Time is a fundamental issue in physics and cosmology, and a perennial problem in philosophy and theology. Ibn ‘Arabî had a unique and comprehensive view of Time, and nothing like it was ever developed by any other philosopher or scientist, before or after Ibn ‘Arabî. His writings on time are of great interest today. It can be fairly said that Ibn ‘Arabî’s view of time and the cosmos is a fruitful concept that potentially bridges the gap between traditional theological and metaphysical views of the world and the contemporary scientific views that are based on experimental procedures and logic.
Even among modern studies of Ibn ‘Arabî’s works, his unique view of time in its cosmological dimensions has received little attention, although his conception of time is indeed central to understanding, for example, what is called his theory of the oneness of being.
One reason for this relative neglect may be the difficult symbolic language he usually used, and the fact that he didn’t discuss this subject at length in any one place in his extant works – not even in the four chapters of his magnum opus, the Futûhât al-Makkiyya, whose titles relate directly to time. His overall cosmological understanding of time has to be pieced together from scattered treatments in many works and different contexts within the Futûhât.
Known by imagination
To start with, Ibn ‘Arabî considers time to be a product of our human imagination, without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence, the four “mothers of existence”.
We need this imagined conception of time to chronologically arrange events, and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects. But for Ibn ‘Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion, nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed.
Thus Ibn ‘Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, physical time and spiritual time. He explains that they originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains how this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous.
Ibn ‘Arabî also gives a precise definition of terms such as the “day”, drawing on the specific usage of the Qur’an and earlier Arab conceptions of time. Ibn ‘Arabî shows how the definitions of words such as “day” are related to the relative motions of the celestial orbs (including the earth), where every orb has its own “day”, and how those days are normally measured by our normal observable day that we count on the earth.
The Day of Eternity
In fact, rather than the day or any other time unit, Ibn ‘Arabî considers the main primitive time cycle to be the cosmic, divine Week. Like our normal week, this is composed of seven Days, but each Day is actually a moment in our time-frame since at every moment in any specific point in space there is a full Day around the globe. Thus he explains how the world is created in seven (cosmic, divine) “Days”, what happens on each Day, and the underlying ontological relation between the Week’s Days of creation and the seven fundamental divine Names of Allah. Ibn ‘Arabî also shows that all the Days of this cosmic Week, including the last Day (Saturday), all actually occur in Saturday, the “Day of eternity”.
This complex understanding of the ever-renewed divine creation in fact underlies his conception of the genuine unification of space and time, where the world is created “in six Days” (from Sunday to Friday) as space, and then is displayed or manifested on Saturday in the process that we perceive as time.
However, we perceive this process – of creation in six Days and the subsequent appearance of the world on the seventh Day – we perceive all this only as one single moment of our normal time.
In fact, based on Qur’anic indications and the corresponding experiential confirmations of the mystical “knowers” (‘urafâ’), Ibn ‘Arabî insists that the entire created world ceases to exist immediately and intrinsically right after its creation, and that then it is re-created again and again. For him, this process of divine re-creation happens gradually (in series), not at once: i.e., it always takes six divine “Days” to be prepared and the last Day to manifest. However, we – the creatures – do not witness this re-creation in six Days, since we only witness the created world in the seventh Day (Saturday, which he calls “the Day of eternity”). So the creation of the world in six Days actually happens every moment, perpetually and recurrently. Therefore, those first six divine Days are actually the creative origin of space and not time. Time is only the seventh Day. This novel conception, the “Week” as the basic unit of space-time, is one which could have a specific and quite essential meaning in physics and cosmology.
The Day of Creation
Even more important in Ibn ‘Arabî’s conception of time, however, is his understanding of the “Day” of creation as a minimum indivisible Day, a kind of instant of time (al-zaman al-fard) that also includes (since it includes all of creation) the instants of that normal day itself which we live in and divide into hours, minutes, seconds and so on. In order to explain this initially paradoxical notion, Ibn ‘Arabî introduces – again based
on initially mysterious Qur’anic indications – the different nature and roles of three very different kinds of compounded days (the “circulated” days, the “taken-out” days and the “intertwined” days), which highlight the fact that the actual flow of time is not as uniform and smooth as we feel and imagine.
The key concept underlying these complex developments is that Ibn ‘Arabî emphasizes, following the Qur’an, that only one creative “event” should be happening on every Day (of the actual cosmic, divine Days of creation), and not the many different (temporal and spatial) events that we observe. To reconcile this apparent contradiction between the unitary Act (and “instant”) of Creation and the apparent phenomena of spatial and temporal multiplicity, he reconstructs the normal, observable days that we actually perceive in a special manner that is complexly grounded in the different divine “Days” of the actual flow of time.
Link between science and mysticism
Philosophers and scientists in general try to understand the world through observations, experiment and logical deduction. As far as the cosmos is concerned, working “backwards”, they try to find out its initial state by extrapolating in various ways from current observations. Although Ibn ‘Arabî considers the intellect unbounded or unlimited as a receptive tool, it is quite limited as a ratiocinative think tool because it relies on limited senses. Therefore the intellect alone – as a thinking tool – cannot describe the origin of the world because it is necessarily a part of it. That is why the Sufis rely on the “heart” (the locus of spiritual “tasting” and inspiration, in the language of the Qur’an) rather than the discursive intellect.
The principle of perpetual re-creation is intimately related to what has been called Ibn ‘Arabî’s theory of the “oneness of being”. Although he never employed the famous term directly, it is quite evident that this characteristic understanding of the oneness of being dominates Ibn ‘Arabî’s many writings. His focus in applying the oneness of being is on understanding the cosmos and how it works. Or rather, he declared that his aims were not to explain the world, but rather to acquire more knowledge of the world as a structure created according to the Image of Allah, so that he might acquire more knowledge of Allah Himself.
All the same, however, throughout the Futûhât and other shorter books Ibn ‘Arabî gives a great many cosmological explanations and sometimes logical analyses of his metaphysical visions. This is why it is important to study Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings, since they may provide a real link between philosophy and science, on the one hand, and mysticism and theology.
This comprehensive cosmological vision, when added to his understanding of the actual flow of time based on the three kinds of days, can be used to build a new, unique, model of the cosmos. In addition to explaining the “oneness of being” and “creation in six Days”, other important results
of Ibn ‘Arabî’s unique concept of time include the ways it helps to resolve the famous EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox, thus potentially reconciling the two great theories of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity in modern physics, how it offers a new understanding of the historical Zeno’s paradoxes, and how it potentially explains the reason behind quantization, how quantities are either discrete or continuous. But the discussion of issues such as these is too complex to go into here.
Ibn ‘Arabî – Time and Cosmology by Mohamed Haj Yousef, Routledge, Abingdon, 2008. ISBN 978-0-415-44499-6 (hardback).
Ibn ‘Arabî - Time and Cosmology is the first comprehensive attempt to set forth all the relevant dimensions of time in Ibn ‘Arabi’s wider cosmology and cosmogony.
James Morris says in his introduction to this work: “this book begins with a helpful survey of the standard theories of cosmology and time found in earlier Hellenistic thinkers, which were largely taken over into the succeeding traditions of Islamic philosophy and science. However, the most creative and unfamiliar aspects of Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmological ideas – especially his distinctive conception of the ever-renewed, ongoing and instantaneous nature of the cosmic process of creation (tajdîd al-khalq) – are carefully woven together from what have always been profoundly mysterious, problematic, and complexly interwoven symbolic formulations in the Qur’an. Thus the main focus and novel scholarly contribution of the central chapters of this volume lie in the author’s careful unfolding and clarification of the intended meanings and references of this dense Qur’anic cosmological symbolism of time and creation, as that multi-dimensional world-view is systematically expounded in elaborate accounts scattered throughout several of Ibn ‘Arabi’s major works. Every reader who engages with this demanding discussion will come away, at the very least, with a heightened appreciation of the symbolic richness and challenging intellectual dilemmas posed by this unduly neglected – yet arguably quite central and unavoidable – dimension of the Qur’an and its metaphysical teachings.”
Detail of an astrolabe made in al-Andalus during Ibn ‘Arabi’s lifetime. Astrolabes were used in areas such as astronomy, astrology, navigation, surveying, determining prayer times and the direction of the Qibla
