4.4.5  Eternity and the Age

Time, in the usual common sense is actually a tool used by our perception to chronologically classify the events or motion of objects; it wouldn’t have any meaning without motion or change. That is why we don’t feel time while we are asleep; 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. That 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].

Therefore, since time is reduced to the present, or otherwise specified, state of existence, which is an instance that 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 day or 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].

As Ibn al-Arabi said in chapter 59 of the Meccan Revelations, which is titled “on knowing existing and assumed time” that people have used the word ‘time’ in many different ways: most philosophers, for example, use it as the duration taken by the motion of orbs. Muslim theological scholars, on the other hand, use it to compare between events.

There many expression used to define time, ‘moment’, ‘now’, ‘day’, ‘day-time’, ‘night’, ‘week’, ‘month’, ‘year’, ‘eternity’, and the ‘age’, some of them we have already discussed. The moment is the current instance of time, but the issue of whether the moment has a duration or not is extremely delicate. If we choose to say it hasn’t, then how can the extent of the entire perceived day be composed of zero-length moments? But if we choose to assert the actual duration of the moment, that would lead to questions, such as “What exactly happens during the moment?” and “Does the event that takes a moment pop up at once or gradually?”

Ibn al-Arabi didn’t give any direct insight about this subtle and highly important cosmological issue. However, in his cosmological treatise Uqlat al-Mustawfiz, he spoke briefly about the Greatest Element, described in section 2.5, and he said that Allah created it “at once”. Therefore, the moment, that corresponds in fact to the creation of the Single Monad, should also be composed of “sub-moments”, that correspond to the creation of the Greatest Element. We can now affirm, according to Ibn al-Arabi, that those sub-moments are utterly indivisible because he said that Allah creates the Greatest Element at once. The questions of “Do those sub-moments have non-zero durations?” and “How many sub-moments are in the moment?” remain open, though a first speculation is that the process is similar to the normal day where the Sun rises and sets to define the day-time and the night, as we explained earlier in this chapter. Ibn al-Arabi usually compares between the creation of the Perfect Human Being, that is the Single Monad, and the creation of the world, and more specifically the motion of the Sun during the day. Therefore, the Day of the Single Monad, that is the moment, may look smooth and composed of a continuous flow of time, but it is quite possible that the same sets of questions may be repeated and similar quantization takes place at smaller scales, especially that Ibn al-Arabi already confirmed that “in everything there is everything”.

We have already said that the future and the past don’t exist; the real time is only the present, the now, or the current state. Also, we explained that the Age is an endless circle that doesn’t have a beginning nor an end for itself; it is all an eternally ongoing present, or as Ibn al-Arabi calls it: “the continuous existence” [II.69.13, IV.362.32].

The English word “eternity” has two different Arabic synonyms; “azal” and “abad”. Azal is eternity without beginning (a parte ante), and abad is eternity without end (a parte post). Ibn al-Arabi showed that eternity is in fact the negation of a beginning (or end), not endless extension: that is why Ibn al-Arabi says that eternity is a negative attribute, as we mentioned in section 4. In this way there is no meaning to asking whether there has been any extension of time between the existence of Allah and the existence of the world, because Allah creates the world out of time, as we discussed in section 4.1.

So the days are repeated cycles of different ‘orbs’, whether celestial or divine: every orb has its own day. These days overlap with each other, so as the day of the Sun, for example, takes 360 days of our days that we count on the Earth; the day of the Moon takes twenty eight normal Earth days, and so on. In one Sun day, many Moon days pass; and in one Moon day, many normal Earth days pass just as in one ‘Lord-day’, one thousand Sun days (earth-years) pass. Likewise, all the possible days of all orbs and divine Names happen and repeat themselves in the ‘Day of the Age’ that ‘is one Day that never repeats, and it has no day-time (nahar) nor night’ [III.202.5]. The Day of the Age is all a ‘day-time’: it doesn’t have a night, because there is no orb above it; it is the truly all-encompassing orb that includes all material and spiritual orbs.

Furthermore, as we have seen above that “the time of something is its presence”: that is why Allah is named as ‘the Age’, because the realities of everything exist in Him. He is the Age because the whole world, hidden and manifest, including all space and time, from eternity a parte ante to eternity a parte post: all this is a manifestation of Allah’s divine Names, so the Age is the all-encompassing orb of all Names [IV.266.11]. Ibn al-Arabi explains this by saying: ‘Don’t you see in Allah’s words (the Quran) when He told us about things in the past, He then used past tense, and He used future tense for things to come, and He used present tense for the now-happening things, ... and if we seek for all that something that has a real existence and these things are occurring in it, which is for them like a container, we shall find nothing, neither by any abstract or by sensible way, except that we find it as imaginary container, which is itself contained by another imaginary container, and so on, nothing but endless illusion. So if you think rationally, you will find that there is nothing (that we call space or time) that can be comprehended only by imagination or by the abstract mind, not by the senses, is nothing but the Real Existence on which our existence is based.

For this reason He named Himself to us as “the Age”, so that the reference can be only to Him, not to the imaginary time, because there is no Ruler other than Allah, and in Him appeared all the realities of things, and their properties. He is the everlasting existence, and the realities of things with their properties appeared from behind the veil of His existence, but because of His subtleness, we see the realities of things, which are ourselves, from behind the veil of His existence without seeing Him, just like we see the stars from behind the veil of the heavens (or the orbs) and yet we don’t see the heavens.’ [III.547.1]

Therefore, the Age is not only time, but it is also space. Because it is the totally “encompassing orb’, it must include everything inside it, spatial as well as temporal. As we shall show in section 4.9, the world as both space and time is created in the seven days of the divine Week, and the Age is not more than those divine seven Days [II.438.5]. Thus in Ibn al-Arabi’s conception, space and time have the same meaning as days, and both are unified as space-time, where the divine Week is its basic unit, and the Age is in fact this Single Week.

Although time appears to be completely different from space, in the theory of Relativity it is treated as a real dimension just like any one of the other three dimensions of space (length, width, depth):. In Relativity, as we explained in the preceding chapter, any point in the Universe can be expressed in terms of its 4-dimensional space-time coordinates, so we don’t have time alone or space alone, but a single continuum called space-time.

One of the most important results of Ibn al-Arabi’s view of time, as we shall explain in section 4.7, is that he considers ‘Saturday’ as the day of eternity, while the other six cosmic Days from Sunday to Friday account for the creation of the world in space. Allah creates the three-dimensions, or the six directions, in six Days from Sunday to Friday, but we witness only Saturday because in the other six days of the cosmic Week we, along with the rest of creation, are being created, and this divine creative process is repeated every single moment.

The world, for Ibn al-Arabi, is confined in those seven dimensions of space-time (6 plus 1) that are actually time, since all are days. This is the meaning of the many verses in Quran specifying that Allah created the heavens and the Earth “in six Days”, corresponding to space, and then He mounted, on Saturday, in time, on the Throne. For this meaning, Ibn al-Arabi describes the physical Universe as something that “is confined in time and space (equally)” [I.121.22]. This could also be easily comprehended if we recall that the actual meaning of time is reduced to the existence of the world in the present moment, not the past nor the future, as we have shown above. Thus manifest existence is confined in space and time, so both space and time refer to existence, and they have no meaning when taken by themselves, without the things or events that happen in them. This new concept will add another aspect to the theory of Relativity that considers time as one dimension of the four dimensions of space-time, especially since Ibn al-Arabi gives exciting details about how those seven Days of the cosmic Week are interconnected, as we shall see in section 4.7.