A question about ten minutes
Ten minutes.
You wait ten minutes for exam results. Then you play a game you love for ten minutes. The clock says both intervals were identical. Were they the same ten minutes?
The core
Time is the medium in which everything happens — and also one of the most mysterious concepts in philosophy. We experience time constantly, but when we try to say what it is, the concept dissolves. Augustine captured this perfectly: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Objective time
Newton conceived time as an absolute, uniform container — “absolute, true, and mathematical time flows equably without relation to anything external.” Time is there whether or not anything happens in it, whether or not anyone experiences it. It is the invisible stage on which events play out, and it would continue to flow even if the universe were empty. Einstein complicated this picture: time is not absolute but relative, varying with speed and gravitational field. But Einstein’s time remains objective — it is a dimension of spacetime, measurable and mathematical, even if it behaves in ways Newton did not expect.
Subjective time
Henri Bergson argued that the time of physics is not real time at all — it is a spatial representation of time, a translation of duration into extension. Real time — durée — is the continuous, indivisible flow of consciousness. It cannot be measured, divided into equal units, or represented spatially without being falsified. The ticking clock does not capture time; it replaces time with a series of spatial positions. Lived time is qualitative, heterogeneous, and creative: each moment is genuinely new, not a repetition of the last.
Serial time
J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) proposed that time is not a single dimension but a series of levels. At the first level, events occur in sequence. At the second level, the observer who watches the events is themselves moving through time — a second time dimension. At the third level, the observer of the observer requires a third time dimension, and so on. The theory is eccentric by scientific standards, but Iqbal found in it a useful framework for distinguishing between the time of physics, the time of consciousness, and the time of the divine.
In the Islamic tradition
Time in the Qur’an is not a neutral container but a created thing — and a sign. God “created the heavens and the earth and made the darkness and the light” (6:1). The alternation of night and day, the phases of the moon, the progression of the seasons — these are not merely natural phenomena but āyāt (signs) that point to their Creator and impose rhythm on human life through prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage.
The Ash’arite doctrine of occasionalismhas radical implications for time. If God re-creates the universe at every instant — if there is no natural continuity between moments — then time is not a continuous flow but a series of discrete divine acts. Each moment is a fresh creation, and the appearance of temporal continuity is God’s habit, not an intrinsic feature of reality. This is the opposite of Bergson’s continuous durée — and the opposite of the scientific conception of time as a measurable dimension.
Iqbal’s treatment of time in the Reconstruction is one of the most original aspects of his philosophy. Drawing on Bergson, Dunne, and the Qur’anic conception, Iqbal distinguishes three orders of time. Serial time — the time of physics and ordinary experience, in which events succeed one another. Durée — the time of the self, in which past, present, and future interpenetrate in a living whole. And divine time— the eternal “now” in which God apprehends all events simultaneously, not as past or future but as a single creative act. For Iqbal, spiritual development is movement from serial time toward durée — from living in a sequence of disconnected moments to living in a unified, purposive flow of creative selfhood.
Why this matters
How a society relates to time shapes everything about it. A society that understands time only as clock time — as a resource to be managed, spent, and optimised — loses the dimension of temporal experience that makes life meaningful. A society that retreats into an idealised past — treating history as a golden age to be recovered rather than a foundation to be built upon — loses the capacity for creative engagement with the present.
Pakistan suffers from both pathologies simultaneously. The educated classes experience time as a resource to be consumed (the productivity culture imported from the West). The religious classes experience time as a decline from an ideal past (the narrative that the earliest generations were the best and everything since has been deterioration). Neither orientation permits what Iqbal called creative time: the experience of the present as a moment of genuine novelty, in which something that has never existed before can be brought into being.
Understanding the philosophy of time is not an academic luxury. It is the prerequisite for a civilisation that lives in the present — neither fleeing into the past nor frantically optimising for the future, but inhabiting the moment as a site of creative possibility. This is what Iqbal meant by living in durée rather than serial time, and it is what Tadreej means by cultivating the disposition of Temporal Presence.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture II (Sections 1–5) · Lecture III (Sections 1–5, 9–12)
Further reading
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapters 1–2
- Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford)
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lectures II–III