless now, but it is making a difference.

Also I feel like some Muslims heard 'don't mix religion and culture' but like somehow turned that into 'we all should act exactly the same and erase any instance of cultural differences in the name of Islam'

idk what ramadan is gonna look like for me this year lol

every time i find myself in muslim insta comment sections i go insane, i grew to resent islam but my experience with it was chill as hell compared to bitches in comment section, they'll call fucking anything haram, it's like they're fucking gatekeeping the religion. they sound like fucking catholics if i'm being honest

1100 people !

In 10 minutes 10 minutes erases 1,100 stories and families!

بقوا ١١٠٠!

في ١٠ دقايق

١٠دقايق تمحي بيهم ١١٠٠ قصة وعيلة!

Sufi Muslims practice Zikr, or the remembrance of God, with music and prayer. [Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters]

Earth Day 2024

I have written about this for the past couple of years, and am largely relying on last year’s post as the basis for this one. No apologies for that: the message is still just as necessary and vital. Next Monday, 22 April, is Earth Day. First held in the US on April 22, 1970, it was opened up to the rest of the world in 1990 and now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by…

View On WordPress

Recorded this snippet of the Al-Firdaus Ensemble, a Sufi music group influenced by the great Muslim poets of Al-Andalus, which I saw perform tonight for the Mawlid al-Nabi (birthday of the Prophet). Every time this singer opened his mouth to sing my eyes started welling up with tears… his voice was so beautiful. It touched me the same way Jeff Buckley’s soaring voice touches me.