ABSTRACT
Last year, following the victory of the Talibans in Afganistan, most of the Western press published reports referring to various manifestations of the new regime’s fundamentalism. The predominant term or concept under which the writings of this category appear is sarriac which literally means listening or audition and by extension, the music listened to; it also includes dance as practised mainly by many mystic confraternities. The interminable debate about the sam already emerged during the first centuries of Islam and has been perpetuated with various degrees of intensity until our own days. From the foregoing general remarks it follows that from the very beginning the religious authorities in Islam, be they legalists, traditionalists or theologians, adopted a reserved attitude toward the overt use of music in worship.
