While arguments associating music with immorality are found throughout history and cross-culturally, they are especially prominent in those cultures with an established courtesan/patron dynamic. Because the role of the courtesan linked musical entertainment to physical intimacy, their literary representations are often connected to discussions or criticisms regarding the place of music within the culture. In the early Islamic courts, singing slave girls (pl. qiy?n, sing. qayna) were essential to both private and public entertainments. The most skilled became part of the musician elite and established themselves as courtesans by holding a position of relative autonomy in comparison to other musical concubines (jawari, mughanni). Of the extant early Arabic sources for music, the Censure of Instruments of Diversion by Ibn Abi’l Dunya is considered the first treatise to question the legality of music in Islam. Ibn Abi’l Dunya argued that patronage of singing girls and listening to music for entertainment diverted one from religion, leading to drink, apostasy and physical transformation. In the Censure, singing girls are understood to be sinners already due to their visibility as performers; it is their acting as agents of corruption by encouraging musical patronage that is at issue. A similar argument is used by the jurist and religious scholar al-Ajurri in his Response to a question concerning music. Though not as well known, al-Ajurri’s Response is also among the earliest treatises regarding the question of music in Islam. Like the Censure, the Response links patronage of singing girls and music audition to corruption; concluding that music itself is effeminate and effeminizing and therefore immoral. In this paper, I discuss how both texts use the figure of the singing girl to represent the dangers of music and musical patronage. I begin with a brief summation of the development of a courtesan/patron dynamic within the complicated hierarchy of musicians and musical concubines in ninth- and tenth-century Abbasid court culture. Then, I summarize and compare the arguments of al-Ajurri and Ibn Abi’l Dunya and their place within the growing debates regarding music at the time. I conclude by comparing these arguments to the defamation of courtesans in select cultures as a means to connect singing girls to the broader context of rhetoric surrounding music and music performance.