2.1.1 The Origin of the World

Many people ask questions like “what is the age of the Universe?” or “when did the World begin?” And many cosmologists go along with these questions and give estimates to the age of the physical Universe; usually about 13.8 billion years. However, any answers to such questions will quickly lead to further questioning whether time started before the World, or vice versa. Many riddles and paradoxes quickly emerge out of this debate. For example, one may ask: if the World started at a certain point of time, why God chose that time in particular? Could the World have been created ten minutes before or after that designated time? And what was God doing, or what was happening, before the beginning of the World?

Ibn al-Arabi, however, shows that such questions are meaningless, because the World is created out of time, and time itself is part of that created World. Allah did not create the World in time, because nothing existed “before” the World apart from Him Who is also out of time, and therefore the creation of the World cannot be compared to other events in time. The existence of the Creator precedes the existence of the World logically, and not chronologically, so it is like when we say “the day starts when the Sun rises” : there is no duration of time that separates sunrise from the start of the day, but logically the day would not start if the Sun did not rise. The existence of Allah, Who is Pre-Existent and Self-Existent Being, is a precondition, and not a cause, for the existence of the World. Therefore, because the World was created out of time (not “in” time), the above questions are invalid, because they use time phrases that have no meaning outside of that time which appeared in or with the World and not before it.

The Exalted Real exists by Himself and for Himself, so His Being is not confined by any other than Him, and He is not caused by something nor is He the cause of anything, but He is the Creator of causes and results. the World exists through Allah, and we cannot say that Allah existed before the World, because “before” is a time phrase, and there was no “time” . Nor can we say that the World existed after the existence of the Real, since there is nothing (other than the Real) “after” or “with” Him. So the Real exists by Himself and the World exists through the Real.

In conclusion, we can only conceive of pure and absolute Being, that has been always existing, and that is the existence of the Real, may He be exalted, and an existence that only comes to be, after non-existence, and that is the existence of the World. There is no actual comparability or co-extensive extension, between these two types of existence, apart from imagination that falsely suppose comparability between God and the World, while the absolute Existence of God is a determining condition for the relative existence of the World. So the the Existence of God is absolutely an active Being, without any external cause, while the existence of the World, as a whole, is passive, since it is determined by God.

However, the “World” , for Ibn al-Arabi, is both spiritual and material, existing int two corresponding types of time, spiritual and physical. The spiritual World preceded the creation of the material Universe, or Nature, as we know it: stars and planets, so there was spiritual time before the creation of the physical Universe. The spiritual time is necessary to describe the relation between spirits and the divine Names before creating the physical World. In this respect, Ibn al-Arabi does respond to the above-mentioned questions, but he still considers such questioning invalid beyond these two created realms of the World. Actually, Ibn al-Arabi considers the age of the World (as spiritual and material together) to be infinite from both directions: i.e., it has always been and it will always be; so it is eternal without beginning and eternal without end. However, this is not saying that the material (and even the spiritual) World is eternal, but the World has some sort of pre-existence in the foreknowledge of Allah, even before creation. Furthermore, Ibn al-Arabi also considers those two ends to coincide with each other, so time as a whole is like a circle that cannot be described to have a beginning or an end, but when we set a point (the present) and a direction (to the past or future) on this circle we define a beginning and an end [I.387.32, III.546.30].