Two important texts of this volume – those of M.Azmayesh and M.During – have already tackled the question of samâ‘. It appears thus clearly for us that it is not a marginal, secondary topic. On the contrary, it goes to the core of the spiritual experience in Islamic climate. When one believes, or gets a hâl, what is happening in his mind ? I will here give some modest outlines of the discussion running between enemies and partisans of samâ‘.
The arguments of the ‘enemies' originate in the domain of the Law, not theology. The fundamental process for them is actually not to ask who is God or to speculate on His nature or to try to unite with Him – this is well out-of-reach of the power of humans- but to question what action to take for accomplishing faith. What must one do to conform to God's will for humankind? How must the believer act in order to fulfil the promise of eternity given to him? In early centuries (the 7th to 10th centuries AD), jurists grouped human acts into five great categories: obligatory (for example, fasting during Ramadan), praiseworthy (fasting at other times), neutral, blame worthy (consuming ritually impure foods), and forbidden (consuming explicitly forbidden foods such as wine or pork). Samâ‘ itself wasn't mentioned in this ancient taxonomy, because the founding texts that make up the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet hardly took note of it. When it was noted by the jurists, it was at best considered to be a neutral activity, more often discouraged, and sometimes forbidden. However, these judgments were made in reference to profane music and dances. We are referring here to religious dances with ecstatic significance. During the 9th and 10th centuries a mystic movement called ‘Sufism' developed. The Sufis gathered together for evenings of collective recitation of passages from the Koran or jaculatory prayers; these were progressively accompanied by chanting, sometimes by instrumental music, and then by rhythmic movements. On the one hand, these movements were ritualised. However, they could lead to more spontaneous gestures, translating states of ‘ecstatic trance'. I use this evocative English term to express several purely Sufi concepts[1], which have already been the object of numerous commentaries. Mystic masters describe their displays in detail, but of course the actual content remains ineffable. During the course of an evening, one, several or all of the participants may slip into extremely lively physical expression[2]. In fact, Sufi rituals are extremely varied in their formats as well as their aims: certain Sufi groups (such as the Naqshbandiyya brotherhood) often seek to avoid loss of control, while others (such as Rifâ‘iyya or ‘Isâwiyya) obviously seek to induce states of trance[3].
The success of the Sufi movement and its sessions of ecstatic prayer, or samâ‘, worried fundamentalist doctors– those who wished to hold Islam to its earliest foundations and refused innovations judged to be deviant. They attacked the Sufis, who responded in kind. We will skip over the historic details of the debate and the names and references of this polemic, despite their interest, to recall only the essential points. On the fundamentalist side, let us examine the words of Ibn Taymiyya. A late arrival to the debate, he summarized the arguments of those that came before him, and was also its most active and determined participant. He fought all his life for the re-Islamification of a society he judged to be corrupt, and died in prison in 1328, in Damascus. A significant part of the contemporary fundamentalist movement follows his theories, thus he is an important author in social and doctrinal history, and one whom it is important to understand precisely. Ibn Taymiyya's thought is founded on the importance of considering Divine Law in order to maintain social and individual balance. God certainly has no need of human actions; it is humans themselves that need their faculties in order to assure their own salvation. God mercifully gives them the Law, to guide them in their wandering through the shadows of ignorance and to give them a firm moral and intellectual anchoring. Taymiyyan spirituality is based on the idea of religion as the union of human will and divine will in obedience to the Law. It is through accomplishing the acts ordained by the Law the believer encounters God; thus each act in the believer's life has an intensely religious dimension.
As it happens, Ibn Taymiyya was questioned at least two times about the Sufi's ecstatic dances, and the text of his fatwa-s (= legal consultations) has essentially been conserved (cf Michot 1991). Ibn Taymiyya expresses a marked aversion for the Sufi dances that he observed in his youth. He rejects their religious value through two types of arguments:
– from an exegetical point of view, he notes that neither the Koran nor the Prophetic Tradition mention samâ‘. None of the great founders of Muslim law approved music or dance in itself (Michot 1991 70-71; Molé 1963 160 s.). This question of sources is of course considerable: did our ancestors dance? This is the formidable question of the representation of origins, which affects Christianity as well.
– from the perspective of religious psychology, Ibn Taymiyya affirms that the effect dance has on the human spirit is the same as that of wine, which is explicitly condemned by the Law. What's more, the perturbation it produces is much more pleasant – which creates the risk that it may be done simply for pleasure. The consequences of the act of dancing are even more serious than those of alcoholism. Human will power is not only weakened, it is taken over by the dance as if by another being. The Taymiyyan critique is clearly at its most profound here. It does not limit itself to condemning dance for moral reasons, as an act that displeases God. Ibn Taymiyya states that human consciousness is not unified, and does not limit itself to a single focus. It has a tendency to scatter, to pluralize itself in a way through everything that fascinates and intoxicates it. What's more, it is attracted to its own capitulation when faced with the outside world. Just as the drunkard delights in the slumber of his consciousness, the dancer rejoices in the abandon of his intellect, forgets the rules of the Koran, and takes pleasure in being traversed by exterior suggestions (Michot 1991 83-86). But human consciousness doesn't allow emptiness, and this abdication on the dancer's part, which breaks the union between human will and divine will in observance of the Law, leaves the way clear for the intrusion of the ‘other' This other is clearly not God, away from whom the dancer has exiled himself, but Satan, the great masker of reality, who disguises sin as a form of piety: the Sufi, through dancing, believes he has encountered the divine in his ecstasy, but he is actually experiencing the drowning of his own psychic unity. This Satanic possession also explains the prodigies accomplished by certain Sufis during this state of trance, as walking in the air (Michot 1991 83-86). Note here that Ibn Taymiyya was doubtless targeting certain ceremonies inspired by shamanism[4] that were fairly different from the more serene samâ‘ of many other groups.
– in closing, Ibn Taymiyya puts forth social arguments: ecstatic dance encourages self-obsession and a fatalism that separates the individual from the solidarity of his community. To this Ibn Taymiyya adds a basic rule against mystic experience: if music and dance were truly a means to encounter the divine, it would make the prophet's work superfluous and useless, and would become a competitor and menace to religion and the social order itself. Would the mystic, in contact with the Absolute, still need the rules of religion, the Law and its doctors? For Ibn Taymiyya, no individual experience can serve as a foundation for certitude; certitude's only source is the Sacred Text. No Sufi can use his individual encounter with the divine as an argument with other believers.
Clearly, Ibn Taymiyya's condemnation permits no argument: Sufi dance is not only discouraged and illicit, it is the embodiment of an anti-religion, a demonic sect in which the dancer, under cover of mysticism, seeks only the narcissistic pleasure of abandoning his individual responsibilities. Ibn Taymiyya fought passionately for the outlawing of these rituals, but his success in this domain was mixed.
Of course, the Sufis defended themselves energetically against these accusations, and were fairly successful if one is to judge by the spreading of their rites of samâ‘, practiced by millions throughout the Muslim world. Their writings are numerous and consequential; their main spokesperson, or at any rate the most famous, was the great Iranian theologian Ghazâlî (deceased in 1111, living thus far earlier than Ibn Taymiyya). Ghazâlî rehabilitated the mystic path at the heart of classic Islam. For, as he argued, what is it that lies at the base of religious certainty, if not the experience of faith? And what do the mystics seek, if not a continuous deepening of the experience of faith? According to Ghazâlî, it is along these lines that samâ‘'s defence lies. Here are his principle arguments:
– The absence, or at least, the feeble quantity of textual references to music and dance in the Koran or in the Islamic Tradition is obvious; however, this is a reason to consider it as viable, since if it were dangerous the Sacred Text would surely have warned believers of this peril.
– All actions have only the value of their intentions, and the Sufi's intention is to reach the truth. Here, Ghazâlî proceeds in stages. He begins by underlining the acceptability of hearing, the awakening of this first sense, reminder of our first heavenly nature; then he mentions hearing chants, to which the story of King David, poet and musician, is added as a historic and sacred warning; then he evokes hearing instrumental music; and finally the movements drawn out by this music. These movements are the natural prolongation of the music and can hardly be separated from it, as expressed through the term samâ‘ itself, which means both ‘hearing' and ‘ecstatic dance'. Ghazâlî differentiates those which are ordered and ritualized from those which are at random (Ihyâ' ‘ulûm al-dîn IV 248), the two arising from a sort of overflowing of the momentum of love for God. For Ghazâlî, this samâ‘ can truly lead to an experience of the divine (wajd); he does not concede that a Satanic element could slip into a rite carried out with sincerity and fervour: "That which unites the heart with God does not contain evil" (Ihyâ' IV 280).
– Ghazâlî also affirms, countering the fundamentalists, that the fact that samâ‘ is enjoyable does not mean that it is illicit. Pleasure in and of itself is far from illicit: that which is offered during earthly life illustrates, in the Koran, the beatitude of the joyful in paradise. In a certain sense, samâ‘ is a foreshadowing of the joys of the beyond. In any case, the pleasure that is part of hearing music conceals, according to Ghazâlî, an ineffable secret. Without going so far as to openly assert that music could reveal the intimate, hidden structure of the Koran, he states that it draws us back to one of the most subtle mysteries of the Revelation.
In short, for Ghazâlî, samâ‘ does not make a person foreign, alien to himself (cf During 1988 22); rather, it reveals to him his transcendental unity, the part of his conscience where all his impulses meet. He does not deny that it can be dangerous, but the danger resides in the state of spirit of the listener and the participant: "He who truly listens becomes truly himself, he who listens dominated by his carnal soul becomes religion-less", Dhû al-Nûn, the great Egyptian Sufi of the 9th century, is quoted as saying. Other Sufi writers round out this argument. Some, like the Iranian Ahmad al-Tûsî, author of an enthusiastic pamphlet in favour of samâ‘ (Bawâriq al-ilmâ‘, 13th century) underline the superiority of movement over stillness: movement is of the spirit, hot – while rest is cold, material and vulgar. Movement cleanses the body of its blemishes. But the movement itself can be completely internalised. Some great Sufi masters attest to having continued to dance in complete immobility. Actually, samâ‘ should never stop, its music and dance should accompany the Sufi at all times. The music of samâ‘ is also "the voice of the birds, the creaking of a door, the applause of the wind" according to a quotation made by the 11th-century Sufi Qushayrî. The practice of samâ‘ constitutes, in a way, the outcome of sacred history: this is suggested in a Sinaitic monk's recognition of the eschatology of Muslim mysticism while watching Junayd's disciples performing samâ‘, as told in a Sufi legend recorded in the treatise The Kings's Rules of Life (Adab al-mulûk– beginning of the 11th century – the chapter on samâ‘).
In summary, this debate which has gone on for nearly a millennium between partisans and adversaries of samâ‘ brings us to the heart of self-questioning. How can we make people more human, and more faithful to their mission as human beings? Some, like Ibn Taymiyya, believe that the individual is basically weak and narrow-minded; he needs a Law to guide him and make him grow. The role of reason is to recognize the necessity of the Law. If the individual loses his reason – this precise reason that is illuminated by the Law – Satan will possess him. Satan is impulse, of course, but also and especially the refusal to put off satisfaction. More optimistically, Ghazâlî sees the impulse of love for God as the primary motivator of the human being, and finds it natural that gesture (in dance for example) accompanies intention. However, Ghazâlî wasn't a dancer himself, far from it. We might do better to look to the most brilliant protagonist of samâ‘, Jalâl al-dîn Rûmî, the 13th-century Anatolian master. For him, samâ‘ is the understanding that the entire cosmos is nothing but music and dance; thus dancing becomes the jubilatory gesture of the Sufi freed from his own ignorance. It lies beyond inert matter, even beyond the desire for eternity:
"When you enter into samâ‘, you are beyond the two worlds * the world of samâ‘ is beyond both this world and the other.
Although the roof of the seventh sky is high * samâ‘'s ladder reaches even higher.
Dance, with all that is not Him beneath your feet! * Samâ‘ is yours, and you are God's!"
It would be illusory to hide current evolution in this domain. The practice of samâ‘ in all its forms has been diminishing globally for over a century, under the dual push of pro-occidental secularism and a fundamentalism that renews the beliefs of Ibn Taymiyya. Rûmî's brotherhood, the Mawlawiyya, was outlawed in Turkey, the country in which it was born, in 1924. Samâ‘ was also outlawed in the (ex)communist countries like the former Soviet Union or Albania… It remains totally prohibited in Saudi Arabia. All this is to say that the question of who animates samâ‘ – God or Satan – remains current and has a real socio-political dimension. Who the devil does the mystics' dance bother so much? Why, and in the name of what, is it forbidden? It seems that a political power cannot control a population completely if it doesn't control its individuals down to their own gestures. In this domain, what happened during the Middle Ages in Europe has ended up happening in the contemporary Muslim world.
– Adab al-mulûk – Ein Hanbuch zur islamischen Mystik aus dem 4/10 Jahrundert, éd. par B.Radtke, Beyrouth / Stuttgart, 1991.
– Jean DURING 1988, Musique et Extase- L'audition mystique dans la tradition soufie, Paris, Albin Michel.
– Abû Hâmid GHAZALI, Ihyâ' ‘ulûm al-dîn, éd. par ‘A. ‘I. al-Sîrwân, Beyrouth, Dâr al-qalam, s.d.
– Jean MICHOT 1991, Musique et danse selon Ibn Taymiyya, Paris, J.Vrin, 1991.
– Marijan MOLE 1963, « La danse extatique en Islam » dans Les danses sacrées, Paris, Seuil, 1963.
-Gilbert ROUGET 1990, La musique et la transe, Paris, Gallimard.
[1]Such as hâl, dhawq or wajd (cf Michot 1991 38-40 and Rouget 1990 451, 454, 458, 497).
[2] Cf Rouget 1980 460-461, 499, 504.
[3] Cf Rouget 1980 464, 466-467. However, the distinction he brings between ‘induced' and ‘conduced' trances he brings does not seem very functional..
[4] 18) What Cf Rouget calls a ‘trance of possession' (as opposed to ‘trance of communion'), p.479; also 518 on the euphoria of tarab.