A Refutation of Those Who Permit Music and Musical Instruments, and a Misinterpretation of the Statement of Allah the Exalted: {And of the people is he who buys idle talk}

The Shaykh : We often hear fatwas that contradict the path of the righteous Salaf, the four Imams, and others, which some Islamic writers today claim in the name of making things easy and being lenient with people. You must have heard someone explicitly permitting musical instruments, even though the scholars of old and their followers today interpret the statement of Allah the Exalted by explaining "idle talk" as singing that distracts those who engage in it from performing many Islamic obligations, which may include maintaining the prayer. When some people interpret this phrase "idle talk" as speech that contradicts the Shari'ah, or as inciting chaos and noise against the word of Allah, and do not also interpret it as singing, despite the many hadiths from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) regarding the prohibition of musical instruments, which supports the interpretation coming from the Salaf that "idle talk" is singing. Among those hadiths, for example—and I am not listing them all—is what al-Bukhari narrated in his Sahih as a mursal hadith, and a large group of hadith scholars connected it with a sound chain to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), who said: meaning fornication meaning animal silk, known in some countries as "local" silk, i.e., non-plant silk We hear today from many people who declare it openly, either in writing or in lectures, that musical instruments are permissible, given the ingenuity of the European disbelievers today in inventing many, many instruments. If a listener hears them, his strength collapses, his Islamic meanings and Islamic honor are lost, and he no longer cares about the open sinfulness or lewdness that occurs there. When we hear such fatwas, we must stand before them questioning, and it is not permissible to stand before them submissive, saying to them: How do you expand the meaning of such that it includes building mosques? So that no rich person remains who donates from his abundant wealth beyond what Allah the Mighty and Majestic has obligated upon him in zakah. He does no good except within the limits of the obligatory, while he has prevented himself from voluntary acts, because these scholars have found for him a way that any good you spend can be considered part of the obligatory zakah.
And so, the examples multiply in interpreting texts from the Book and texts from the Sunnah contrary to what the scholars of the Muslims were upon in the past.