Last updated: April 30th, 2025 at 12:22 pm · Est. Reading Time: < 1 minute
Listening to songs was a popular entertainment activity of pre-Islamic Arabs. The singers usually engaged with musicians who played different musical instruments to adorn the voice of a singer and enrich the overall impression.
Our knowledge of singing and listening to singing comes from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Pre-Islamic poetry has a lot of references to music and musical instruments.
As pre-Islamic Arabic poetry attributes the art of singing to the ‘singing girls’ and as the listeners were mostly elite men, it can be assumed that playing music and listening to it was a secular activity. It was for pleasure, rather than for religion. This assertion could be particularly true for pagan Arabs. They did not use to sing as part of worship.
References
Henry George Farmer, A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century (London: Luzac, 1929) 1 – 19.
Shiloah, “Music in the Pre-Islamic period as reflected in Arabic writings of the first Islamic Centuries,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 7 (1986), 109 – 120.
Further Reading
History of Islam, Social Structure of Pre-Islamic Arabs, https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/