4.4.10.3  Intertwined Days

As we have mentioned in section 4.3 above, Allah said in the Holy Quran: (Each Day He is upon a task) [55:29]. Since Allah didn’t say ‘tasks’ but rather a single task or event, Ibn al-Arabi argues that the whole Day should be under the effect of one single divine task. This, however, is not the case for our normal ‘circulated’ days and is clearly not the case for the ‘taken-out’ days we’ve just described in sections 4.10.1 and 4.10.2 above, because we observe many different events are happening in each day.

Ibn al-Arabi argues that the original Days of events, in which Allah described Himself as being each Day upon some task, are intertwined with the circulated days in a specific manner, which he explains by dividing the day into 24 hours. However, Ibn al-Arabi emphasizes that this example is only for approximation, since one could also explain this ‘intertwining’ on a smaller scale than hours, such as minutes and seconds, or even smaller. The matter as he describes it is already very complicated for the 24 hours, although this may be possible to calculate now using sophisticated computer programs.

Starting with the night of Sunday, because its name ‘the First’, or ‘the One’ is a divine Name of Allah, and it is the first cosmic Day, and also it is the day of the Sun that is the heart or center of the manifest world [Ayyam al-Shaan: 11], Ibn al-Arabi reconstructs the Days of events from the hours of the taken-out days, starting with the first hour of the night of Thursday, then the eighth hour, and so on with seven-hour intervals until the full twelve hours of the night of Sunday are completed. Then he moves on to construct the day-time of Sunday in the same way, as illustrated in Table 4.4 and Figure 4.12.

Table 4.15: The Intertwined Days (example of Sunday alone). The BOLD cells in the table indicate night-time hours. The data in this table is extracted from Ayyam Al-Shaan, pp. 11-12.

Then he moves on to analyze the night of the circulated day of Monday in the same way, but starting from the day-time of Friday, and so on for the full seven Days, as indicated in the following Table 4.5 and Figure 4.12.

Table 4.16: The intertwined Days (all the seven Days). The BOLD cells in the table indicate night-time hours. The data in this table is extracted from Ayyam Al-Shaan, pp. 11-16.

As can be readily seen from Table 4.5, the flow of time for the ‘intertwined’ days is even more complicated than that of the taken-out days, as demonstrated in Table 4.3 and Figure 4.11. This complex relationship is shown graphically in Figure 4.12. Again, it would be more accurate to imagine this graph in three dimensions, but the graphic depiction is already very complicated in two dimensions.

Figure 4.12: The intertwined days, and their relation with the circulated days. The information in this figure is extracted from Kitab Ayyam al-Shaan, pp. 11-16. This figure demonstrates how the 24 hours of each day of the normal circulated days are distributed over the seven Days of events. The 24 hours of the Day of Sunday for example (the 24-fold zigzag circle in the front) are distributed over the normal week days, starting from the first hour of Thursday night and moving with the seven-hour intervals already described.

The flow of time according to the intertwined days is the real flow, because it indicates the manifest, outward order of events. The reason why there is a constant seven-hour step, as in the Tables 4.4 and 4.5, and in Figure 4.12, is that the order of creation proceeds according to the seven main divine Names, and the corresponding cosmic Days of creation, as we have already described in section 4.4. For example, on Sunday, of the original Days of creation, the world starts ‘hearing’ the divine Command, which initiates the first dimension in creation. Then once the Sunday cycle, of the divine Attribute ‘the All-Hearing’, is over, the Monday cycle starts granting the world the attribute of ‘the Living’, and so on for all the seven fundamental Attributes. Thus the manifest world gains the qualities of these fundamental divine Attributes one after the other. In this process of sequential creation the three dimensions of space are formed, and the re-formed again and again as they develop and their states change through time.

In each ‘Day of event’ that is intertwined with the outwardly observable normal circulated days, Ibn al-Arabi explains that Allah constantly inspires the Universal Soul to act upon the orbs below it, encompassing and giving rise to all the manifest cosmos, so that they move in a specific manner that will cause one particular kind of event in the cosmos. But the effects of this complex composite motion of the orbs will be different, depending on the capabilities and characteristics of individual creatures [Ayyam al-Shaan, 11-12]. For example, when Allah inspires the Soul to move the element of fire in order to heat the world, the effects of this single event depends greatly on the individual creatures: those which are ready to burn will burn, and those which accept heat will be heated, and so on [Ayyam al-Shaan, 6].

So the divine creative ‘Event’, in relation to the Real, or the Single Monad, is one from Him; but with relation to the acceptors of the world it is many events that we would call infinite, were they not confined by their shared quality of existence. [II.82.6]

Ibn al-Arabi describes in his Kitab Ayyam al-Shaan the different kinds of events that are particularly associated with each Day of the seven Days of the original divine ‘Week’ of event. He also gives a ratio of ‘contribution’ by each one of the seven heavens. These mysterious symbolic data and concepts are not very easy to understand, and they require a separate extensive study.