Dear Hadi,
Dear Reader,
Thank you for your question. Sometime back, we answered a related question. If you’d like to read that answer, here’s the link: Why are art, music, and dancing haram?
With regard to your specific question, there are a variety of opinions on the subject of music. Let’s begin with Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, from his book The Halal and Haram in Islam, in which he states, “Among the entertainments which may comfort the soul, please the heart, and refresh the ear is singing. Islam permits singing under the condition that it not be in any way obscene or harmful to Islamic morals.”
Later, he states, “It is reported that many Companions of the Prophet (may Allah be pleased with them) and second-generation Muslim scholars used to listen to singing and did not see anything wrong with it. As for the ahadith which have been reported against singing, they are all weak and have been shown by researchers to be unsound.”
Therefore, to answer your question: we strongly believe, and God knows best, that there is no problem with singing or listening to songs, so long as the lyrics are not obscene.
Other scholars, more conservative than Sheik al-Qaradawi, say that singing is not haram, but music is, and so if it is accompanied by music, it then becomes haram. This opinion, for instance, is expressed by the scholar Sheik Uthman al-Khamees.
And yet other scholars, like Sheik Tariq al Suwaidan, disagree and do not consider music intrinsically haram. He states that the hadeeths against music are all weak, except for one, which appears in Sahih al Bukhari, and it is in fact, this hadeeth that many conservative voices usually quote:
“From among my followers, there will be some people who will come to consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks, and the use of musical instruments, as lawful….” (Sahih all-Bukhari, Book 74, Hadith 16).
From this hadeeth, some conservative scholars surmise that musical instruments are haram and that the Prophet portended that a time would come when someone in his umma would make the haram into halal. However, even though the hadith appears in Sahih al Bukhari, the great medieval scholar Ibn Hazm, for example, did not accept this hadith as sound. Sheik al Suwaidan, moreover, considers that the prohibitions in this hadith are of two types: general, such as illicit sex, and conditional, such as silk, which is certainly halal for women. He believes that music falls into the conditional category and becomes haram when combined with the other harams e.g. alcohol consumption and impermissible sexual relations.
Please remember that we are not qualified to give religious fatwas, but that in our opinion, and God knows best, is that so long as the music and the lyrics are not illicit and do not encourage or lead to the illicit, then it should be permissible.
In peace.