A many-sided concept - concept of time in Islamic culture

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When seeking to describe the concept of time, space or any other basic notion specific to a given civilization, it would be useful if we could find a distinctive form of words to sum up that civilization's character.

But this would be to fall victim to two simplistic assumptions. One is that civilizations are discrete and unconnected. The other is that each civilization has its own special insight into time, which is reflected in various ways in the regions of that civilization.

The following brief comments about the concept of time in Islamic culture are intended to suggest that these two assumptions cannot be accepted at face value.

Qur'anic time We cannot here consider the Qur'anic view of time in all its richness, and shall therefore dwell on three points only.

The first is that the Qur'an integrates time as an essential aspect of revelation. The "divine teaching" was adapted to the circumstances of the Prophet's actions, and responded to his doubts, his questionings, and the

situation of the infant Islamic community as regards both its organization and its relationships with other communities.

The second concerns "sacred history" as it develops in the Qur'an in accordance with this divine teaching. The early Meccan revelations focused on the cycle of creation-cosmic break-up and total destruction-recreation, in which every soul is judged according to its actions. But in the middle of the first Meccan period (from the beginning of the revelation until the years 615-616) religious history acquired temporal substance. In the first phase this history mainly took the form of the manifestation of divine judgements on the peoples who rejected the Word and on sinful communities. But soon this aspect, while not disappearing altogether, gave way to a history of the divine revelations, which established a genealogical and spiritual continuity between the bearers of these revelations, each confirming his predecessor's message.

The third point concerns a basic temporal notion in the Qur'an, that of a "stated term" or fixed term" (ajal rnusamma), which is applied in particular to the lives of people, human communities, and the world. Behind this and similar expressions lies the idea of an "allocated span" whose duration is fixed by divine decree-an idea in keeping with the affirmation of God's prescience and omnipotence, but also containing within the notion that the life-span of beings and things is in a sense subject to quasi-natural laws, to a divinely-ordained legal system.

Astronomy and liturgical time The Muslim calendar is lunar. Liturgical time, especially the determination of the beginning and end of the fasting month (Ramadan), is bound up with observation of the New Moon. For secular time and the timing of the dally prayers unequal hours were used, their length varying according to the season and the latitude. Equal hours were mainly used in astronomy.

Muslim astronomers carried out intensive research into ways of predicting the appearance of the crescent Moon and of measuring time (there was a science of the measurement of time, ilm al-miqat). Particularly interested in liturgical time, they drew up tables to determine the hour of prayer for every day of the year, and developed sundials and astrolabes marked with curves corresponding to these times.

We feel tempted to suggest that these scientific developments were not actuated by liturgical needs. Firstly, jurists tended to exclude arithmetic when it came to forecasting the new Moon; and secondly research into the visibility of the new Moon was part of the natural development of astronomy. Indeed, prayer curves were probably only a sort of appendage to the theory and art of sundials and astrolabes. Scholars who claimed that their work was of value to the faith probably only did so in order to please the enlightened ruler who had encouraged them to take it up.

On the other hand, however, scholars' preoccupation with religion can be interpreted as a sign that they were fulfilling a social demand. This is confirmed both by the frequent use of sundials in mosques and also by the tendency of mosques to employ the services of a rnuwaqqtt, or specialist in the measurement of time, who might, like the fourteenth-century Damascene Ibn al-Shatir, be a great astronomer. This social demand provided astronomer-mathematicians with a testing-ground for their theories.

Universal histories Muslim historiography is characterized by its richness and the scale of its output. It was also extremely diverse, both in its subject-matter urban, regional, provincial and universal histories; religious and secular histories) and in its method of presentation (genealogical, dynastic, annalistic or by generation), all these approaches sometimes being combined.

With the beginning of a strictly Muslim era, starting with the Prophet's Hegira or migration from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina), the annalistic form, in which events are recorded on an annual basis, gained a valuable chronological framework. The universal histories also contain attempts to synchronize the histories of the different peoples of the pre-Islamic period. The idea of a universal history in fact implies a single temporal continuum into which natural and cultural events are fitted.

At the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth, most Muslim theologians adopted an atomist doctrine, which dealt both with matter (and the accidents that might attach thereto) and with time. According to this doctrine, bodies consist of indivisible homogeneous particles, which are distinguished from each other only by the presence in them of accidents which endow them with a given characteristic. Some theologians (the Mu'tazilites) held that bodies comprising these atoms and certain accidents last beyond the moment when they come into being. Others (the Ash'arites) considered that every accident is continually recreated by God, just as atoms and bodies only last by virtue of an accident which is continually recreated in them by God.

The world: finite or eternal? Muslim philosophers, whose philosophical activity followed in the wake of Aristotle and the neo-Platonists, opposed the theologians not only over the doctrine of atomism (for them, as for Aristotle, time was continuous) but also as regards the eternity of the world.

Al-Kindi (d. circa 866) held that the world had a finite span; but from al-Farabi (d. 950) onwards philosophers adopted the thesis that the world is eternal. They did not deny the world's causal dependence on first principles, and on God, but they did not recognize a first moment marking the beginning of the world. The debate between supporters and opponents of the idea of an eternal world involved problems relating to infinity, causality, the logical difficulties inherent in the idea of a beginning of the world, and the relationship between knowledge and divine will on the one hand and time on the other.

This brief account of Islamic thinking about time shows that it is not a single body of thought characteristic of Islamic culture as a whole; nor can be defined by a form of words that would englobe all its variants. There have been sporadic attempts to explain certain temporal behaviour patterns in present-day Islamic societies by presupposing a specifically Muslim view of time; but this is merely to introduce in addition to the two assumptions mentioned at the beginning of this article) a sort of "cultural fatalism" to the effect that man's conduct and image are determined by a vision laid down as a timeless paradigm. n

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