The Chest of Time

The days, in general, are repeated cycles of different “orbs” , whether celestial or divine: every orb has its own day. These days overlap with each other, so as the day of the Sun, for example, takes 360 days of our days that we count on the Earth; the day of the Moon takes twenty eight normal earth days, and so on. In one Sun day, many Moon days pass; and in one Moon day, many normal Earth days pass, just as in one “Lord-day” , one thousand Sun days (earth-years) pass. Likewise, all the possible days of all orbs and divine Names happen and repeat themselves in the “Day of the Age” that “is one Day that never repeats, and it has no daytime nor night” [III.202.5].

The Day of the Age is all a “daytime’: it does not have a night, because there is no orb above it; it is the truly all-encompassing orb that includes all material and spiritual orbs. Based on several Prophetic narrations, Ibn al-Arabi considers that “the Age” is one of the divine Names of Allah. According to one Hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad says: “Do not damn the Age, for Allah is the Age” , while in another divine Hadith, Allah says: “the son of Adam hurts Me: he damns the Age, and I am the Age, the command in My Hand, I circulate the daytime and the night” .

Since “the time of a thing is its presence” , Allah is named as “the Age” , because the realities of everything exist in Him, so He is “the Age” because the whole world (hidden and manifest), including all space and time, from eternity without beginning to eternity without end: all this is a manifestation of Allah’s divine Names, so the Age is the all-encompassing orb of all Names [IV.266.11]. He explains further this by saying:

Do you not see that in Allah’s words (the Quran) when He told us about things in the past, He then used the past tense, and He used the future tense for things to come, and He used the present tense for the now-happening things, ..., and if we seek for all that something that has a real existence and these things are occurring in it, which is for them like a container, we shall find nothing, whether sensible or abstract, except that we find it as an imaginary container, which is itself contained by another imaginary container, and so on, nothing but endless illusion. So if you think rationally, you will find that there is nothing (i.e., no “containing” reality of space or time) that can be comprehended by imagination or by the mind, nor by the senses, nothing but the Real Existence, or Being, on which our existence is based.

For this reason He named Himself to us as “the Age” , so that the reference can be only to Him, not to “time” as imagined (or illusory), because there is no Ruler other than Allah, and in Him appeared the realities of all things and their properties. He is the everlasting existence, and the realities of things with their properties appears from behind the veil of His existence, but because of His subtlety, we see the realities of things, including ourselves, from behind the veil of His existence, without seeing Him, just like we see the stars from behind the veil of the Heavens and yet we do not see the Heavens. [III.547.1]

Moreover, given the above definition of the Age, it does not only mean time, but it is also space. Because the Age is the totally “encompassing orb” , it must include everything inside it, spatial as well as temporal. For this reason, the Age is seven divine Days, six for space, from Sunday to Friday, and Saturday for time. The Age is not more than those divine seven Days [II.438.5]. Thus in Ibn al-Arabi’s conception, space and time have the same meaning as days, and both are unified as space-time, where the divine Week is its basic unit, and the Age is in fact this Single Week.