A nasheed is a genre of vocal Islamic devotional song, traditionally performed either entirely unaccompanied or with only simple percussion instruments such as the daf, a frame drum, setting religious themes including praise of God, devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, moral exhortation and spiritual reflection, in Arabic or in the many other languages spoken across the global Muslim world. The genre's traditional avoidance of melodic instrumentation reflects a widely, though not universally, held position within Islamic scholarly opinion that instrumental music carries a more ambiguous or restricted religious status than the human voice alone, a position that has historically shaped nasheed toward vocal-centered composition even as musical style, melody and vocal arrangement have varied considerably across regions and periods.
Nasheed is performed in a wide range of settings, from informal devotional gatherings and religious educational contexts to formal concert performance and, increasingly since the later twentieth century, commercial recording and broadcast, and the genre today spans considerable stylistic range, from simple, traditional unaccompanied vocal forms to more elaborately produced contemporary recordings that some listeners and scholars debate regarding how closely they still adhere to the genre's traditionally vocal-centered character.