Sama, Arabic for "listening" or "audition", is the Sufi practice of spiritual listening to music, poetry and chant, often accompanied by movement, as a means of drawing near to God. In sama the recitation of mystical verse and the sound of instruments and voices are used to awaken love and longing for the divine and to induce states of ecstatic absorption in which the listener is carried beyond ordinary awareness. It rests on the Sufi conviction that beauty, and above all beautiful sound, can serve as a ladder to the divine, stirring in the heart a remembrance of its origin and a yearning to return to it.
The practice has been controversial within Islam from early on, and the Sufi tradition itself debated it carefully. Its defenders, drawing on the experiences of the mystics, held that music rightly used lifts the purified heart toward God; its critics warned that music risks stirring the lower passions rather than the love of God, and stricter jurists condemned it outright. Different Sufi orders accordingly embraced, regulated or rejected sama, and where it is practised it is hedged with conditions concerning who may take part and in what state.