2.2 Ibn al-Arabi’s View of Time?

To start with, Ibn al-Arabi declares that time is an imagined attribute that does not exist on its own; it has no separate physical or non-physical entity. He argues that “time in relation to us is like eternity in relation to Allah, and since eternity is a negative attribute that does not exist on its own, so time in relation to the contingent world, or the entire cosmos, is (also) an imagined attribute that does not exist.” [I.291.28]. In his major book Meccan Revelations, he says: “we showed in this book and in our book ‘The Time’ that time is something that has no (real) existence” [I.490.17]. Although this last book is not found today, Ibn al-Arabi’s concept of time is developed in quite detailed fashion in the Futuhat, though it is scattered all around the book and not placed in specific parts, including even those chapters 59, 291 and 390 whose titles relate directly to time.

The concept of time is needed to compare the sequence of events or motion, but real existence is only attributed to the thing that actually moves, not to the abstractions of motion, time or space in which motion is observed:

Time and space are consequences of natural bodies. Time is something imagined that does not exist (in itself), but it is introduced by the motion of orbs and localized things when we ask about them “when” . So time and space do not exist in reality, but existence is to the things that move and still. [II.458.1]

This is not only to say that “motion” , “space” and “time” do not have real “physical” existence, but they do not even exist separately in an abstract way: their existence is a mere illusion; it is only a projection of the human imagination.

It is not very easy to deny the existence of time, space and motion, since they are widely encountered in our experience of everyday life. However, Ibn al-Arabi is not the first one to propose this. We shall see below that Aristotle gives a very simple proof that time is not real. The real existence of motion and space, however, are far more unusual and intricate to disprove. Perhaps only Zeno (b. ca. 488 BC) was brave enough to postulate the illusion of motion, and he composed many related mathematical riddles that are still logically unsolvable even after the development of modern mathematical analysis and the theory of sets. The main idea behind Ibn al-Arabi’s mysterious conceptions here is his controversial theory of the Oneness of Being, which we have been discussed in Chapter V of Volume I, as it will be also elucidated throughout this book. Clearly, if we suppose that the “real” existence in the World is uniquely One, there would be no meaning to motion, and hence to time and space; or at least they would have to be redefined. We shall discuss in Zeno’s paradoxes in the coming chapters and we shall see that they cannot be explained without the re-creation principle.

Coming back to time, we can say that it can be very easily shown that it is in fact imaginary. Aristotle says in his Physics that “time consists of two parts, one of which has existed (and gone, i.e. the past), the other does not yet exist (i.e. the future), so how can something exists which is composed of what does not exist?” Lettinck (1994).

So if there is any real existence to time it will be in the present, or the “now” , not the past or future, but Aristotle then gives another argument that also the “now” is not time. It is rather a point in the imaginary time, like a point on the line; although the line is composed of points, still each point is not a line. Likewise time is the sum of all present moments that exist only one by one, and each one present moment (alone) is not time. Time therefore is the mind’s projection on the continuous presence from the future to the past through the present.

Similarly, Ibn al-Arabi gives a straightforward and profound meaning of time, right in the title of chapter 390 of the Futuhat, where he says: “the time of a thing is its presence” [III.546.16]. Then he explains that the time of the Lord is the “servant” and the time of the servant is the Lord, [III.547.31], because the Lord deserves this name by the servant, since He would not be called “Lord” if there are no servants to worship Him; likewise the servant deserves this name by (his relation to) the Lord. In the same way, when we say for example: “Amr is the son of Zaid” , this means, according to Ibn al-Arabi, that the time of the fatherhood of Amr is the sonhood of Zaid, and vice versa. Or in his own words: “the time of the father is the son, and the time of the son is the father” [III.547.36]. That is why he named this chapter (390) as: “the time of a thing is its presence, but I am out of time and You are out of time, so I am Your time and You are my time” . This means: “I am Your presence and You are my presence” .

In the usual common sense, time is a tool used by our perception to chronologically classify the events or motion of objects; it would not have any meaning without motion or change. This is why we do not feel time while we are asleep; so we have to look for some kind of a standard reference motion (such as the Sun, the Moon, the stars, or a watch) in order to realize how much of time has elapsed since we went into deep sleep. Time, therefore, has no real absolute meaning; it is only used relative to something in order to describe its state of existence. This is why Ibn al-Arabi sometimes uses the words “time” and “state” as synonyms, as when he says: “as you like (you can) say from the time of its existence, or the state of its existence” [II.281.11].

So the real meaning of time is reduced to the existence of the World in the “present moment” , which has no duration or extension, because the future and the past are mere imagination. If we know that, Ibn al-Arabi declares, there is no problem to go along with people and say that “time” is the daytime and night, or that it is a duration taken by the motion of objects, or it is comparing an event to another when someone asks about it by “when?” , because these definitions have been widely used and they are correct in relation to time, in the common sense [III.548.7].

Despite the fact that he considers time to be imaginary and having no real existence, Ibn al-Arabi stresses that it is one of the four “mothers (fundamental principles) of existence” : the monads, the forms (or accidents), time and space. Everything else in the manifest World is composed of these four parameters [III.404.22]. He also argues that those four parameters, together with another six categories that are derived from them, are enough to describe the state of everything in the World. Together these make up the familiar ten Aristotelian categories: i.e., substance (jawhar), quantity, quality, relation, time, place, situation or position, possession, or state, passion and action; although the meaning of jawhar here is of course radically different from its usual Aristotelian usage, reflecting in this case the theological inspiration of Ibn al-Arabi’s terminology. Yet those four “mothers of existence” , including the monads, in Ibn al-Arabi’s distinctive conception of the Oneness of Being, are nothing but imaginary forms or reflections of the unique “Single Monad” which is the only thing that can be described as having a real existence: all other things in the World are different forms of this Single Monad, including “vision and the visible, hearing and the heard, imagination and the imaginable, thinking and the thinkable, ... etc” [III.404.12]. This latter concept reflects Ibn al-Arabi’s controversial theory of the Oneness of Being.

The importance of understanding the reality of time is, therefore, to provide the link between the actual unity of this Single Monad and the apparent multiplicity of the witnessed World. That is why Ibn al-Arabi says that:

The science of time is a noble science from which eternity is truly known. ... Only the Elites of Sages among “the True Men” may ever come to know it (eternity). This (reality) is known as “the First Age” or “the Age of ages” , from which time is emerging. [I.156.34-157.1]

Therefore, we may summarize that time, as we ordinarily experience it, is defined by motion, and motion is defined by the different positions of the monads, whose different states (times or instances) are forms of the Single Monad, which alone is described by real existence. The Duality of Time Theory explains how exactly this Single Monad is creating the individual monads in the inner levels of time, which is to say: how geometry is formulated, and then how this creation is evolving in the outer time that we encounter.