Day the Music Died?

Al-Jazeera reports on the threat posed by Muslim fundamentalism to Iraqi musicians. Similar pieces have turned up in the Western media, discussing threats, intimidation, and violence against those who don't follow fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, especially in the south. For those interested, there is a great deal of dispute among Muslims over whether music is permitted. this scholar claims it is clearly forbidden, while these people are convinced that it isn't. The case that music is forbidden rests pretty strongly on the hadith corpus, which is contradictory on the subject, and the belief that all the verses forbidding that which distracts from religion mean quite literally anything that is not religious. To my outsider's perspective, these are some pretty thin arguments.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias points out a key source on the subject.