In the contemporary era, the Islamic system faces governance challenges across a wide range of issues. Some of these issues, such as the question of hijab, suffer primarily from the absence of an effective governance model, while their jurisprudential formulation remains relatively clear. Music, however, faces a dual challenge: in addition to a governance deficit, it is also afflicted by ambiguity in its jurisprudential conceptualization. This ambiguity stems from the fact that, within the Shiʿi juridical tradition, music has generally been treated as a subsidiary topic and, despite the abundance of relevant narrations, has not even been examined as an independent chapter of jurisprudence.



Adopting a social approach and employing an analytical-ijtihādī methodology, this article reconceptualizes music as a multidimensional phenomenon situated within its social context. Its central finding is that the object of prohibition in the narrations is not merely a sound possessing certain characteristics—such as tarjiʿ (melodic modulation) and ṭarab (ecstatic musical stimulation)—but rather “sound within its social context,” a context that encompasses cultural, economic, and moral dimensions. Accordingly, although sound itself remains an essential component of the legal subject (mawḍūʿ al-ḥukm), its social setting must also be regarded as part of that subject. Consequently, the same sound may receive different legal rulings—from prohibition to obligation—depending on the context in which it occurs.



This jurisprudential formulation provides the necessary foundation for the social extension of Islamic legal reasoning and for the development of a governance model for music within an Islamic framework.