Musicking and Islamic Law as a Problem of Methodology

The issue of music and Islamic law is considered in the aspect of the methodology due to the proper Arabic language picture of the world and mechanisms of theoretical thinking classical Arab-Muslim culture. The author clarifies that the procedure of inference in Islamic law did not concern music or musicians, but the actions of a person playing/listening music. On the grounds that legal power was epistemic, concentrated in the hands of private lawyers, there was no single center in Arab-Muslim culture from which the legislative decision regarding musicking/listening would extend to the entire Islamic world. The situation is different in the Russian Empire and the post-Soviet states, where, despite the external similarity with classical Islam, the attitude of a lawyer and a person who plays/listens music, for reasons of a cultural and historical nature, is built according to a hierarchical system of values and requires separate study without mechanically equating one historical phenomenon with another. It is shown that the contrarian dichotomy ‘permitted — forbidden — neutral’ appeared in modern science as a result of the universalist approach, did not take place in the legal field of the Arab-Muslim culture, which developed its own system of evaluating actions. The lawyer made a judgment, or ‘branch’, based on the basis-‘root’, which served as the textually fixed Koran and Sunnah, as well as the procedures of unanimous judgment and co-measurement, while the judgments themselves on the same fact could be contrastingly opposite, depending on the characteristics of the legal schools.