An Innovation Rather Than a Wrong Method

Where the Naqshbandi order objects to music as the wrong method for its own path, Wahhabi and Salafi currents object to musical devotion on an entirely different basis, one that reaches Sufi orders and non Sufi Muslims alike. Their reasoning follows the same bidah framework that leads them to reject shrine visitation and the mawlid: since the Prophet and his earliest companions are not recorded practicing devotional music or dance as worship, introducing either now counts as an innovation with no warrant in the first generations, whatever spiritual benefit its practitioners report from it. That argument extends well past the specific ecstatic forms, such as the Mevlevi whirling ceremony or Chishti qawwali singing, that some Sufi orders built entire devotional traditions around, toward a general suspicion of music in religious life some Wahhabi authorities have applied even outside explicitly devotional contexts. The two objections can look similar from the outside since both conclude that music has no place on the path, but they rest on different arguments and would not necessarily agree with each other's reasoning: a Naqshbandi teacher rejects sama as unsuited to a particular contemplative method still open to other paths, while a Salafi scholar rejects it as illegitimate religious innovation, a verdict that, on his own premises, extends to devotional music practiced anywhere in Islam, Sufi or not.