4.4.9  Creation in Six Days

Having completed all the types of creations that Allah wanted to create in this world, all the six inclusive types: angels, jinns, humans, animals, plants, and the inanimate elements, and nothing else remains to be created, but these creations started interacting and changing through their various states.

This means that the time that we live is only Saturday, while the other six Days (of events) of the (original) Week could account for space, and not time; this is also supported by the observation that the usual word for ‘day’ in Arabic also bears the meaning of ‘direction’. If we add this to what we have just said above about the oneness of being, and that the act of creation ‘in one Week’ actually takes place at every moment of time, then we can easily come to a very important conclusion that the actual Week and its seven distinctive Days is itself a unit of space-time, and not time alone.

In the first six Days, from Sunday to Friday, space is created with its six directions that make together the three dimensions of space, and then it is displayed ‘in time’ on Saturday. We don’t feel the creation in the six Days because we are being created through these Days, or moments, so we only feel ourselves created on Saturday, which is why it is the Day of eternity. As Allah said in Quran: “I called them not to witness the creation of Heavens and the Earth, neither the creation of themselves” (18:51). But when this initial stage of creation is over and Allah the All-Merciful ‘mounted on the Throne’, changing the creation from one state into another, then and only then, on Saturday, do we realize ourselves and also realize the world (of space) that is being created in those preceding six Days, that are also continuously recurring, but as space and not as time.

For this reason, as we have explained in section 2.1 above, Ibn al-Arabi declares in many passages that the world is constantly being re-created on every single ‘Day of event’, and the Days of events are seven, based on the central divine Attributes of Allah, as we have already seen in section 4.8. So the creation of the world by Allah is a seven-step process: in each Day of those seven Days of events the world gains the qualities and manifestations of the corresponding divine Attribute. Thus on the First Day, the world, which had been already eternally determined in the fore-knowledge of Allah, hears the command: ‘Be’, so it moves from the ‘absolute Unseen’ into the first step of existence which has no dimension yet (), like the geometrical point; it is the first real Image of the Real, Allah, the Exalted, and thus it is called ‘the real through whom creation takes place’, and this is the ‘Greatest Element’ as we have seen in section 2.5. Then, on the Second Day, the world becomes living, and by that the creation of angels from the divine Light takes place and this forms the first dimension of space (). Then on the Third Day, it can witness its Creator, while on the Fourth Day it becomes willing to magnify Him, and by that the second dimension is completed (). Then on the Fifth Day it is able to praise and magnify the Creator, and finally, on Friday, especially by the ‘last three hours’ of Friday, when the Human Being is created, the world will actually know its Creator, and by that the third dimension () is created, and this perfected only by creating the Human Being, who is in respect to the world like the Spirit is for the true Human Being [I.118.8, III.363.3]. By these six Days the world is completely created as a Single Monad, who is also the ‘Complete Human Being’, including heavens and Earth, mind and soul, spirit and body.

Then on the seventh Day, of Saturday, this picture of the complete world will be held in the imagination of the human being, because it is an imaginal form that will intrinsically cease to exist right in the second moment after its creation, to be instantly re-created in a new form. That is why, Ibn al-Arabi explains, Allah appointed as the ‘rulers’ on Saturday the essential qualities of coldness and dryness, so that this cosmic image may appear to be continuous [I.61.15]. So our imagination holds a new picture of the world, every ‘Day’ (moment), and by comparing between those succeeding pictures, the imagination perceives motion or change in space and time, since Allah never manifests in the same form twice or to two perceivers in the same form [I.679.7, II.77.27, II.616.3]. This is also the meaning of the verse: “each Day He is in a (different) task” [55:29], which Ibn al-Arabi uses more frequently than any others from Quran to corroborate this particular ontological view.

It has to be noticed however, that in every Week of Creation, only one point of space-time is created, and that is the point where the observer is, or rather, the observer himself is also created at that point in space-time. The observer perceives other points of space and time because they have been held somehow within the ‘Dust’ of the divine cosmic Imagination.

Therefore, Ibn al-Arabi explains the verse in Quran: (Your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the Earth in six Days, then He mounted on the Throne; He draweth the night as a veil over the Day) [7:54] as indicating that the creation has been completed in six Days, from Sunday to Friday, by creating Adam (the cosmic Human Being) on Friday; and then ‘He established Himself on the Throne’ on Saturday when nothing new is to be created, but only changing the states of the creatures, until the Day of Judgment, and after that either in the Gardens or in Gehenna, so this is the Day of eternity. Yet the heavens and the Earth are constantly being re-created every moment: therefore the same Week and Days of creation, including Saturday, are continually reiterating throughout Saturday, at every moment.

If we think of the whole manifest creation (the cosmos or ‘world’) throughout all places and times, throughout ‘the Age’, it is only seven Days: six Days for the creation, and the seventh Day, Saturday, for the realization. But if we think of ourselves as points in this space-time of the Age, because of the eternally renewed re-creation we observe succeeding Days and Weeks, as moments; yet all those Days, including Saturdays, are happening in the Saturday of the single, unique Week of the Age.