Samāʿ means hearing, or audition. In Sufi usage it is the practice of listening to music, sung poetry or chanted verse as a religious act, sometimes with movement or dance. It is the most publicly visible thing the Sufi tradition does, and it was also among the most contested. Three of the books on this site take it up, and they do not agree.
Al-Ghazali gives it an entire chapter, and opens with an image rather than an argument:
“The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy. These harmonies are echoes of that higher world of beauty which we call the world of spirits.”
He then names his opponents. The Zahirites, he says, hold that God is altogether incommensurable with man and so deny that a man can really love God at all; what he takes for love of his Creator is “a mere projection, or shadow cast by his own fantasy.” On that view music can only ever concern creature-love, and is therefore unlawful as a religious exercise.
Al-Ghazali's reply is the sentence the chapter turns on, and it concedes more than it first appears to:
“Music and dancing do not put into the heart what is not there already, but only fan into a flame dormant emotions.”
The defence is real but conditional. If the love is there, music serves it. He is equally clear that the effect “is deeper in proportion as the natures on which they act are simple and prone to emotion,” and that what is fanned may as easily be “earthly and sensual” as “divine and spiritual.” The same fire, either way.
Al-Hujwīrī makes audition the eleventh and last of the veils he uncovers, and approaches it by way of the senses, arguing that hearing is what makes religion obligatory in the first place: belief in the Apostles “does not become obligatory until the obligatoriness of knowing God is ascertained by means of hearing.”
But his governing principle is that audition has no fixed value. It has the value of whoever is listening:
“Whatever is heard by penitents augments their contrition and remorse; whatever is heard by longing lovers increases their longing for vision; whatever is heard by those who have certain faith confirms their certainty… Audition is like the sun, which shines on all things but affects them differently according to their degree.”
He records, without mockery, the Sufis who gave it up. Some reasoned that since they belonged neither to those perfected in audition nor to those insulated by austerity, “it is better for us to abstain from audition and to occupy ourselves with something that is suitable to our state.” Others abstained on other people's account entirely — audition “is dangerous to the vulgar and their belief is disturbed by our taking part in it,” so “we have pity on the vulgar… and from altruistic motives decline to indulge in audition.”
He also preserves a genuinely unresolved technical dispute: whether audition belongs to absence or to presence. Some held it a faculty of beginners, used “when distracted by forgetfulness, in order to obtain concentration” — and therefore a distraction to anyone already concentrated, since “the lover who is united with his Beloved fixes his gaze on Him and does not need to listen to him.” Others held the opposite. (Chapter XXV)
Suhrawardī, writing the manual that became the standard handbook of the orders, is the most candid of the three about the practice's history. He does not claim ancient warrant for it:
“The reason of denial is that this custom is innovation, for in the time of Muhammad, of the sahaba, of the tabi'in, of the 'ulama, and of ancient shaikhs, this was not the custom. Some of the modern shaikhs have established the custom; and, since it is not opposed to the sunnat, held it laudable.”
His defence is therapeutic rather than scriptural. Austerity produces “weariness, sadness, kabʿz, and despair,” and the shaikhs devised assemblies of “sweet sounds, harmonious melodies and verses desire-exciting” to repel that. He sorts listeners into three kinds: those who “hear the address of God to themselves,” those who address God through the meanings of the verses, and — implicitly — the rest.
And he is blunt about how it goes wrong in practice, listing the real motives that fill such gatherings: the claim to food, “the inclination to dancing, to sport, and to pastime,” and “the desire of beholding things forbidden.” In his own day, he writes, many assemblies rest “on the claim of lust and of sensual delights — not on the principles of sincerity.” Whatever else may be permitted, “the abandoning of prayer is not lawful.” (Chapter V)
The three positions are not really contradictory so much as differently weighted. All three accept that samāʿ does something powerful; all three deny that it produces anything by itself. Al-Ghazali emphasises what it can release, al-Hujwīrī that its effect depends entirely on the listener, Suhrawardī that the institution is recent and easily corrupted. None of them treats the question as closed, which is worth remembering when it is presented today as though it were.
Related: ḥāl and maqām — audition is discussed in the sources chiefly as a means of inducing or receiving a ḥāl, and the kabʿz Suhrawardī mentions is qabḍ.
The passages above are quoted from complete public-domain translations, all of which are free to read here in full.
Read the Kashf al-MaḥjūbRead The Alchemy of HappinessRead the Awārif al-Maʿārif