This entry examines Sahih al-Bukhari 5590, which foretells that some among the Muslim community will come to consider illegal sexual intercourse, silk, wine, and musical instruments lawful. The prediction concerns re-labeling — declaring the prohibited permissible — rather than mere transgression, and the entry also discloses a classical dispute over the report's chain. It is a prediction about jurisprudence as much as behavior.
The source text
“From among my followers there will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks and the use of musical instruments, as lawful.”
Sahih al-Bukhari 5590 · Grading: sahih (Bukhari by inclusion; Ibn Hajar affirmed its connected chain against Ibn Hazm's mu'allaq objection)
What was understood in the seventh century
The narration stands in Sahih al-Bukhari and is sahih by inclusion; Ibn Hajar affirmed its connected chain against Ibn Hazm's objection that it was mu'allaq (suspended), a dispute returned to below. It is attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The dispute matters because Bukhari's compilation is otherwise the benchmark of authenticity, and a suspended chain would be a rare vulnerability.
The distinctive feature of the wording is that it predicts not merely that Muslims would commit these acts — sin was assumed — but that some would come to declare them permissible, a re-labeling of the tradition's own categories. In the seventh century the community was small and doctrinally uniform on these prohibitions, so the foretold development had no internal precedent. The prediction, in other words, concerns the categories themselves being redrawn from inside the community, a future in which the prohibited is declared permitted rather than merely practiced.
The fulfillment record
Descriptively, the foretold re-labeling is observable. Recorded music is a universal feature of contemporary life, including in Muslim-majority societies — the global recorded-music market has grown for over a decade according to IFPI reporting — and alcohol is legally sold in most Muslim-majority states (see the WHO alcohol fact sheet). Public arguments that the Qur'an and Sunnah never prohibited music, or that the prohibitions are historically contingent, are now common currency in intra-Muslim debate, carried out openly in books, fatwa platforms, and mainstream media. None of these facts is contested; what is contested is whether they instantiate the hadith or merely postdate it, and whether re-labeling of the kind foretold is genuinely present in them.
The correspondence is sociological and ongoing rather than a dated event. It also presupposes the traditional rulings: for readers who reject those rulings, the hadith describes a legitimate scholarly development rather than a foretold deviation, and the entry notes that dependence openly. This is an unusual feature among the entries in this section: the evidence for fulfillment and the frame that makes it fulfillment stand or fall together.
Considerations and counterpoints
Ibn Hazm famously argued that the report's chain is disconnected in Bukhari and used this to deny the music prohibition itself; mainstream hadith scholarship, following Ibn Hajar's Taghliq al-Ta'liq, holds the chain connected through other routes, but the dispute deserves disclosure. Skeptics further argue that predicting future laxity is a standard religious trope requiring no foreknowledge, since every tradition anticipates its own decline — and that the argument is circular for anyone who disputes the underlying prohibitions. The entry discloses all three difficulties — the chain dispute, the trope objection, and the circularity — because each is independent and each is serious; a reader may accept the correspondence while weighing any one of them differently.
Credibility rating: Tier 2 · Interpretive — Sahih source and an observable modern phenomenon of re-labeling, but the correspondence is circular for readers who dispute the underlying prohibitions, and the chain has a noted (answered) mu'allaq controversy.