4.4  Origin and Structure of Time

---

Although Ibn al-Arabi declares that the notion of an independent, self-substantial time is “imaginary”, or created by our mental estimation, he still considers it to be one of the main constituents of existence. He also speaks about two kinds of time, physical and psychic, arguing that our feeling of time originates from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, as demonstrated in Figure 4.4. On the other hand, he declares clearly that time is actually discrete or quantized. Borrowing the term from the Quran, he calls the minimum “day” as the “day of event”, or also: the single day. Surprisingly, however, this single day of event, though discrete and indivisible, equals the normal human day itself, the same complete revolution of the heavens as observed from the Earth, or the 24-hour day. This is however easily explained when we take into account re-creation principle, as explained in section 2.1, in addition to the various new conceptions, such as the circulated and intertwined days, all explained in sections 4.10.1, 4.10.3 and 4.10.2. In addition to that, Ibn al-Arabi speaks about circular and cyclic time and, like some modern theories of physics, he considers time to be curved, relative and non-homogeneous.

Since he considers it as the real unit of time, Ibn al-Arabi pays special attention to the different meanings of the “day”. He gives precise definitions of the day and the night on the Earth, then generalizes that in application to the other orbs or celestial spheres, since every orb has its own day and night, and those days range from the minimum and finite singular Day of event to the infinite divine “Age”.

To start with, Ibn al-Arabi declares that time is an imagined attribute that doesn’t exist on its own; so it has no separate entity. He argues that: ‘Time in relation to us is like eternity in relation to Allah, and since eternity is a negative attribute that doesn’t exist on its own, so time in relation to the contingent world or the entire cosmos is also an imagined attribute that doesn’t exist.’ [I.291.28]

In his major book of the Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi 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 Meccan Revelations, 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 the 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 also a consequence of natural bodies, but time is something imagined that doesn’t exist (in itself), but is introduced by the motion of orbs and localized things when we ask about them by ‘when’. So time and space don’t 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 don’t have real physical existence, but they don’t 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 that. Aristotle gives very simple proof that time is not real, by explaining that time consists of two parts, one of which has existed and passed, the other doesn’t yet exist, so how can something exists which is composed of what doesn’t exist? If there is any real existence to time it will be in the present, the now, not the past nor the future, but the present is not time, rather it is a point in 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, but each one present moment, alone, is not time. Therefore, time is the mind’s projection on the continuous presence from the future to the past through the present.

Similarly, Ibn al-Arabi gives a straightforwardly profound meaning of time. Right in the title of chapter 390 of the Meccan Revelations, 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 wouldn’t be called “Lord” if there are no servants to worship Him; likewise the servant deserves his name by his relation to the Lord. Similarly he says: “the time of the father is the son, and the time of the son is the father” [III.547.36]. That is why Ibn al-Arabi named this chapter 390 as: “the time of a thing is its presence, but I am not in time and You are not in time, so I am Your time and You are my time’. This means: “I am Your presence and You are my presence”. 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.

The real existence of motion and space, however, is far more unusual and intricate to disprove. Perhaps only Zeno was brave enough to postulate the illusion of motion and he composed many related riddles that are still logically unsolvable, as we explained in chapter II, section 5. The main idea behind Ibn al-Arabi’s mysterious conceptions here is his controversial theory of the oneness of being, as described in section 1, on which the Single Monad Model is based. 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.

Despite the fact that he considers time to be imagined and having no real existence, Ibn al-Arabi stresses that it is one of the four fundamental principles of existence: the forming monad, the accidental form, time and space. Everything else in the manifest world is combined 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, physical and metaphysical.

Ibn al-Arabi distinguishes between two kinds of time; natural and para-natural, or: physical and spiritual. The first is used to compare the motion of bodies and orbs, while the latter is used to compare the changes in spiritual states, such as realizing and knowing.

Moreover, in Islamic mysticism we read many fantastic stories that apparently look fictitious even to physicists who are familiar with concepts such as time travel and space-time wormholes. Ibn al-Arabi refers to the relativity of time in many direct and indirect ways. He explicitly says: “minutes are like years while sleeping” [IV.337.1], but sleeping here doesn’t necessarily mean usual sleep, rather a state of imagination or realization that momentarily isolates the Sufi from witnessing the visible world while his spirit is occupied with other dimensions of being. For example, he speaks about the 300 spiritual knowers “whose hearts are like the heart of Adam”: ‘If a knower (of those 300) is taken (to witness) one scene of the Lord’s scenes, he receives in one of its ‘days’ (called the Lord’s Day, which equals a thousand earthly years of what we count, according to Quran 22:47) at that moment (when he is taken to the Lord’s scene) divine knowledge (equivalent to) what others get in the world of (normal) senses in one thousand normal years with hard work and preparation... The person who can appreciate what we have said is only whoever has tasted that, when (normal) time was folded up for him in that moment, just as distance and other quantities are folded up for the eyesight, whenever someone opens his eye and looks at the orb of fixed stars: at the same time when he opens his eye, the rays are connected with the bodies of these stars. So look how big is this distance and this speed!’ [II.9.23]

Also regarding time-travel, which is widely known in science fiction and theoretically allowable in the theory of Relativity, as we explained in chapter II, many Sufis and similar figures across many other religious traditions have of course frequently referred to their experiences of various forms of travel across normal boundaries of time. Ibn al-Arabi mentions the story of al-Jawhari who went to take a bath in the Nile, and when he was in the water he saw, like a vision, that he was in Baghdad and he got married and lived with his wife for six years and had children, and then he was returned to himself from this momentary vision. However, after few months this women, whom he saw in the vision that he had married, came looking for his house in Egypt, and when he met her he knew her and knew the children. [II.82.22]

According to his accounts of this type of spiritual ascent in chapter 367 of the Meccan Revelations, the physical elements of the Sufi’s body dissociate and return to their corresponding natural place: Earth to Earth, water to water, air to air and fire to fire, and only after that, his spiritual self enters the celestial spheres to meet the other spirits inhabiting each sphere and to learn from them; then one may even ascend further to the highest spiritual dimensions, as Ibn al-Arabi also described in greater detail in his highly autobiographical the Ascension to Highest Station.

However, real traveling to the past is not possible at all, since time itself doesn’t go back: once a form is created and goes into the past it never comes back again, although it is of course possible to remember past events: ‘The past that has gone never comes back, but the similar (form) may come back; so when it comes back it causes (someone) through itself to remember that which was like it and has gone and is now in the past.’ [II.186.27]

On the other hand, Ibn al-Arabi repeatedly describes time as a “circle” [I.387.33], which doesn’t have a beginning or an end, but when we specify a point on this circle, such as the present, and look in one direction, whether to the past or future, we do set a relative beginning and an end. So the present now joins together the two ends of time in a circle [I.387.32, III.546.30].

It might be very difficult initially to imagine how time could be circular, as it was very difficult to convince people that the Earth is spherical when this idea was first introduced, precisely because most everyday activities show us only a small portion of the Earth’s surface which appears flat to us. In order to understand the meaning of circular time, we have to imagine that the whole of all existence, including what we perceive as future, present and past, all exist at once. This whole existence is then like a circle, a curve that doesn’t have a visible beginning or an end when we look at it from outside. When we sit on the circumference of this circle and look in one direction, we set a beginning and an end. In the same way: the present moment in which we exist is a point on the circle of the whole existence, this point defines the future and the past and it also defines an imaginary beginning and an imaginary end of time: imaginary because the whole circle of existence is the infinite Age, whose imaginary beginning is the eternity a parte ante and the imaginary end is the eternity a parte post [IV.266.3].

In this regard, Ibn al-Arabi says in poetry: “the age has curved on us and bent” [I.202.7], so as we notice he referred to the Age, instead of simple time, because as in modern physics and cosmology, the curvature of time is apparent only at very large scales, as we summarized in chapter III.

Moreover, this cosmic notion of circular time is quite different from cyclical time, and the two ideas shouldn’t be confused in Ibn al-Arabi’s writings. Cyclical or periodic time, such as the day, the week, the month and the year, is a duration of time in which the same kind of events should be happening in the different repeating cycles. We should again note, however, that in reality, according to Ibn al-Arabi, there is never any repetition at all [II.432.12, III.282.21]. Those cycles of time are actually similar to each other but never identical, and that is because they are ruled by the same divine Names, which is why we expect to see similar events, but then the reason why we don’t see identical events or true repetition is because of the interaction between different cycles of different divine Names [III.201.14], according to their hierarchy as described in section 2.6.

---