4.4.10.2  Taken-out Days

Allah said in the Holy Quran: (One sign for them is the night-time: We take the day-time out of it, and lo, they are in darkness) [36:37]. Ibn al-Arabi points out that this verse indicates that night is the origin, and that day-time was somehow ‘hidden’ in it and then was taken out of it [Ayyam al-Shaan: 9, II.647.20]. In other words, as he explains [I.716.15], the night is like a dress or a skin over the day-time, and then Allah takes the day-time out of the night so that the world, which was in the absolute darkness of the divine ‘Unseen’, is created so that it appears in the light of actual existence.

Ibn al-Arabi, however, argues that Allah didn’t specify in this verse which day-time was taken out of which night-time, and so this has to be clarified. For it is not, as we might think, that each day-time, that we witness, was taken out of its own night. We have to seek the true relation between each day-time and its night, and this relation, Ibn al-Arabi says [II.445.32, III.203.30], is based on the first hour of the day-time and the night-time, because each hour of the day-time and the night-time has a ruler; one of the five planets, the Sun, or the Moon, corresponding to one of the seven principial divine Attributes, as described in section 4.8; so each day is named after the planet that rules the first hour of it. For example: the first hour of Sunday is ruled by the Sun, and that is why it is so named (in English and many other languages); likewise Monday is the day of the Moon, and so on. In Arabic, however, the names of the days of the week don’t have direct relations with the names of the planets that rule these days, but this connection still forms a basic principle in Ibn al-Arabi’s view of time.

But before we discuss this further and assign each night to its actual day-time, we should understand the exact meaning of ‘taking out’ the day-time from the night-time, or the night-time from the day-time. As we have repeatedly showed above, Ibn al-Arabi regards the different day-times and night-times as ‘parents’ to what Allah creates in them: so everything that happens in the day-time is like a ‘son’ whose father is the night-time and whose mother is the corresponding day-time; and everything that happens in the night-time is like a son whose father is the day-time and whose mother is the corresponding night-time [Ayyam al-Shaan: 7; II.445.18]. As Allah said in Holy Quran: (He merges the night-time into the day-time, and He merges the day-time into the night-time) [57:6]. So there is a kind of abstract, generative ‘marriage’ between day-times and night-times, but where night-times and day-times exchange their parental roles from being fathers to being mothers, and vice versa. That is why they are ‘intertwined’, as we shall see further in section 4.10.3 below. Now Ibn al-Arabi explains that the meaning of the above Quranic assertion of ‘stripping-out’ or ‘taking-out’ the day-times and night-times is when the day-time turns from being father into being mother or vice versa. So when we say that this day-time is taken out of that night-time, it means that this day-time and night-times exchange their generative parental roles, although together they are always like a couple, a single day, but not the same as the circulated days.

Table 4.13: The taken-out days. There are three day-times and three nights between the day-time and the night that is taken out of it. This Table is summarized from Ayyam al-Shaan, pages 6-7.

Ibn al-Arabi argues that there are three other day-times and three other night-times between the day-time and the night-time from which it was taken out, and that is because of the three-dimensional structure of the world, or six-directional with three night-times corresponding to the directions down, left and back; and three day-times corresponding to up, right and front [Ayyam al-Shaan: 7]. The following table shows the resulting day-times of the week and the night-times from which those respective day-times were taken out:

Therefore, as we can see, there are three days between each day-time and its partner night-time. Of course normally the observable earthly week will run starting from the beginning of Sunday night, then Sunday morning, then Monday night, then Monday morning, and so on, as we have seen in section 4.10.1 above, which describe the normal ‘circulated’ days. As we can extract from Table 4.3, the ‘taken-out’ days can be demonstrated as in Figure 4.11, which also run starting from the beginning of Sunday night but leaving out three day-times and three night-times, thus jumping to Wednesday day-time of the circulated days and so on, but to to understand this graphical relation we need to imagine it in three dimensions which is difficult to represent he on paper.

Figure 4.11: The Taken-out Days, but this seven-fold loop should be viewed as curving in the three dimensions, so as when they make one loop it is equivalent to making a complete sphere.

In chapter 302 of the Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi explains how the process of taking the day-time out of the night-time is identical to taking the world out of non-existence into the ‘light’ of existence: ‘We have mentioned that the world was hidden in the (absolute) Unseen of (the fore-knowledge of) Allah, and that this Unseen was like the shadow of a person. So if something were taken out from the entirety of that shadow, it would come out in the image of that shade, just as that shadow is itself in the image of that of which it is a shadow. The result of what is taken out of that shadow is in the image of the person. Don’t you see that light (of the day) is what appears when the day-time is taken out of the night-time?

Those things which were hidden in the night (of the divine ‘Unseen’) appear by the light of the day-time. Therefore the day-time does not resemble the night-time, but rather resembles the light, by the appearance of those things through it. The night was the shadow of the (divine) Light, and the day-time, when it is taken out of the night, comes out on the image of that Light. Likewise, the world, in its coming out of the Unseen, comes out in the image of the world (already present in) the Unseen, as we said.’ [III.12.1]