Slippery Stone

The author deserves credit for bringing into relief in a highly balanced way the Islamic position on music. His is not the war cry of a normative, traditional person merely pronouncing “thou shall not listen to music”, and issuing dire warnings for the culprits, without offering any rationale or without drawing any distinction between the permissible and forbidden variety of music. Being well versed in primary Islamic sources and aware of the present Western and Westernised Muslim lands, Baig is eminently qualified to tackle both boldly and sensitively the tricky issue of music in Islam. In the words of the renowned Islamic scholar, Syed Salman Nadvi, who has contributed the “Foreword” to this valuable work (pp.xiii–xv), Baig ‘has shown how the restricted permission of sama[ (recital of compositions in praise of Allah or the Prophet) without the use of musical instruments by certain Sufi orders was later misused and how in later years it deteriorated to what is now done in the name of qawwalis’. (p.xiv)