by Zakariya Wright
Philosophers have long realized that time is not immutable. Orthodox Muslim theology (Asharism) expounded a notion of time as a succession of distinct, created (and vanishing) moments. As one writer summarizes the doctrine, "In every instant, God is creating the world anew; there are no intermediate causes. God can be thought of as continually creating the universe from nothing ... Of itself, creation is discontinuous; it appears continuous to us only because of God's compassionate consistency."[1] In other words, it is only God who is al-Qayyum, the Self-Subsistent; and it is only by His merciful gift of qayyumiyya, sustainment, that He allows us to construct the idea of linear time: "He is the One who rendered the sun radiant, and the moon a light, and He designed its phases that you may learn to count the years and to calculate. Allah did not create all this except for a specific purpose" (Qur'an, 10:5). Thus between the eternal, absolute time (dahr) in the hands of God and the perishing moment of human time (waqt), Allah allows us to mark linear time (zaman) as a merciful stabilization for our lives in this world.[2] This sort of constructed time is not a purpose in and of itself, only a means to an end; and repeatedly Allah urges us to not place our hopes in it, not to depend on it. Indeed, the End of Time is as near to us as our deaths, itself immanent in each moment.
Interestingly enough, Allah does not use the words zaman and waqt in the Qur'an. The closest word connoting human time is 'asr: "By Time, surely mankind is in loss" (Qur'an, 103). 'Asr here can mean either the time of late afternoon ('asr prayer) or time itself, and both meanings are given in Tafsir al-Jalalayn of Imam Suyuti and Mahalli. Ibn Kathir says, "Al-'Asr is the time in which the movements of the children of Adam occur, whether good or evil." Ibn 'Abbas indicates, among other things, that the reference here is to the hardships of time. Al-Tabarani reports that whenever two companions would meet, they would not depart before one of them had recited the chapter, al-'Asr, and Imam Shafi'i said, "If the people were to ponder on this chapter, it would be sufficient for them." Allah's reference to human time here is thus alerting us to the travails of time; and one cannot help but note that the verb 'a-s-r means to press, squeeze or compress. Moreover, it is also the same root for Arabic's word for modernity itself, 'asriya. More than ever, we witness in the modern age the ability of time to press or squeeze humanity.
Modernity's "time-crunch" is further evidence of the inherently subjective, created nature of time. To put it simply, time is speeding up. This acceleration is perhaps the best way of getting a handle on modernity and how it affects the lives of ordinary Muslims around the world today. According to one UC Berkeley Professor, modern man has everywhere been engaged in a "passionate search for the assessment of modernity's foundations which are thought to rest in its typical sense of experiencing temporality."[3] Acceleration best defines this particular temporality of the modern: "Modernity does not give us space for stagnation or relaxation," says a Norwegian professor: "The basic principle of modernity is dynamization. And this dynamization consists of three forms of acceleration that move each other forward: technical acceleration, social acceleration, and the acceleration of the life tempo."[4]
The theorists of modernity do not seem to agree as to what actually causes this acceleration. Some ascribe it to money: "Money symbolizes the availability of merchandise and services. And by this it affects people's temporal consciousness & money is essentially an accelerator of social processes," says Jeff Kintzelé, who believes Benjamin Franklin's adage, "Time is money," should actually be reversed to say, "Money is [or controls] time."[5] Another writer targets new forms of media, which become "'time-machines' establish[ing] us within a kind of impatience," a blur of mini-reports and sound-bites that leads to the "compression of time."[6] The prominent Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf speaks of the "acceleration of urbanization." One might also target modern means of communication and travel which compress space. Actually meant to save us time, such technology speeds up time by keeping our words and bodies hurtling through space, depriving us of the moments-in-between needed for solitary contemplation or real social presence.
But it would be narcissistic to assume that we, by our self-indulgent manipulations of the material world, actually control the flow of time. "The sons of Adam inveigh against Time (dahr), but I am Time, and in My hand are the night and the day."[7] Muslims should not be surprised by modernity's acceleration of time. The Holy Prophet Muhammad warned that towards the End to Time, "Time will become short, knowledge will decrease, tribulations will appear, stinginess will become common and turmoil [killing] will increase." He is also reported as saying, "The Last Hour will not come before time contracts, a year being like a month, a month like a week, a week like a day, a day like an hour, and an hour like the kindling of a fire."[8] The acceleration of time is thus a Divine affair. While Muslims have largely distanced themselves from precise Doomsday predictions in comparison to their Christian counterparts, we would not be presumptuous in noticing that the idea of time acceleration is a striking similarity between the observations of the Prophet Muhammad 1400 years ago and today's theorists of modernity.
It is understandable why many traditional religions have come to view modernity as an anathema. Muslims, however, need not feel alienated by modernity, even if the technological and social processes associated with modernity originated in non-Muslim lands. If the acceleration of time is indeed one the key conditions of modernity, it is surely God, not humans, who controls this time.
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[1] Gerhard Bowering, "The Concept of Time in Islam," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 14, 1 (March, 1997), p. 59-60. (back)
[2] For more on the different words for time in Arabic, see Bowering, p. 61-62. (back)
[3] Elias José Palti, "Time, modernity and time irreversibility," in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 23, 5 (1997), p. 27. For more on this subject, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time (MIT Press, 1985). (back)
[4] Hartmut Rose, "Modernity means acceleration," Interview with Lorenz Khazaleh, for Cultural Complexity in the new Norway. See www.culcom.uio.no/aktivitet/timeandmodernity/rosa-eng.html (back)
[5] Jeff Kintzelé, "Man, Money, and Time. Logic of Credit: Logic of Modernity?" in Design Issues (1988). (back)
[6] Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia (translated by Jody Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 168-169. (back)
[7] Hadith Qudsi on the authority of Abu Hurayra, reported in Bukhari. (back)
[8] Such hadith and related variations are reported by Abu Huraira, Anas b. Malik and others and are found in Bukhari, Muslim and Tirmidhi. (back)