←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 3: The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer

Section 6 of 12

The problem of time and divine eternity

Section summary

In brief

Surveying centuries of Muslim debate on time, Iqbal proposes that divine eternity is 'change without succession' — an organic appreciative duration — while serial clock-time is born only with the act of creation. God is neither frozen outside time nor carried along by it.

Section 5 was the metaphysical pivot of Lecture III: the passage from Ash'arite atomism to Iqbal's spiritual pluralism, from atoms and accidents to egos and degrees of reality. It established that the fundamental unit of reality is not the material atom but the psychic act, that reality is essentially spirit, and that the Ultimate Reality is an Ego from which only egos proceed. That section answered the question of what reality is made of. Section 6 now confronts the question of what reality moves in — the problem of time.

The problem is forced upon Iqbal by the logic of his own argument. If the Ultimate Reality is an Ego — a living, creative consciousness — then that consciousness must have some relationship to time. Does God exist in time, as one being among others carried along by a temporal stream? Does God exist outside time, in a frozen eternity that has no contact with the moving world? Or is there some third possibility that does justice both to God's absolute creativity and to the genuine reality of temporal experience? The way one answers this question determines the entire character of one's theology — and, as Iqbal will show, the entire character of one's civilisation.

The section advances through five major movements. First, Iqbal establishes that Muslim thinkers have always been drawn to the problem of time, partly because the Qur'an foregrounds temporal phenomena (the alternation of day and night) as signs of God, and partly because of the Prophet's identification of God with Dahr (time) in a famous tradition. The Sufi metaphysical tradition, especially Muḥyuddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, treated Dahr as one of the divine names — giving the problem of time a theological urgency it never possessed in Greek philosophy.

Second, Iqbal surveys the objective approaches to time and finds them all inadequate. The Ash'arites conceived time as a succession of discrete 'nows,' which leads to the absurdity of temporal voids between moments. Newton conceived time as an independent flowing stream, which generates its own paradoxes: the infinite regress of needing another time to measure the first time's flow, and the impossibility of specifying time's beginning, end, or boundaries. Modern physics, however, vindicates the Ash'arite intuition of discontinuity: the universe varies by sudden jumps, and there is, as Rougier reports, 'an atom of time.'

Third, Iqbal diagnoses why the objective approaches fail to reach a complete account: they lack psychological analysis. The Ash'arites arrived at a genuine insight about time's atomic character but could not connect their time-atoms organically to their material atoms, because they never examined the subjective experience of temporality. This is the section's central critical diagnosis.

Fourth, Iqbal surveys later Muslim responses that do incorporate the subjective dimension. Mullā Jalāluddīn Dawānī conceives time as a unified span encompassing all events — a view that anticipates Josiah Royce's Absolute — but then adds the crucial qualification that succession is relative and disappears in the case of God. The Sufi poet Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī goes further, articulating a hierarchy of temporal experience: the time of gross bodies is divisible into past, present, and future; the time of immaterial beings is serial but compressed; and Divine time is absolutely free from passage, above eternity, without beginning or end. Fakhruddīn Rāzī, the most systematic Muslim theologian to address the problem, subjects all contemporary theories to searching examination but confesses he has reached no definitive conclusions — an admission of intellectual honesty that Iqbal clearly admires.

Fifth and finally, Iqbal offers his own synthesis, drawing on the distinction between the appreciative and efficient selves that he developed in Lecture II. The appreciative self lives in pure duration — change without succession. The efficient self lives in serial, atomic time. And atomic time is born from the movement between the two: from the self's passage from appreciation to efficiency, from intuition to intellect. Applied to the Ultimate Ego, this means that God's time is 'change without succession' — an organic whole that appears atomic only because of the creative movement of the ego. Iqbal identifies this with the position of Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Bāqir: time is born with the act of creation. The section closes with a Qur'anic grounding: 'To God belongs the alternation of day and night.'

The section is pivotal within the lecture's arc. Having established in Section 5 that reality is spirit and that the Ultimate Reality is an Ego, Iqbal must now show that this spiritual interpretation can handle the most fundamental category of experience — time — without collapsing into either the frozen eternity of classical theology or the process-theology of thinkers like Alexander who make God a being in the making. His solution — eternity as non-successional change, serial time as its organic measure — is one of the most original contributions in the entire Reconstruction.

Original text

The problem of time has always drawn the attention of Muslim thinkers and mystics. This seems to be due partly to the fact that, according to the Qur'an, the alternation of day and night is one of the greatest signs of God, and partly to the Prophet's identification of God with Dahr (time) in a well-known tradition referred to before. Indeed, some of the greatest Muslim Sufis believed in the mystic properties of the word Dahr. According to Muḥyuddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, Dahr is one of the beautiful names of God, and Rāzī tells us in his commentary on the Qur'an that some of the Muslim saints had taught him to repeat the word Dahr, Daihūr, or Daihar.

The Ash'arite theory of time is perhaps the first attempt in the history of Muslim thought to understand it philosophically. Time, according to the Ash'arite, is a succession of individual ‘nows’. From this view it obviously follows that between every two individual ‘nows’ or moments of time, there is an unoccupied moment of time, that is to say, a void of time. The absurdity of this conclusion is due to the fact that they looked at the subject of their inquiry from a wholly objective point of view. They took no lesson from the history of Greek thought, which had adopted the same point of view and had reached no results. In our own time Newton described time as ‘something which in itself and from its own nature flows equally.’ The metaphor of stream implied in this description suggests serious objections to Newton's equally objective view of time. We cannot understand how a thing is affected on its immersion in this stream, and how it differs from things that do not participate in its flow. Nor can we form any idea of the beginning, the end, and the boundaries of time if we try to understand it on the analogy of a stream. Moreover, if flow, movement, or ‘passage’ is the last word as to the nature of time, there must be another time to time the movement of the first time, and another which times the second time, and so on to infinity. Thus the notion of time as something wholly objective is beset with difficulties.

It must, however, be admitted that the practical Arab mind could not regard time as something unreal like the Greeks. Nor can it be denied that, even though we possess no sense-organ to perceive time, it is a kind of flow and has, as such, a genuine objective, that is to say, atomic aspect. In fact, the verdict of modern science is exactly the same as that of the Ash'arite; for recent discoveries in physics regarding the nature of time assume the discontinuity of matter. The following passage from Professor Rougier's Philosophy and New Physics is noteworthy in this connexion:

‘Contrary to the ancient adage, natura non facit saltus, it becomes apparent that the universe varies by sudden jumps and not by imperceptible degrees. A physical system is capable of only a finite number of distinct states . . . . Since between two different and immediately consecutive states the world remains motionless, time is suspended, so that time itself is discontinuous: there is an atom of time.’

The point, however, is that the constructive endeavour of the Ash'arite, as of the moderns, was wholly lacking in psychological analysis, and the result of this shortcoming was that they altogether failed to perceive the subjective aspect of time. It is due to this failure that in their theory the systems of material atoms and time-atoms lie apart, with no organic relation between them.

It is clear that if we look at time from a purely objective point of view serious difficulties arise; for we cannot apply atomic time to God and conceive Him as a life in the making, as Professor Alexander appears to have done in his Lectures on Space, Time, and Deity. Later Muslim theologians fully realized these difficulties. Mullā Jalāluddīn Dawānī in a passage of his Zawrāʾ, which reminds the modern student of Professor Royce's view of time, tells us that if we take time to be a kind of span which makes possible the appearance of events as a moving procession and conceive this span to be a unity, then we cannot but describe it as an original state of Divine activity, encompassing all the succeeding states of that activity. But the Mullā takes good care to add that a deeper insight into the nature of succession reveals its relativity, so that it disappears in the case of God to Whom all events are present in a single act of perception.

The Sufi poet ʿIrāqī has a similar way of looking at the matter. He conceives infinite varieties of time, relative to the varying grades of being, intervening between materiality and pure spirituality. The time of gross bodies which arises from the revolution of the heavens is divisible into past, present, and future; and its nature is such that as long as one day does not pass away the succeeding day does not come. The time of immaterial beings is also serial in character, but its passage is such that a whole year in the time of gross bodies is not more than a day in the time of an immaterial being. Rising higher and higher in the scale of immaterial beings we reach Divine time — time which is absolutely free from the quality of passage, and consequently does not admit of divisibility, sequence, and change. It is above eternity; it has neither beginning nor end. The eye of God sees all the visibles, and His ear hears all the audibles in one indivisible act of perception. The priority of God is not due to the priority of time; on the other hand, the priority of time is due to God's priority. Thus Divine time is what the Qur'an describes as the ‘Mother of Books’ in which the whole of history, freed from the net of causal sequence, is gathered up in a single super-eternal ‘now’.

Of all the Muslim theologians, however, it is Fakhruddīn Rāzī who appears to have given his most serious attention to the problem of time. In his “Eastern Discussions,” Rāzī subjects to a searching examination all the contemporary theories of time. He too is, in the main, objective in his method and finds himself unable to reach any definite conclusions. ‘Until now,’ he says,

‘I have not been able to discover anything really true with regard to the nature of time; and the main purpose of my book is to explain what can possibly be said for or against each theory without any spirit of partisanship, which I generally avoid, especially in connexion with the problem of time.’

The above discussion makes it perfectly clear that a purely objective point of view is only partially helpful in our understanding of the nature of time. The right course is a careful psychological analysis of our conscious experience which alone reveals the true nature of time. I suppose you remember the distinction that I drew in the two aspects of the self, appreciative and efficient. The appreciative self lives in pure duration, i.e. change without succession. The life of the self consists in its movement from appreciation to efficiency, from intuition to intellect, and atomic time is born out of this movement. Thus the character of our conscious experience — our point of departure in all knowledge — gives us a clue to the concept which reconciles the opposition of permanence and change, of time regarded as an organic whole or eternity, and time regarded as atomic.

If then we accept the guidance of our conscious experience, and conceive the life of the all-inclusive Ego on the analogy of the finite ego, the time of the Ultimate Ego is revealed as change without succession, i.e. an organic whole which appears atomic because of the creative movement of the ego. This is what Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Bāqir mean when they say that time is born with the act of creation by which the Ultimate Ego realizes and measures, so to speak, the infinite wealth of His own undetermined creative possibilities. On the one hand, therefore, the ego lives in eternity, by which term I mean non-successional change; on the other, it lives in serial time, which I conceive as organically related to eternity in the sense that it is a measure of non-successional change. In this sense alone it is possible to understand the Quranic verse: ‘To God belongs the alternation of day and night.’ But on this difficult side of the problem I have said enough in my preceding lecture. It is now time to pass on to the Divine attributes of Knowledge and Omnipotence.

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5. Motion, accidents, and the spiritual nature of reality

7. Divine knowledge and the open universe

Original text

‘Contrary to the ancient adage, natura non facit saltus, it becomes apparent that the universe varies by sudden jumps and not by imperceptible degrees. A physical system is capable of only a finite number of distinct states . . . . Since between two different and immediately consecutive states the world remains motionless, time is suspended, so that time itself is discontinuous: there is an atom of time.’

‘I have not been able to discover anything really true with regard to the nature of time; and the main purpose of my book is to explain what can possibly be said for or against each theory without any spirit of partisanship, which I generally avoid, especially in connexion with the problem of time.’