** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 747 2 November 17 MUSIC & THE DEVIL

MUSIC: AN INSTRUMENT OF THE DEVIL? AND DOES REJECTION OF IT MEAN VIOLENT EXTREMISM?
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Your teenage offspring announces: ‘I am giving up listening to music’. Aghast, do you rush to tell the cops? You might. Because it is a sign of ‘radicalisation’. A clue the boy is plotting mischief. Inclining towards terrorism. Joining ISIS. Maybe driving a van into pedestrians – God forbid! The notorious Prevent anti-extremism strategy claims that much. Chilling, eh?

‘I am a Muslim. I don’t listen to music’, a fellow named al-Wahab revealed during a seminar I attended in Islington. ‘Because the Qur’an forbids it. It’s like hearing the devil’s whisperings.’ Intrigued, I asked for the reference. He obliged. Surah Luqman, ayat 6. I looked it up. The voice from Heaven promises ‘a humiliating torment’ for those who engage in ‘idle talk’, or tales, to mislead from God’s ways. That’s what is says in the Arabic. Music and songs are the commentator’s take. (Naturally, it is a Salafi-Wahhabi annotation.) Other translations say nothing about music. Too bad for naive al-Wahab.

Can some music have a negative, demonic influence on people? Giuseppe Tartini’s violin sonata, The Devil’s Trill, resulted from a dream in which the composer sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the score, hence the sonata’s alleged diabolical influence. Legend has it that if you listen to it something strange will occur afterwards. I did and zilch followed. Maybe crafty Tartini indulged in a PR stunt? And Tolstoi’s novella, The Kreutzer’s Sonata, tells of a man who murders his wife after discovering her affair with a violinist. The two lovers had played Beethoven’s composition together. Then the husband felt that music was an awesome thing. The Kreutzer’s Sonata, he believed, should not be played before women misbehaving, so next day he stabbed his wife to death. A story about jealousy, certainly, but about evil music? Hhhmm…

Philosophers too have taken a dim view of some music. In his blueprint for a righteous society, The Republic, Plato talks about it as part of education, as an accompaniment to songs. Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece, distinguishes several types of music and links them with different feelings and moods. Some are fine for soldiers, to represent courage and discipline, others not. And Socrates declares a preference for the lyre, the instrument of the god Apollo, as opposed to the flute, favourite of satyrs, the ithyphallic companions of Dyonisus. (A satyr, Marsyas, challenged the god to a context. Apollo won and skinned Marsyas alive.) You can imagine what Plato would have made of Eminem and bands like the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden or even Michael Jackson. Pity Apollo isn’t around to flay alive that lot.

As to Aristotle, he held that music served a fourfold end: amusement, moral education, recreation and purification. Art can use of any of those ends but mere amusement cannot be an ultimate goal. Too bad for the universal line: ‘That was fun!’ It wouldn’t have pleased the great philosopher a little bit. No wonder Aristotle was a snob.

Even if the Qur’an does not condemn music, what about the hadiths? Sharia, Islamic law, is a blending of Qur’an and hadiths and there is a prophetic saying, of an eschatological flavour, and reported in Salafi-Wahhabi notes to the Qur’an, which declares musical instrument (ma’azif in Arabic, probably meaning drums) unlawful, along with men wearing silk. Debate rages about it. However, even hardline Sunni ‘Popes’ like Yusuf al-Qaradawi permit instrumental music. Moreover, what about the Turkish Mevlevi Order of Dervishes? They danced the Sema’, a mystical and musical ceremony, as well as being the crack units of the Ottoman armies that got to the gates of Vienna. The examples of Moghuls and Persian Safavid also militate against any Islamic ban on instrumental music. And even the puritanical Saudis dance the Sword Dance – a favourite of Prince Charles.

Even the dumbest fundamentalist could never invoke the Bible against music or dancing. The psalms are religious songs. Many with musical directions, addressed to the choirmaster, including ‘with string instruments’. When the Ark of the Covent was brought to Jerusalem, Kind David himself danced ‘before the Lord’, girded with only a loin cloth (II Samuel:14). St Matthew’s Gospel says that Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn after the Last Supper. And in church tradition the psalms feature in settings like Vespers by Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Mozart. Gregorian chant is one of the glories of monastic spirituality. I confess, it bores me a bit but then music was never the priest’s ruling passion – God so willed.

After knocking al-Wahab’s scriptural exegesis, I must agree with him on the radicalisation issue. Rightly or wrongly, he believes that his faith and music are incompatible. An opinion to which he is perfectly entitled. It may be extreme but why extremist in the sense of violent extremism? Or, for that matter, even non-violent extremism? Why should he be harassed by Prevent? Jehova’s Witnesses have peculiar ideas about blood transfusion but the British government doesn’t treat them as ‘extremists’. Mormons don’t believe in sex before marriage or homosexuality, yet they are an all-American, hard-working, supremely law-abiding lot. Does President Trump brand them as extremists?

The Prevent strategy is loopy. It led someone to report two Muslims students because they didn’t look at females. Given the present hysteria about men touching women’s knees, that is perhaps rather reassuring.

As to his satanic majesty, the Devil. He is man’s eternal enemy and gets up to all sorts of tricks to make humanity stumble, as he did in the Garden of Eden, but music per se isn’t one of them.

Reverend Frank Gelli

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