Page 44 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Fig. 1.1. “The Earthquake,”
a sermon by "Abd al-Hamid
Kishk, a pioneering ¤gure
of the da"wa movement.

Image right unavailable

taxi driver, who had a long beard and was dressed in a jalabiyya, was listening
to a sermon tape by the popular preacher "Umar "Abd al-Ka¤. At a certain point
during the ride, as the tape came to an end, the boy sitting in front next to the
driver asked him if he had any music he might put on instead. After a few mo-
ments of awkward silence, the driver responded that music was haram (forbid-
den) in Islam. The boy looked surprised and irritated but kept quiet and turned
away. The driver, noting the boy’s irritation, said, “Don’t just look away, tell me
what you’re thinking. We can talk, there’s no problem.” “How can singing be
haram?” said the boy, “Who told you that?” The driver replied, “Do you or don’t
4
you believe in the Quran and the sunna?” The boy responded that of course he
did. “Shouldn’t we do everything in our lives to follow the sunna? Doesn’t it
tell us not only the rules of God, but, as Muslims, isn’t it also a model for us?”
Again the boy, now getting impatient, concurred. On a roll, the driver moved to
clinch the argument by means of a hadith, an account of one of the Prophet’s
deeds or sayings: “When the Prophet used to hear songs, he would put his
¤ngers in his ears, and considered music to be one of the devil’s snares [madkhal
al-shaitan].” The boy quickly retorted that the driver’s hadith was da"if, a clas-
si¤catory term referring to a category of hadith whose authority is of the weak-

Cassette Ethics 33