Just came across a particularly sad story on the BBC News website. Apparently, listening to this in the town of Niafunke, Mali, could earn you a beating. As could listening to any music at all. Fundamentalist Islamists have taken over the town and surrounding area, and are enforcing strict rules against anything they consider to be in violation of Sharia law.
If you don’t know who Ali Farka Touré is, despite his relative obscurity, he regularly makes “best 100 guitarists” lists, such as Rolling Stone’s.
Yes, there are worse thing going on in, say, Syria right now, but at least there it’s possible to understand why. Whereas this is fundamentalist thought-police at their most fundie and anti-human.
I’ve never understood how a sect that enforces this musical prohibition can win converts. Music (and dancing) are probably as old as humanity and may well have preceded the origin of language.
It seems like some people are just determined to take all of the joy out of life. You have to wonder what’s going on in the heads of such people. How can they themselves want to live without music?
Eh. I’m fairly certain they are garden variety bandits and would-be warlords who discovered that the trappings of radical Islam are a great way to get attention and go from being no-name thugs to international super-baddies who make global headlines. Thugs can do their best work when they can attract a steady stream of the angry, disaffected, unemployed young men that any poor area is going to have. And there is no better way to prove what a badass you are than by pissing off the entire world.
I’m sure there are a few fundamentalists here and there, but the majority of the population in the area practices a fairly relaxed form of Islam. This isn’t a religious thing, it’s a marketing tool and we are doing their work for them.
As far as I can tell from a cursory search, no. Apparently the Koran itself doesn’t prohibit music, but does say that what is harmful is illegal or unclean. Obviously there’s a lot of room for debate on what should be considered harmful. The specific prohibition of any music appears in later commentaries written, obviously, by people who considered music harmful. Many Muslims reject that principle today, and many others don’t.
That’s one sneaky conniving way to have someone killed, that is. I like it.
[QUOTE=davidm]
Does the Koran have a prohibition on music?
[/QUOTE]
Not any more than Christianity has a prohibition against dancing, but *Footloose *was still based on a real thing. Or a prohibition against speaking, and yet Benedictine monks take vows of silence. I gather the gist of the idea is that “you’re not supposed to have fun, you’re supposed to work all day and pray or study religion all night, every minute of your life is duty, if you have any free time for the profane you’re doing it wrong”
There are some hadith that condemn loose living and lump music into the whole “wine, women and song” category. (There’s one that says that some Muslims will fall into error, and support illicit sex, men wearing silk, wine, and playing instruments.), and there are other hadith that outright condemn things like flueplaying and drumming.
Some of the more conservative Islamic groups, based on these hadith, don’t allow music.
The fundamental problem facing a person of any religious belief is determining which of the religion’s rules were ordained by the god versus which rules were created by man.
There are a lot of reasons for RO over Mali just now. Constitutional democracy overthrown, a thousand or more dead in fighting, possibly a quarter million people displaced, all as an unintended consequence of NATO nations flooding the Libyan rebels with weaponry. I guess if the ban on music provokes the West to pay some attention to what’s happening in Mali, that might be a silver lining.
:smack: Of course, why didn’t I think of that. Thanks so much for pointing out how superficial we rich First Worlders can be. How trivial indeed are the things that actually get our attention away from our screens and amusements, and the money race during the week.
Just because somebody wants to bitch about people who would ban music doesn’t mean we’re ignorant about what’s going on in Mali and neighboring countries.