Islam is apparently not a religion to appeal to the musically inclined, because, as former guitarist Bilal Philips warns, only certain forms of music are acceptable to God:
Bilal Philips was once a guitar god. Now he is trying to convince Muslims that God doesn’t want them listening to guitars.
A Saudi-trained Canadian, Mr. Philips is among a small group of lecturers who preach against most forms of music — a controversial prohibition that surfaced in Manitoba recently, where a dozen Muslim families want to pull their children from music class.
“A heart filled with music will not have room for God’s words,” he writes in his book Contemporary Issues, which also defends child marriages, wife beating, polygamy and killing apostates while calling homosexuality “evil and dangerous.”
While Mr. Philips argues that Islam does not prohibit all music, he says it only allows adult male singers and “folk songs with acceptable content sung by males or females under the age of puberty accompanied by a hand drum.”
“Wind and stringed instruments have been banned because of their captivating power,” he continues. “Their notes and chords evoke strong emotional attachments. For many, music becomes a source of solace and hope instead of God. When they are down, music brings them up temporarily, like a drug. The Koran, the words of God filled with guidance, should play that role.”
Of course, music is bad because of the behaviour of musicians, too:
“What you see instead is that some of the most corrupt elements of society are found among the musicians. The drugs, the deviations and homosexuality, these type of things and all the corruption that’s there, people committing suicide,” he says. “The reality is that it in fact does carry an evil, dark side which produces that type of corruption amongst themselves and, in the end, ends up corrupting elements of the society.”
Wow. I didn’t realize the Toronto Symphony was such a hotbed of decadence and perversion!
