I know a few people who do, and they’re all women. Whether that’s just a coincidence or not, I don’t know.
I sleep on my stomach, and I’m a guy.
But that might just be a metaphor for a Celene Dion concert.
Weird. I used to go to a Christian church that allowed no instrumental music. I know they felt that there was some biblical reason for this, even though the bible clearly states that instruments were played.
Of course, that was just instrumental music, and just in church. But I am willing to bet some cold, hard cash that there are Christian churches out there that are against any music, anywhere, ever.
Can somebody help me out, here?
Another guy who sleeps on his stomach chiming in. Although, I can fall asleep on my back or side almost as easily. Just depends on what feels most comfortable to me at the time.
Orthodox churches still don’t allow musical instruments, and Catholic churches didn’t allow them until the Middle Ages – there was a great furor when organs were introduced into the cathedrals of Europe. Many of the fathers speak of instruments being allowed according to the old covanent, as they were suitable for a less spiritually advanced people, and a foreshadowing of what was to come, much like animal sacrifice was. With the new covenant, they like sacrifices have passed away, and the human voice is the only instrument fit to be used to praise God.
Well, like I said regarding the Muslims, it depends on what you define as “music.” Qur’anic recitation, which is a lot like Jewish cantillation, is clearly music (check out Sheikh Abu Bakr ash-Shatri for an excellent example). The Muslim scholars defined that as not-music, though, and so it was allowed.
There are certainly certain sects of Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonite) in the US who feel that music has no place in church services today, with the non-accompanied “singing” of hymns in actuality having no music written for it… people speak/sing together but without any set medlodic line. More conservative sects may carry this into other areas of life, although certainly not during the rumspringa . I heard a tape of such hymn “singing” at a cultural interpretive center in Lancaster County PA once, & can assure everyone that, to put it mildly, the muezzin is far more musical.
You’ll very rarely run into Muslims who shun music in totality as a practical matter, even in a Wahhabist society. Qatar TV (a state owned operation in an officially Wahhabbist state) runs an Arabic video show every weekday called Clip Show with cute yound Palestinian hostesses showing MTV-style videos from Lebanon and other places. And even the Taliban eventually approved of Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens music. A lot of my English students wanted me to translate their Will Smith tapes for them, and one teenage girl even borrowed a Dylan tape of mine to make a copy. Only once did I run into a little awkwardness; teaching out of a book really for immigrants to the states we were doing a chapter called “Do You Like Jazz?” which was teaching music-based vocabulary and how to construct questions and answers to yes-or-no questions. Problem one was “OK, who even knows what jazz is?” Problem two was we had a few essays like “I Prefer Jazz to Rock” vs “I Prefer Rock to Jazz” and I had to append the option of “All Music Is Forbidden” :eek: 
for one or two students out of 20.
That I did so with a straight face, especially given the usual lighthearted kidding about culture differences we had every day, still amazes me.
My husband tried to sleep on his tummy, but apparently I get in the way. Maybe your sample is skewed towards women, Speaker?
Crandolph, you make an excellent point about preferring Muslim-run sites to Wikipedia. I cited Wikipedia because I assumed Wikipedia goes through *some * editing process, and you never know when any random website is good info or the unedited rantings of madmen. Regretfully, I do not know enough about Islam or the Arabic language to make good guesses.
Why?
I sleep on someone else’s stomach. Does that count? 
Er, because there are ahadith that say that’s what one should do. For orthodox Sunni Muslims, the hadith are second only to the Qur’an in formulating shari’ah. Much like the written Torah only gives the basics of halachah, with elaborations and practical points fleshed out in the Talmud, the Qur’an only gives the basics of shari’ah, with the rest coming from the hadith and from later commentary. For example, the Qur’an makes reference to the obligatory prayers, and the times they are to be performed, but for details on how to perform them, how one should stand and bow, what one should say, etc., one must rely on the hadith.
To ward against Shaytaan. A devil will give you nightmares.
Sorry. I mean, was there any logical reason for such a hadith, or just a weird taboo that became scripture? Was it, “Don’t sleep on your stomach because your face will be turned toward Hell, when it should be turned toward God or Mecca,” or was it just “Don’t sleep on your stomach–'cause I said so.”
I believe it was because Muhammad had seen a vision of the people in hell, and they laid on their stomachs, and he felt that it was not right that Muslims should lay the same way as they do in hell.
There’s some significant variation in Islamic sects as to which hadith are apocryphal and which aren’t. I think it becomes important to note precisely where the passge appears, and who regards it as valid.
There are also a lot of variations in belief regionally in which local tradition - including pre-Islamic tradition - gets overlaid in such a way that people have come to believe that certain practices (female “circumscision” being a notorious example) are religious when in fact they’re cultural. We have any number of similar analogies in Christianity (Little Drummer Boy, Santa Claus, etc.). Although in this case it looks as if the sleeping thing is out of a hadith, in general I’d be careful to sift local traditions from worldwide Islamic belief in other cases like this.
Ok, I couldn’t find the hadith I was looking for, possibly because it appears that roughly half of my Islamic library did not follow me in my recent move, and is probably in an attic somewhere. However, I did find this article that gives several citations from the hadith about the sunnah of sleeping. Notably,