4.4.10 Real Flow of Time
As we already explained, Ibn al-Arabi showed that the creation of the world by Allah is a linear chronological sequence, since He creates only one event at a time, or indeed in each Day, as Allah says: (each Day He is upon a task) [55:29]. Yet we observe multitudes of different events happening apparently at once. According to Ibn al-Arabi, the way to understand this apparent paradox is to discover the real flow of time.
Ibn al-Arabi shows that the actual flow of time, as the divine creative Week being the basic unit of space-time, is not the witnessed flow from Sunday to Monday and so on to Saturday. These normal days of the week that we witness are the ‘circulated’ days, and not the actual divine Days of events, in which only one single event should be happening each and every single Day. In order to define or construct the actual cosmic Days of events, we need first to attach each night-time to its own day-time, for again the underlying metaphysical connection is not as we observe, but the actual night-time of each day-time is not the observed night-time that precedes or follows this day-time; rather it is ‘taken out’ and separated from its own day-time by three day-times and three night-times. This extraordinary connection, Ibn al-Arabi explains, is directly related to the three-dimensional structure of space. Finally, he also affirms, according to Quranic indications, that the actual Days of events are ‘intertwined’ with the observable, ‘circulated’ days in a specific manner that he explained in details in his book “Kitab Ayyam al-Shaan” (“The Book of the Days of Task”).
So we shall first explain in this section the meanings and the relations between those three metaphysically distinct types of days: the ‘circulated’ days, the ‘taken out days’ and the ‘intertwined days’, each in the following subsections 4.10.1, 4.10.2 and 4.10.3. This hypothesis of ‘intertwining’ defines a unique new concept of time (and space) that has apparently not been discussed before in the history of science and philosophy as we reviewed in chapters II and III.