TIME IN ISLAM


Does the world of Islam, occupying the center of the globe, possess a concept of time characteristically its own, or can the Islamic notion of time be exhaustively explained by a cluster of borrowings from its neighbors and cultural ancestors? Is there a unity to the Islamic notion of time, or is Islam a universal culture encompassing many languages and ethnic groups, each with its own notion of time? Can one only speak of a spectrum of ideas on time in Islam or are there constants that would provide parameters defining Islam authentically as a religion and culture? On the one hand, are there distinct and perduring elements in the Islamic notion of time that challenge the current clash-of-civilization theories to articulate a definition of Islamic civilization upon which to base their axioms? On the other hand, do developments in the Islamic concept of time reveal the monolithic claims of Muslim fundamentalism to rest upon an idealized and homogenized vision of the past?

The search for defining characteristics of Islamic culture and religion might begin with many notions, including monotheism, revelation, prophethood, or religious law. I have chosen the concept of time for two reasons: first, time appears to provide a more neutral point of comparison than other more religiously charged notions; second, time is not limited to one particular field of Islam, but can be traced in a broad cross-section of language and poetry, indispensable in Islamic astronomy and music, constitutive for Islamic ritual and law, and crucial in Islamic theology, cosmology, and philosophy. From the great range of these fields I would like to select four points for my reflections in the present paper: the vision of time in the Qur'dn and Muslim tradition, the atomism of time peculiar to Islamic theology, the paradigm of time prevalent in the medieval mystical philosophy of Islam, and the rhythm of the Muslim calendar that provides the basis for Islamic historiography.

In the pre-Islamic era, Arab time was characterized by fatalism, dahr, which erases human works without hope for life beyond death. Also called the "days" or the "nights," dahr is the cause of earthly happiness and misery; it is death's doom and the measure of destiny; it changes every- thing, and nothing resists it. While dahr held sway like fate, it could be transcended by a moment marked out in tribal memory and often preserved in poetry. Dahr was thus punctuated by the Days of the Arabs, ayyam al-cArabj the days of vengeance in combat and tribal prowess, when memorable events placed markers in the recollection of the course of events.

The Qur'an rejects the pre-Islamic fatalism of dahr. Instead, it explains time from the perspective of a transcendent monotheism pro- mismig paradise and threatening eternal damnation. Just as the pre-Islamic Arabs had their days of victory and vengeance, so Allah had His days of deliverance and punishment. God's personal command, "'Be!' and it is, kunfa-yak Cn" obliterated the spell of fate. God gave His command when He formed the first human being and made the heavens and the earth. He determines the beginning of a person's life and calls each individual to a final account after death. There is no place in the Qur'an for impersonal time; each person's destiny is in the hands of the God who creates male and female, gives life and brings death, and grants wealth and works destruction. God is active even in a person's sleep, for "God takes the souls unto Himself at the time of their death, and that which has not died in its sleep. He keeps those on whom He has decreed death, but looses the others till a stated term."5 From the "Be!" of a person's creation to the time of death, human existence falls under the decree of God: Allah is the Lord of each instant; what He has determined happens.

Muslim tradition, or Hadfth, amplified the divine determination included in the Qur'an, and transformed Muhammad's stress on divine omnipotence into a rigid predeterminism. Saving dahr from Qur'anic condemnation, HIadlIth identified dahr with God through a powerful divine utterance and warned against slandering dahr through a famous saying of the Prophet.6 In order to establish that Allah's unalterable decree is invariably fulfilled, another strand of Hadith introduces the notion that everything that happens is written in a heavenly book. While each em- bryo is still in the womb, an angel writes down the daily ration, the works, the moments of misery or happiness, and the hour of death of the man or woman it will become. Combining pre-Islamic notions of all- pervasive time with the idea of God's decree in the Qur'an, Muslim tradition saw time as a series of predetermined events binding divine omnipotence to the certain occurrence of each instant of a person's life span.8 Unavoidable as fate and irreversible as time, each instant happened solely through God's very own action.

The most common Islamic term for time, zamwin, does not appear in the Qur 'an, nor does qidam, its counterpart for eternity. The Arab lexicographers, however, had a great variety of terms for time. In general, they distinguished dahr, time from the beginning of the world to its end, from zaman, a long time having both beginning and end; Casr, a span of time; bin, a period of time, little or much; dawim, duration; mudda, a space of duration; waqt, a moment in time; in, present time; awmn time season; yawm, a time, whether night or day; and sia, a while or an hour. Abad was duration without end and azal duration without beginning, to which qidam, time without beginning, corresponded to its primary sense as distinct from sarmad, incessant continuance. Iuliid, perpetual existence, was implicit in the Qur'anic day of eternity, the entrance to dar al-bulfi, paradise.9 It is obvious that these distinctions do not reflect a quasi-technical usage of each term to the exclusion of others, but rather an approximately predominant meaning that often blends with the neighboring terms in the actual literary use. When it came to translating Greek philosophical texts into Arabic, the most commonly employed correspondences were chro'nos, translated by zaman, ailon by dahr, kairos by waqt, and diastasis by mudda.

Through the exposure of Greek thought, the philosophers of Islam became familiar with two powerful and mutually opposed philosophical notions of time. For those who followed the Aristotelian view, time was an accident of motion, while for those who espoused the Plotinian con- cept, time had no extra-mental reality; rather it was the stream of consciousness of a thinking mind, a duration existing independently of motion. Aristotle had attempted to prove the eternity of the universe from the nature of time. In the Plotinian view, time did not come into existence with the creation of the universe, but existed from eternity as the duration of God's infinite consciousness.

While Islamic philosophical notions of time oscillated between Aristotelian motion and Plotinian duration, it was the atomism of Democritus that appealed most strongly to the creators of normative Islamic theology. Atomic theory opened a way to link the immutability of reality with the observable changes and manifold forms in nature by describing reality as composed of simple and unchangeable minute particles, called atoms. The atoms and their accidents exist for only an instant. In every instant, God is creating the world anew; there are no intermediate causes. God can be thought of as continually creating the universe from nothing." Subverting Greek "materialistic" atomism, the Muslim theologians made atomism an instrument of divine providence and held that each moment within time is the direct creation of the eternally active God. Of itself, creation is discontinuous; it appears continuous to us only because of God's compassionate consistency.

Islamic atomism may be illustrated by the famous example of a person engaged in writing.- Allah creates within the human being first the will and then the capacity to write, creating both will and capacity anew in every instant. Then God creates, anew in every instant, the movement of the hand, and finally, the motion of the pen concurrent with it. Every instant and action in the process of writing is independent from every other; all stages of the process issue from God alone. It is only in appearance that there is a coherent action of writing. Similarly, a self- consistent world in space and time, working harmoniously, is only an appearance. The one true actor is God alone. The link of causality that appears to rule the world and human life becomes subordinate to Allah, and natural causes give way to divine will. As a rule, God does not interrupt the continuity of events, though He is able to intervene at any moment by what is commonly termed a miracle but simply means an interruption of His customary activity. Atomism was not only most congenial to a vision of God acting instantaneously in the world as the sole true cause, it also proved most closely akin to Arabic grammar, which lacks genuine verbs for "to be" and "to become." Neither does Arabic employ the tenses of past, present, and future. Instead, it uses verbal aspects of complete and incomplete, marking the degree to which an action has been realized or is yet to be realized without distinguishing precisely between present and future.

While Muslim philosophers and theologians sought to explain time, the mystics of Islam set out to experience it. For the Sufi mystics the paradigm of time is suspended between two days, the Day of Primal Covenant at the dawn of creation and the Day of Final Judgment when the world comes to its catastrophic end. Time resembles a parabola stretching from infinity to infinity, an arc anchored in eternity at its origin and end, which reaches its apex in a mystic's ecstatic moment of memory and certitude. The early Sufis discovered the decisive religious moment for humanity in preexistence, when all human beings heard and understood God's self-revelation for the first time at the very birth of creation.'3 By recognizing the preexistential origin of all humanity on the Day of Covenant, the Sufis established a dimension of time that traces the present moment back to eternity in the past and balances the eschato- logical thrust of the Qur'an from the present to eternity in the future, reached at the Day of Judgment.

Through a distinct meditational technique, known as dikr, recollection of God, the mystics return to their primeval origin on the Day of Covenant, when all of humanity (symbolically enshrined in their prophetical ancestors as light particles or seeds) swore an oath of allegiance and witness to Allah as the one and only Lord. Breaking through to eternity, the mystics relive their waqt, their primeval moment with God, here and now, in the instant of ecstasy, even as they anticipate their ultimate destiny. Sufi meditation captures time by drawing eternity from its edges in pre- and post-existence into the moment of mystical experience.

The medieval Sufi, Ibn al-cArabi, analyzed the concept of time on the basis of the Prophet's tradition that Allah is time or dahr. Just as God's being is everlasting, so is God's time; it is eternity, beginningless and endless. Human beings, who are called in Sufi language sons of their moments, may also be understood as being, not having, time or waqt. Human time is momentary. Each moment is the reflection of God's eternity in the person's receptivity to the divine action at each and every instant. Seen in this way, there are two levels of time: that of God, dahr, and that of human beings, waqt. Yet both levels are inconsistent with our ordinary conception of time, because God's time stretches out to eternity while the time of humans shrinks to a mere instant, a dot without duration. Caught between these two modes, divine everlastingness and mortal momentariness, we human beings construct a notion of time. The zamdn or chronos, that is imaginary and subjective, though inspired by the real and objective time of dahr and waqt.

The imaginary zaman can be understood through two principal models: that of cosmology and that of relativity. The cosmological model is based on an image of the universe that is largely derived from the Ptolemaic system of the spheres and the story of creation known from Scripture. Its central notion is the idea of the complete day, yawm, a sequence of night and day, which complement each other like male and female or like activity and passivity. Night and day come into being with the revolution of the spheres setting the universe in motion, but become discernible only through the creation of the sun and its course. In the model of relativity, however, God and the world are seen as the two terms of a quasi-temporal relation between Creator and creatures. Time viewed from the side of God is real but has no existence apart from God. Perceived from the vantage of human beings, time is imaginary and lacks any existence of its own. Whether conceived from the human or the divine side, time is a mere relation. Yet this mere relation is infinite, just like empty space. It can be divided into ever smaller or larger time- segments in a duration that has neither beginning nor end. There is, however, an implicit link between our imaginary time and God's real time, which can be aptly described by one of Ibn al-cArabi's images: Any point along a circle may be seen as the point separating past from future. While having no extension whatsoever, this point of the "now" is still part of the actual extent of the circular line. In other words, although a product of our imagination, time is, in each moment, the virtual and actual object of interaction with eternity. Eternity belongs to God alone, but God's creature participates in the present moment.


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