Insight Editions · No. 126
Ibn al-'Arabi: Time and Cosmology
Mohamed Haj Yousef
Mohamed Haj Yousef examines Ibn 'Arabi's teachings on time, divine days, cosmic creation, and their relation to contemporary physics, including his proposed Single Monad model.
A study guide to Ibn al-'Arabi: Time and Cosmology by Mohamed Haj Yousef. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Mohamed Haj Yousef's Ibn 'Arabi - Time and Cosmology (Routledge, 2008, in the series Culture and civilization in the Middle East) presents itself as the first comprehensive attempt to explain Ibn Arabi's view of time and its role in creating the cosmos. The author, a lecturer in physics at the United Arab Emirates University, reads Ibn Arabi's Futuhat al-Makkiyya and shorter works side by side with modern physics, and ends by building a cosmological model of his own, the "Single Monad model".
In one sentence: for Haj Yousef, Ibn Arabi teaches that time is imagined yet real, that the world is re-created at every instant by one Single Monad which scans space in six divine Days and shows it to us on the seventh, and that this picture can dissolve puzzles physics still finds hard, from Zeno's arrow to quantum entanglement.
Argument map
- Physics has no agreed account of time. Classical, relativistic and quantum theories disagree, and old puzzles (Zeno) and new ones (EPR) remain. (Part 1)
- Ibn Arabi offers a different starting point: time is "imagined" but real, the world is created out of time, and the quantum of time is one day viewed across the whole world. (Part 2)
- The structure is a Week. Seven divine Attributes govern seven Days; six Days build the six directions of space, and Saturday, the Day of eternity, is the manifest instant we live in. (Part 3)
- Real time is not linear. Days of event are "taken out" of each other and "intertwined" in an order Ibn Arabi tabulates, so ordinary days are woven from many divine Days. (Part 4)
- Only one thing is truly real at a time. From the One comes only one; existence is the Real's, and everything else is re-created at every instant. (Part 5)
- So the cosmos is a scan. A Single Monad, the Perfect Human Being and First Intellect, built from the Greatest Element, wears every form in turn, as a monitor beam draws pixels. (Part 6)
- This explains and predicts. Timeless motion, Zeno, entanglement, causality, strings and the unseen worlds all fall into place, and some tests are proposed. (Part 7)
Chapter map
| Part | Book chapter | Pages in book | The question it answers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cosmology and time | 1-26 | What have physics and philosophy said about time, and who was Ibn Arabi? | 2 |
| General aspects of Ibn 'Arabi's concept of time and days | 27-72 | What is time, what is a day, and how small is the smallest moment? | 3 | The significance of the divine week and its seven days |
| 73-99 | Why seven Days, and what is made in each? | 4 | The actual flow of time | 100-116 |
| How do divine Days become the days we live? | 5 | Unicity and multiplicity | 117-139 | How can the One produce a many? |
| 6 | The Single Monad model of the cosmos | 140-164 | What is the model, and how does creation run? | 7 |
Part 1. Cosmology and Time
The opening chapter does three jobs. It sketches the story of Western and modern cosmology, it gives a first tour of Ibn Arabi's cosmos as he drew it in chapter 371 of the Futuhat, and it surveys what philosophers and physicists have said about time, so that Ibn Arabi's view can later be set against all of them.
1.1 From Ptolemy to the Big Bang
Haj Yousef begins with a definition. Cosmology is the science of the universe, and cosmos is a Greek word for harmony or order, the opposite of chaos. Time, he adds, is one of the most basic questions of all, "since the whole of existence is nothing but consecutive series of events in time." Everybody feels it; very few can say what it is.
The historical sketch is brisk. Arab scholars and translators carried astronomy, built on Ptolemy and Aristotle, into twelfth-century Europe. Once the Church had adopted the geocentric model as theology, critics were treated as heretics, so Copernicus (AD 1473-1544) circulated his heliocentric model anonymously and his book appeared only in 1543. Galileo's telescope of 1609, Kepler's laws, and Newton's Principia of 1687 followed. Yet Newton, like Aristotle, still held the stars fixed and the universe beyond the solar system static, and that belief, the author says, survived about three centuries after him.
The turn came with measurement. Halley in 1718 compared ancient star positions with new ones and found "proper motion"; Herschel in 1783 found the Sun's own motion; Hubble in 1924 showed that some faint spots are other galaxies, and his redshift data showed that everything is moving. Haj Yousef quotes Stephen Hawking on Einstein's cosmological constant, added in 1915 to keep the universe static, a choice Einstein later counted among his greatest mistakes.
The modern picture
The author then summarises the present picture without its mathematics. The Moon circles the Earth, the planets circle the Sun, the Sun circles the centre of the Milky Way with hundreds of thousands of millions of other stars, and the galaxy is one of thousands of millions. He gives the standard units: the light year and the parsec (3.26 light years). Light from the Sun takes 8.33 minutes to arrive; Proxima Centauri lies about 4.24 light years away; our galaxy holds about 200 billion stars in a disk of more than 100,000 light years; Andromeda is about 2.9 million light years off; the most distant objects are about 13 billion light years away. Everything moves, the universe has no centre or edge, and a traveller going straight would in principle come back from the opposite side.
Theories of the whole
| Theory | Claim as the book summarises it | What troubled it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static universe | Stars fixed, cosmos unchanging | Proper motion and redshift | Big Bang |
| Universe began about 15 billion years ago from a tiny, dense point | Uniform background radiation, initial state | Steady State | Continuous creation of matter fills the expanding space |
| Discarded after the 1965 background radiation discovery | Inflation (Guth, 1979) | Very early exponential expansion | Why matter began in an excited state |
The last row matters most to the author. The semi-classical approximation uses "Instantons", which he glosses as snapshots that omit time and describe "the spontaneous appearance of a universe from literally nothing." He promises that Ibn Arabi's view "could be a key to eliminating these peculiarities, because he simply views the world as an eternal existence that is perpetually being recreated."
1.2 Ibn Arabi and his cosmos
Ibn Arabi (AH 560-638/AD 1165-1240) was born in Murcia, moved to Seville at seven and entered the Sufi path at sixteen. After years in Andalusia and Morocco a vision sent him East; in 1201 he went to Cairo, Jerusalem and Mecca, and in 1224 he settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240. He was later called Muhyi al-Din, the Reviver of Religion, and al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master. His two best-known books are al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). He himself listed 289 titles, which rise to 317 confirmed works when other titles he mentions are added; more than 850 books have been attributed to him.
The chain of cosmic births
The reason for creation is Love. Ibn Arabi leans on the Hadith of the Hidden Treasure, which the notes give as: "I was a hidden Treasure, so I loved to be known; so I created the creatures/creation so that I might be known." The notes add that hadith scholars do not find it in the standard collections, but that Ibn Arabi held it "is sound on the basis of unveiling, but not established by way of transmission (naql)" [II.399.28].
God's love to be known is a Mercy, and that Mercy formed the abstract place in which creation appears: the Cloud (al-'ama'), named after another hadith in which the Prophet, asked where our Lord was before creation, answers that He was in a Cloud. The Cloud took the forms of the Roaming Spirits, created directly and knowing nothing but God, not even themselves. One of them received a special epiphany of knowledge that engraved in it all that God would create until the Last Day. That spirit is the First Intellect, also the Higher Pen. It saw its own "shadow", and that shadow is the Universal Soul, the Protected Tablet, on which the Pen writes.
From here the book follows Ibn Arabi's imagery of marriage and birth. Whatever results from a cause is its "son"; the cause is the "father", and the place where the result appears is the "mother". So the Intellect and Soul beget everything below them.
The Soul has two forces, the intellective force (quwwa 'ilmiyya) by which it perceives knowledge and the active force (quwwa 'amaliyya) by which it keeps itself in being through motion. It first gives rise to the level of Nature and to the Dust or Prime Matter. Nature and Dust beget the Universal Body, and the "births" go on down to the soil, physical matter in general. Everything above the Universal Body is spiritual; the physical world appears after it. The author allows two readings: the physical world forms in the Universal Body, as a vast cloud of primary matter that became stars and galaxies, or by it, if the First Body is read as the first elementary particle formed by the Single Monad.
The notes explain that Nature here means the level of Nature, the four foundational elements, and quote Ibn Arabi saying that it has no separate existence yet its effects are real: "So how strange is its state and how high its effect!" [II.430.8].
Throne, Pedestal and orbs
The first thing formed in the Universal Body was the Throne on which God established His authority from His Name the All-Merciful. Within it is the Pedestal, which Ibn Arabi compares to "a tiny ring in a vast desert" against the Throne. Within the Pedestal lies the Isotropic Orb (al-falak al-atlas), starless and the same in every direction. Inside it the zodiac was created and divided by human convention into twelve equal parts. In this space God created the seven Gardens, which are distinct from the seven heavens; the term al-Wasila crosses all seven Gardens in Ibn Arabi's drawing and names the highest level of Eden, belonging to the Prophet. Below the Gardens comes the orb of the fixed stars with the 28 lunar mansions, and inside it the seven visible heavens and the Earth. Earth and heavens stand to the Pedestal as the Pedestal stands to the Throne.
The zodiac signs and lunar mansions, Ibn Arabi says, are conventions: "They are only assumptions and proportions in this body (of the sky)" [III.436.30]. The book also notes that his drawing shows a pillar standing for the Perfect Human Being, without whom the cosmos would collapse, and seven heavens resting on seven earths; the caption to Figure 1.4 adds that this marks a spiritual relation, since Ibn Arabi knew the Earth is spherical.
1.3 What philosophers have said about time
The chapter then opens the question proper with a list: what time is, whether it can be stopped or reversed, whether its flow is universal or tied to an observer, when it began, whether it is objective or imagined, how it relates to space, whether it is continuous or discrete, what "now" means. Asking "What is time?" is like asking "What is love?". Augustine knew the answer when nobody asked and lost it when someone did.
Two broad camps emerge: a rational or realistic view based on physics, and an idealistic view based on metaphysics, for which time is a construct of the mind.
Greek and Islamic philosophers
| Thinker | View of time in the book's summary |
|---|---|
| Plato | Time came into being with the heaven; it is the circular motion of the heavens |
| Aristotle | Uncreated, continuous, "a number of motion"; imaginary, since past and future do not exist and the present has no extension |
| Ibn Sina | Time is "the number of motion when it separates into before and after, not in time but in distance"; real only through moving matter; continuous |
| Ash'arite theologians | Atomist: time is discrete, and the world is re-created in time; Ibn Arabi praises and corrects them |
| al-Kindi | Follows Aristotle, but argues the world needs a generator (muhdith) because an actual infinite is impossible |
| al-Razi | Time as "the moving form of eternity" (Plato) and eternal (Plotinus) |
| al-Farabi | The world as a whole is in formation and corruption "in no time"; its parts change in time |
The author uses al-Farabi to make a point he will need later. A physicist describing a mountain as a rigid mass needs no time at all; once the Earth's motion, the restless atoms, the insects and the wind are included, time enters and new mathematics may be needed. "So because we live 'inside' the world we feel time, but the entire world itself is out of time."
Two findings frame the rest of the book. The Qur'an never uses the ordinary Arabic word for time (zaman), though it often speaks of year, month, day and night, and of the divine Names the First, the Last and the Age. And although hundreds of studies of time in Islamic thought exist, almost none has focused on Ibn Arabi. One reason is his scattered style; another is that his treatise al-Zaman (Time), which he mentions in the Futuhat [I.141.13], seems to be lost.
Western philosophy and modern physics
Augustine and Aquinas rejected circular time for a one-way journey from Genesis to Judgement; Newton drew time as a line in 1687 and made it absolute, a container that exists with or without events. Leibniz objected with the relational view. Kant made Euclidean space and linear time structures of the mind and set out his antinomy about a beginning in time; McTaggart split time into an A-series of past, present and future and a B-series of earlier and later, and argued both fail.
Physics changed the question. Minkowski in 1908 announced that "space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." Einstein's special theory of 1905 made intervals depend on the observer. Friedmann predicted expansion in 1922 and Hubble confirmed it in 1929, so the universe, time included, began in the Big Bang. The author lists the further puzzles: the arrow of time, expressed through entropy, although physical laws are mostly symmetric in time; time travel, which Relativity allows but which breeds paradoxes; and quantum time, where below the Planck time no experiment shows that time stays continuous.
A preview of Ibn Arabi's view
The chapter closes with a summary of what is to come. Time is imaginary, a tool the mind uses to order events. There are two kinds, natural and para-natural, arising from the Soul's active and intellective forces. Even so, time is one of four constituents of nature, with space, the monad (al-jawhar) and the form (al-'arad). It is cyclic, relative and inhomogeneous. Every orb has its own day. The seven Days of the cosmic Week are unalike, and all of them, Saturday included, happen "in" Saturday, the Day of eternity. Time is discrete, yet the indivisible "day" equals the normal day we divide into hours and seconds; three kinds of days are needed to explain this. And the world ceases to exist the moment after its creation and is created again, a view on which Chapters 6 and 7 will build the Single Monad model.
Part 2. Ibn Arabi's Concept of Time and Days
Chapter 2 is the book's longest survey: twenty short sections that lay out every element of Ibn Arabi's view of time, each one developed later. It opens with his poem from chapter 59 of the Futuhat: "Time, if you investigate what it comes down to, is something verifiable; Yet it is known (only) through (human) imaginations".
2.1 Time is imagined, yet it is a "mother"
Ibn Arabi's first claim is that time has no existence of its own. He reasons that "time in relation to us is like eternity in relation to Allah," and eternity is a negative attribute, so time too is "an imagined attribute that does not exist" [I.291.28]. Only the moving thing exists, not motion, space or time: "So time and space do not exist in reality, but existence is to the things that move and still" [II.458.1].
The author backs this with Aristotle, who asked how something can exist that is made of a past that is gone and a future that is not yet, and who held that the "now" is not time but a point on it, as a point is not a line. Ibn Arabi gives his own definition in the title of chapter 390: "the time of a thing is its presence." The time of the Lord is the servant and the time of the servant is the Lord, since each name needs the other; "the time of the father is the son, and the time of the son is the father" [III.547.36]. Time is therefore relative, which is why we lose it in sleep and must look at the Sun or a watch on waking.
| Mother | Arabic |
|---|---|
| The formable monad | al-jawhar al-suwari |
| The accidental form | al-'arad |
| Time | al-zaman |
| Space | al-makan |
With six derived categories they make up the ten Aristotelian categories. Yet all four are forms of one reality, the Single Monad (al-jawhar al-fard). That is why knowing time matters: it links the unity of the Monad to the multiplicity we see.
2.2 Natural and para-natural time
Ibn Arabi distinguishes physical or natural time (zaman tabi'i), which compares the motion of bodies and orbs, from spiritual or para-natural time (zaman fawq-tabi'i), which compares changes of spiritual state. "You should know that some of time is above Nature and some of it is below Nature." The first is defined by the motion of the orbs; the second by states. The author equates natural time with the time of physics and para-natural time with what philosophers call psychological time, citing the Sleepers of the Cave, who slept over three hundred years and thought it a day, and a line of Ibn al-Farid: "With her for me a year is like a glimpse, and an hour of parting for me is like a year." Ibn Arabi's own version is short: "minutes are years while sleeping."
2.3 The world was not created in time
Questions such as when the world began or what God was doing before it are, for Ibn Arabi, meaningless. The world was created out of time, and time is part of the created world. God's existence precedes the world logically, not chronologically, as sunrise precedes the start of the day with no interval between them. His existence is a precondition, not a cause.
Ibn Arabi does allow a spiritual time before the physical world, needed for the relation between spirits and Names. He names three levels of the world: the visible world ('alam al-mulk), the world of meanings ('alam al-malakut) and the all-encompassing world of divine Imagination ('alam al-jabarut). Taken whole, the world has always been and always will be, but only because it pre-exists in God's eternal knowledge; time as a whole is a circle with no beginning or end until a present point and a direction are chosen.
He divides things into necessary (God), impossible, and possible or contingent (mumkin): the world needs a determining cause (murajjih) to exist. Its entities are in God's knowledge eternally but brought into existence one after another: "So the issue for Allah is one, as He said: and Our Command is but one, as the twinkling of an eye (54:50), and multiplicity is (only) for the countables themselves" [I.162.22].
The chapter then translates the dense opening argument of chapter 59 [I.291.8]: the world exists either by God for Himself or for an "other"; an "other" that is non-existent cannot bring anything into being, and an existent "other" cannot be self-existent, so it is the world itself. God's Wish, Will, Knowledge and Ability are not additional to Him. The author presents this passage as the basis of the view called the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud), which he says is widely misunderstood: the world depends at every moment on the One Real, and nothing was added to God by creating it.
2.4 Where time comes from
We cannot ask when time began, but we can ask how. Both kinds of time originate in the Universal Soul's two forces: physical time from the active force, by which bodies keep moving to preserve their existence, and spiritual time from the intellective force, by which the heart receives knowledge [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 6-7]. Natural time began with the Isotropic Orb. Since that orb has no features, its motion could not be measured until the orb of fixed stars gave reference points. The orb's motion started when the first degree of Gemini matched the divine "Foot" on the Pedestal; one full revolution completed the first Day, Sunday, and creation went on to Saturday and then began again [II.437.34]. The length of that Day cannot be known; dividing it into 24 hours is convention.
2.5 Space-time: six Days and Saturday
Ibn Arabi calls the physical universe something that "is confined in time and space" [I.121.22]. The central novelty is that the six Days from Sunday to Friday create the world as space, and Saturday displays it as time. We witness only Saturday, because on the other six Days we are still being created, and the whole process repeats every moment. Space has six directions (two for each of three dimensions), so the world lives in seven "dimensions" of space-time, all of them "days". The author reads the Qur'anic verses on creation "in six Days" followed by God's mounting the Throne in this light.
Ibn Arabi also contrasts space and time. "Time ... is just like space, an extension that has no (outer) limit" [I.291.6]. But "Space is defined by who sits in it, and time is counted by breaths"; time rests on the divine Name the Age; space emerged by God's establishment on the Throne, time by His nightly descent to the lowest heaven [IV.337.5].
2.6 Motion as re-creation
Ibn Arabi's lost Book of Motion (OY no. 223) went the way of his book on time, but chapter 198 discusses motion. "Everything in the world that moves and rests does not move and rest by itself, but by a mover and a rester." The orbs move in tidy sequence "like the motion of the millstone"; the elements move in an "entwined" way, parts leaving neighbours for new places; and time emerges from the orbs' motion but affects only what lies below them.
His deeper definition [II.457.27] reduces motion to an embodied thing appearing in one place in one time and in the next place in the next time. There is nothing but the thing, the place and the succession: "But those who claim that there is some (real) thing called 'motion', which got into the embodied thing and caused it to change from one place to another, they have to prove it!" On this view nothing travels; the object is re-created in neighbouring places, and we imagine motion.
The author adds Ibn Arabi's puzzle from The White Pearl: "everything that moves does not move in occupied space (mala'), but it moves in a void (khala')". When water fills a cup, the air must leave before the water enters, so the effect would precede the cause, and simultaneous cause and effect is excluded because entities are created in series. Ibn Arabi even questions causality, giving God's words "I create the things next to the causes and not by them" [II.204.13]. The author compares this to electrons jumping between energy levels with no existence in between.
2.7 Relative and curved time
Spiritual experience shows the relativity of time. In chapter 73, Ibn Arabi says that one of the three hundred knowers "whose hearts are like the heart of Adam", when taken to one of the Lord's scenes, receives in one moment what others gain in a thousand years of study, because time is "folded up" for them [II.9.23]. On curvature, the author cites a line of verse: "the age has curved on us and bent (hadaba al-dahr 'alayna wa inhana)" [I.202.7].
| Case in the book | What happened | Ibn Arabi's lesson |
|---|---|---|
| al-Jawhari | Bathing in the Nile, he saw himself in Baghdad, married and lived six years with children; months later the woman came looking for his house in Egypt [II.82.22] | Time folds; more events can fit in a moment |
| The Prophet's Mi'raj | Ascension through the heavens in one night, both physical and spiritual | A multitude of events in a short span |
| Ibn Arabi's own ascensions (ch. 367) | Spiritual only; the body's elements return to their places and the spirit meets the prophets of each sphere | Travel gives knowledge, not physical effects |
| Ahmad al-Sabti | Son of Harun al-Rashid, met at the Kaaba passing between two men without parting them [I.638.32] | Spirits of the dead can be embodied |
| Visions of prophets [IV.77.27] | He recited the Qur'an to Abraham and saw all believers past and future "on a single plane" | Meeting the future is possible as vision |
The contrast with Relativity is the point. Relativity's traveller returns to find generations gone; Ibn Arabi's traveller returns with more knowledge, because time is imaginary and more events mean more knowledge. The Pole (al-qutb), called the master of time, is always attentive to what God wants of him, and so witnesses all things out of time. Moses heard God's speech because he was taken out of time. But travel into the past is impossible: "The past that has gone never comes back, but the similar (form) may come back" [II.186.27].
2.8 Time is discrete, and the quantum is a day
How can a day be indivisible when we divide it into hours? The author's answer, developed in Chapter 4, is that each of us lives only a tiny share of the single Day: a still picture, after which we cease to exist and are re-created in the next Day, so that motion is like a cinema film. Each lived moment is a whole Week, and "our life as a time is a collection of Saturdays". Our normal days are "intertwined" with the divine Days, which is why we see many events. And at every moment there is a full day round the globe: evening somewhere, morning elsewhere.
Finally, the author says that Ibn Arabi's time is neither discrete nor continuous. Both notions assume multiplicity; on the plane of real Unity there is no time at all.
2.9 to 2.11 Chest, circle and cycle
Everything has a "chest" (sadr), its front or first appearance. "The chest of time is the time (instant) of the Dust's acceptance of the form" and "the chest of days is Monday" [II.652.27]. Causes are the chests of things; while we look at causes we are blind, and we see when we look instead at the "special Face" between us and our Lord. We are imprisoned in the chest of time and break out through the heart.
Ibn Arabi calls time a circle (da'ira): the present joins its two ends [I.387.32], and the imaginary beginning and end are azal and abad. This circular time differs from cyclical time: day, week, month and year are periods in which similar events recur. Yet there is never true repetition. Each cycle is ruled by divine Names, and their interaction keeps any two days from being the same. Sunday's motion comes from the Name the All-Hearing and Monday's from the Living [II.438.9]; this Sunday differs from last Sunday because its place in the month and year differs. His prayer calls the Prophet "the Dust (hayula) of forms which does not manifest in one form to any two (persons), nor in any one form to anyone twice".
| The day of... | Length in normal Earth days (book's Table 2.1) |
|---|---|
| The Moon | 28 days |
| The Sun | 360 days = 1 year |
| Mercury | about 30 years |
| al-rabb (the Lord) | 1,000 years |
| al-mithl (the Like) | 7,000 years |
| Zodiac | 12,000 years |
| Longest planet (star) day | 36,000 years |
| al-ma'arij (the ascending ways) | 50,000 years |
The author compares knowing these cycles to weather forecasting: good probabilities, not certainty. He also gives Ibn Arabi's great cycle of 78,000 years, from the start of creation under the Name the Hidden, in Libra, to the appearance of the Prophet's body under the Name the Manifest [I.146.18]. The numbers in chapter 7 of the Futuhat on the order of creation, he admits, "clearly do not agree with modern cosmology and geology".
2.12 to 2.14 Day, daytime and night
In chapter 69 Ibn Arabi defines the units of time through an imagined observer on Earth. "Timing" is an estimate applied to something that does not accept it, as we suppose a beginning on a sphere. The observer fixes on a sign in the zodiac and waits until it returns: that is a day. The Sun rises from the "shining-place" (mashriq), reaches the meridian, declines and sets in the maghrib; the lit span is the daytime (nahar, from nahr, river, since light spreads like water in a riverbed); the dark span is the night; a month is the Sun's passage through one zodiac sign and a year its passage through all twelve. All of these are relations: "So thus you see now that 'time' is (only) an expression for something (humanly) imagined, in which these 'timings' are only supposed."
The true day is therefore the sidereal day, one turn of the fixed stars, measured "from Nath to Nath"; it existed before the Sun, whose creation only split the day into daytime and night [I.140.30]. Here Ibn Arabi parts from theologians who read the six Days as "assumed days". He also notes that Arabs count the day from sunset, so that night precedes daytime: "So He made the night as the origin and took the day out of it, just as the skin is stripped off the sheep" (36:37).
Every orb, spirit and divine Name has its own Day. The smallest is the single Day of event; there is no largest except the Age, "one Day that never repeats" [III.202.5]. Each orb has a natural motion and a forced motion imposed by the orb around it [I.121.25]. Every Name also has a daytime and night, caused by the Name the Light: the Intellect's night is when it turns to its Lord, its day when it turns to the Soul. From this the author draws a rule he will use later: we move in the Soul's daytime and perceive in its night; "we either move or perceive, but not at the same time." Ibn Arabi even notes that "The outlet of the night from the sphere of the Earth where the Sun sets is cone-shaped" [III.203.22].
2.15 to 2.20 The single Day, moments and the Age
The divine Act is one, but its effects differ by recipient: when the Soul moves fire to heat the world, those ready to burn burn [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 11]. "The task in relation to the Real is one from Him" but many for the recipients [II.82.6]. If the Intellect scans N states in each Day, each observer exists for 24 x 60 x 60/N seconds, and that share is the "now". Ibn Arabi calls the single Day "the day of Breath": "and the day is the magnitude of the breath of the Breather in the single time" [II.171.23].
The moment (al-waqt) is "your state in the time being, without any relation to the past or to the future"; the Sufi is "the son of his moment". The author quotes Gerhard Bowering: "In Ibn al-'Arabi's view there is an infinite cluster of moments, conceived as time atoms without duration". Whether moments have duration is left open; Ibn Arabi says the relation of the Single Monad to the Greatest Element is a secret he was sworn not to reveal.
The past is "a relegation of an actualized non-existence", the future "a pure non-existence" [II.69.13], and the now is a barzakh between them. Eternity is a negation, not an endless stretch: in his Book of Eternity Ibn Arabi says that "there is nothing called eternity at all", and he solves the puzzle of God's speech to Moses this way: "It is more proper to say that Moses heard out of time, because the Speaker spoke out of time." He records the debate on the "primordials" (four, eight, One, or One with the Reality of Realities) and places himself with those who speak of the Reality of Realities, also called the Muhammadan Reality.
The chapter ends with a glossary of further terms: al-sarmad (absolute eternity), mata (when?) and al-hin (a short or specified time), among others.
Part 3. The Divine Week and Its Seven Days
Chapter 3 asks why the week has seven days when nothing in the sky happens every seven days, and answers with Ibn Arabi's doctrine that each Day of the cosmic Week comes from one of the seven fundamental divine Attributes. It ends with the book's boldest reading of Genesis: six Days for space, Saturday for time, repeated at every instant.
The chapter opens with the cryptic poem that heads chapter 60 of the Futuhat: the elements are "four mothers", our sustenance comes from the ears of grain under Virgo, our time is seven thousand years, and the reader is told: "So see, with your intellect, seven in seven, from seven that are not kings." The days we see look alike, but by the kinds of events in them they reduce to seven distinct Days. (The book capitalises "Day" and "Week" for the cosmic, divine units.)
3.1 Why seven?
The author surveys calendars. Egyptians and Greeks once used ten-day weeks; revolutionary France tried a ten-day week in 1792 and the Soviet Union five- and six-day weeks in 1929 and 1932, yet all returned to seven. Babylonians and Egyptians believed each hour was ruled by one of the seven moving bodies and named each day after the planet of its first hour; the same names appear in India, Tibet and Burma, and among the Harranians. Ibn Arabi knew this hypothesis. Arabic, however, simply numbers the days from al-ahad (the first, Sunday) to al-khamis (the fifth, Thursday), with al-jum'a (gathering) and al-sabt (rest).
3.2 Four cycles from four Attributes
"Everything in the world has to be based on (specific) divine Attributes" [I.293.5]. The divine Names are countless, but four are the "mothers": Life, Knowledge, Ability and Will, which are enough for God to be God. Three more, Hearing, Seeing and Speaking, are needed for God to be Creator, giving the "seven mother attributes" [I.525.32]. Since the human being is made in God's image and the world in the human image, fours and sevens run through the world: four elements, four cycles of time, seven heavens, seven days.
The four cycles are the day, the week, the month and the year. In chapter 390 Ibn Arabi says time is fourfold because the seasons are four, and the seasons are four because the quaternity of Life, Knowledge, Ability and Will passed down into Nature and then into "the biggest time" cycle, the year.
| Cycle | Divine measure (Ibn Arabi) | Observed measure (book's comparison) |
|---|---|---|
| Day | One turn of the Isotropic Orb; length known only to God | Sidereal day, about four minutes shorter than the solar day |
| Week | Seven Days from seven Attributes; the primary cycle | No astronomical event; one quarter of the 28-day month |
| Month | 28 days, the Moon's circuit of the zodiac [III.548.28] | Synodic month 29.53 days; sidereal 27.32 days |
| Year | 360 days [III.434.9] | 365.25 days |
Ibn Arabi regards the solar year and the observed months as human conventions, and the 360-day year, 28-day month, week and sidereal day as divine periods set up when the orbs were made to move. The 360-day year is not twelve 28-day months, and Ibn Arabi treats that mismatch as necessary: creation is built on generation (takwin), and "with complete ratios no generation could happen" [II.440.7]. The author suggests the observed periods may have drifted, since the Earth's rotation is slowing, and finds a possible hint in two Arabic words for year: sana for the original 360-day year and 'am for the lengthening observed year, citing the verse on Noah, who stayed "a thousand years (sana) save fifty years ('am)" (29:14).
3.3 The Week is the primary cycle
From astronomy alone the day would be the basic unit. Ibn Arabi makes the Week basic because its Days are not alike: each is ruled by a different Attribute. Yet no day of one week is identical to the same day of another: "Nothing is actually repeated, because of divine vastness" [III.127.23]; daytime and night are called "the two-new" (al-jadidan), not "the two-renewed", "because Saturday is not Sunday and it is not Saturday from the other week". "Allah never manifests in the same form twice, nor in the same form to any two persons" [III.127.33]. "Although there are many days, the real order of events reduces them into seven days" [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 6]. The days we live seem conventional because the divine Days are "intertwined" with them, the subject of Chapter 4.
3.4 Seven Attributes, seven Days
The order is not arbitrary. Creation begins with Hearing because a thing must first hear God's command "Be"; everything can hear before it exists, since it is determined in God's knowledge. It ends with Speaking. Ibn Arabi compares the foetus, which acquires six attributes before birth and speech after, and notes that a child born at six lunar months can live, six months being six lunar "days".
The book's Table 3.1 gathers the correspondences, taken from chapter 198 of the Futuhat and al-Tanazzulat al-Mawsiliyya. The main columns are:
| Day | Attribute | Planet | Heaven (from Earth) | Prophet | Creating Name | Lunar mansion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | Hearing | Sun | 4th | Idris | al-Nur (the Light) | Simak |
| Monday | Living | Moon | 1st | Adam | al-Mubin (the Clarifying) | Iklil |
| Tuesday | Seeing | Mars | 5th | Aaron | al-Qahir (the All-Prevailing) | 'Awwa |
| Wednesday | Willing | Mercury | 2nd | Jesus | al-Muhsi (the Enumerator) | Zabana |
| Thursday | Ability | Jupiter | 6th | Moses | al-'Alim (the All-Knowing) | Sarfa |
| Friday | Knowing | Venus | 3rd | Joseph | al-Musawwir (the Shaper) | Ghafr |
| Saturday | Speaking | Saturn | 7th | Abraham | al-Rabb (the Lord) | Khirtan |
Each heaven also has a letter of the alphabet and a clime on Earth, held by one of the seven Substitutes (abdal), saints who receive from the prophet of their heaven. In a passage attributed to Idris, Ibn Arabi lists the prophets from the seventh heaven down: Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Idris, Joseph, Jesus, Adam, with John alternating between Jesus and Aaron [I.154.34]. Events on Earth are preordained in the heavens day by day, though Ibn Arabi also allows unpredictable events from each thing's direct relation with God.
3.5 The meaning of each Day
Ibn Arabi wrote about these "original" Days in the last ten chapters of al-Tanazzulat al-Mawsiliyya, a book the author calls deliberately obscure. The Qur'an says God created the heavens and earth in six Days and then mounted the Throne, and a hadith quoted in full gives the Days: the earth on Sunday and Monday, mountains, rivers and food on Tuesday and Wednesday, the seven heavens on Thursday and Friday, "and when it was Saturday there was no creation in it."
- Sunday (al-ahad, also a Name meaning the One). Its motion is from Hearing, so everything in the world hears the command "Be" even while non-existent. Ibn Arabi distinguishes the divine Saying from Speaking: "By "Saying" the non-existent hears", while by Speaking the existent hears, as Moses did [II.400.7]. The Sun, "the heart of the world", was created on Sunday in the mansion al-Simak, the central fourteenth station, with the letter nun, and made the place of Idris.
- Monday. From the Living, so everything in the world is alive. The Name the Clarifying brought the lowest heaven and the Moon into being. The Moon passes one mansion a day, and from its motion come the 28 letters [II.448.4]. Its heaven belongs to Adam, who lectured Ibn Arabi on the directions when he visited the Moon, because on Monday space and the six directions begin to form.
- Tuesday. From Seeing: every part of the world witnesses its Creator with respect to its own essence. The All-Prevailing created Mars, the dwelling of Aaron, and the letter lam.
- Wednesday. From Willing: every part seeks to glorify its Creator. The Enumerator created Mercury and the letter ta', and Jesus dwells there.
- Thursday. From Ability: every part is enabled to praise. The All-Knowing created Jupiter, home of Moses.
- Friday (al-jum'a, gathering). From Knowledge: every part knows its Creator. The Shaper created Venus, home of Joseph. Before Islam Arabs called the day 'Aruba. Ibn Arabi derives jum'a from the "gathering" of the form of the Real and the form of all creation in the human being, created on Friday.
- Saturday (al-sabt, rest). From Speaking: "so everything in the existence glorifies in thanks of its Creator, but we do not understand their glorification" [II.438.16]. The Lord created Saturn, home of Abraham.
Saturday, the Day of eternity
Saturday holds the key to the whole scheme. In al-Tanazzulat Ibn Arabi writes: "Saturday passes through the existent things like number does in the countable things, permanence in the ... permanent things, and standing in the standing things; it is not non-existing nor existing, and not present nor absent." The world, he says, was formed in six Days, and Saturday remains "for changing from one state to another"; its rulers are cold and dryness, and whoever moves in its orb knows the Identity, the Attributes, the Actions and the Effects [I.61.13]. "And so the Day of Eternity starts which is Saturday (al-sabt), and al-sabt means 'rest'; it is the seventh Day, and it has no end" [III.192.20]. Its daytime belongs eternally to the people of the Gardens and its night to the people of the Fire.
Ibn Arabi tells of meeting the spirit of al-Sabti, the "Saturday man", son of Harun al-Rashid, at the Kaaba. He had worked every Saturday and worshipped the other six days, because he had heard that God created the world from Sunday to Friday and on Saturday "reclined and put one leg over the other and said: 'I am the King'". Since Saturday is from Speaking and Sunday from Hearing, the Week closes in a circle; human beings share in creative speech, and "Allah is by the tongue of every speaker". Ibn Arabi also calls Saturday the "fruitless Day" (22:55), since no Day is born after it [II.564.22].
3.6 Space-time and creation in six Days
Ibn Arabi himself admits the puzzle: "it is rather amazing that the Days, among which is Saturday, are (all) happening in Saturday" [II.444.7]. He compares Adam, shown his progeny, himself included, in God's Hand while standing outside looking on. The author adds that the Arabic yawm (day) can also mean direction.
Taken together with continuous re-creation, the conclusion follows: the Week is a unit of space-time. In the first six Days the world gains one Attribute at a time. On Sunday it hears "Be" and moves from the absolute Unseen to a dimensionless point, the "real through whom creation takes place", which the author identifies with the Greatest Element. On Monday it lives, and angels are created from light; on Wednesday it wills, and the jinn are created; on Friday, in its last three hours, the human being is created and the world comes to know its Creator. The world is then complete as a Single Monad, the Complete Human Being. On Saturday the picture is held in imagination, ceases at the next moment and is re-created; cold and dryness rule Saturday so that the image seems continuous [I.61.15]. "I called them not to witness the creation of Heavens and the Earth" (18:51): we never see the six Days, only their result.
The author adds a corollary: in each Week only one point of space-time is created, the point where the observer is, and the observer is created with it. Other points are held in the Dust of the cosmic Imagination.
Earlier theologians said the six Days could not be ordinary days, since days did not yet exist. Ibn Arabi says they do coincide with the days we live; the Day existed before the heavens and the Sun only split it into daytime and night. The author calls this the first real unification of space and time, giving the Week real rather than conventional meaning.
Part 4. The Actual Flow of Time
Chapter 4 tackles the paradox left open by Chapter 2: if God performs one task in each Day, why do we see countless events every day? Ibn Arabi's answer, worked out mainly in his short Kitab Ayyam al-Sha'n (The Book of the Days of Task), is that the days we observe are not the real flow of time. He distinguishes three kinds of compounded days.
| Kind of day | Arabic | Qur'anic basis | What it describes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circulated days | ayyam al-takwir | 39:5, night and day "encircle" each other | The normal week we observe from one place |
| Taken-out days | ayyam al-salkh | 36:37, the day "taken out" of the night | Which night truly belongs to which daytime |
| Intertwined days | ayyam al-ilaj | 57:6, night and day "merged" into each other | How the divine Days of event are woven through our hours |
4.1 The original Days of event
The single Day, taken over the whole globe, contains our normal day, though we live it as a moment. Ibn Arabi notes that "in each day of our normal days, that is from sunset to sunset or from sunrise to sunrise, there is the end of 360 days" [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 6]. The author explains with longitudes: divide the Earth into 360 lines and the day into 360 degrees. The second degree of the day on the first line is the first degree of the day beginning on the second line, and so on. So any whole day lived in one place is a collection of the last degrees of 360 days elsewhere, and at every moment there is one full day round the Earth. Because we observe from one tiny point, we see a linear sequence of normal days, and the original Days are intertwined with them.
4.2 Circulated days
The notes add that Pablo Beneito and Stephen Hirtenstein, in their study of Ayyam al-Sha'n (The Seven Days of the Heart), render these as "the cyclical days"; the author prefers "circulated" to stress that day and night go round each other and round the Earth.
4.3 Taken-out days
"A token unto them is the night-time: We take the daytime out of it, and lo, they are in darkness" (36:37). The night is the origin, a skin over the day; God takes the day out so that the world, hidden in the darkness of the Unseen, appears in the light of existence. But the verse does not say which daytime came out of which night.
Ibn Arabi treats day and night as parents. What happens in the daytime has the night as father and the daytime as mother; what happens at night has the daytime as father and the night as mother. "Taking-out" (salkh) is the exchange of these roles. To find the true pairs he uses the planetary rulers of the hours: each hour has a ruler, each day is named after the ruler of its first hour, and a daytime and its own night must have the same ruler in their first hour. "So when you look to which planet the first hour of the daytime belongs, then this planet is the ruler of that daytime" [III.203.26].
The result is a gap of three daytimes and three nights between each daytime and the night it came from, because the world has six directions: three nights for down, left and back, three daytimes for up, right and front [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 7].
| The daytime of... | was taken out of the night of... |
|---|---|
| Wednesday | Sunday |
| Thursday | Monday |
| Friday | Tuesday |
| Saturday | Wednesday |
| Sunday | Thursday |
| Monday | Friday |
| Tuesday | Saturday |
4.4 Intertwined days
Neither circulated nor taken-out days give one task per Day. Ibn Arabi therefore says the original Days of event are "intertwined" (mutawalija, from yuliju, to enter into) with the circulated days, and he shows how by dividing the day into 24 hours, as an approximation that could be repeated with minutes or anything smaller. He starts with Sunday, because al-ahad is a divine Name, it is the first day, and it is the day of the Sun, the heart of the world.
The 24 hours of the divine Sunday are gathered from the circulated week: the first hour of Thursday night, then the eighth hour, and so on at seven-hour intervals, until twelve night hours and then twelve daytime hours are assembled. Monday is built the same way starting from Friday's daytime, and so on for all seven. The book's Table 4.3 sets out the whole scheme. Its first rows read:
| Hour | SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI | SAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Night 1 | WED | THU | FRI | SAT | SUN | MON | TUE |
| Night 2 | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI | SAT | SUN |
| Night 3 | SAT | SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI |
| Day 1 | SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU | FRI | SAT |
| Day 2 | FRI | SAT | SUN | MON | TUE | WED | THU |
| Day 3 | WED | THU | FRI | SAT | SUN | MON | TUE |
Columns are the observed weekdays; each cell names the divine Day of event to which that hour belongs (after Table 4.3, from Kitab Ayyam al-Sha'n, pp. 11-16).
4.5 The seven Days in the zodiac
The Day was created in the Isotropic Orb but defined in the orb of the fixed stars, where the twelve signs give a reference point. Ibn Arabi counts from the first degree of Gemini, when that point matched the divine Foot on the Pedestal. The author notes that the first degree of Gemini coincides with the galactic equator and cites a claim that ancient Sumerians used it as a starting point for their zodiacal calendar.
Ibn Arabi's own account [II.437.29] says the Name the All-Sufficient made the orb isotropic, with no planets, no edge and no visible beginning. "This orb determined only one Day, which is a single cycle (of this orb) beginning at the place of the (divine) 'Foot' in the Pedestal." Nobody but God knows its length. The first Day, Sunday, began at the first degree of Gemini, a sign of air; when that point returned, the cycle passed "over every degree, minute, second, and less than that of this orb", and the single indivisible monad of creation was determined. A second motion followed, Monday, and so on to seven motions, each from one Attribute, "which made the Age not more than seven (distinctive) Days" [II.438.3].
4.6 What happens in each Day
In each Day of event God inspires the Universal Soul to move the orbs so that one kind of event occurs; its effects vary by recipient, as heat burns what is ready to burn [Ayyam al-Sha'n: 6]. Ayyam al-Sha'n lists the action of the Soul on each Day and a share of "contribution" from each of the seven heavens, in quarters, perhaps for the four elements. The book summarises these in Table 4.4 but declines to interpret them, warning that the data are incomplete and unclear. The notes add that Beneito and Hirtenstein found the contributions should total 24, the hours of the day, and filled the gaps on that assumption.
4.7 Hours, minutes and seconds
Since our day is a collection of moments from many divine Days, it can be divided without apparent end: 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, then decimals. The notes record that since 1956 the second has been defined by the caesium atom rather than the Earth's motion.
Even the conventional divisions have a divine origin. The orbs have 360 degrees because the Universal Intellect was taught 360 kinds of comprehensive knowledge by the Greatest Element, each with 360 divisions of detail [I.295.12]. God appointed 12 rulers for the zodiac signs (the months), 28 chamberlains for the lunar mansions (the days of the divine month) and 7 chiefs for the heavens (the Days of the Week), each with a human deputy on Earth. Among the Friends of God are 24 Men of (Spiritual) Opening (rijal al-fath), "one of them for each hour".
Finally, the varying lengths of daytime and night through the year come from the Sun's motion along the tilted zodiac. "But the day (al-yawm) itself is 24 hours: it does not increase or decrease" [I.140.33].
Part 5. Unicity and Multiplicity
Chapter 5 turns from time to ontology, because, the author says, Ibn Arabi's view of time cannot be understood without his "oneness of being" (wahdat al-wujud). Ibn Arabi never used the term, and the notes suggest it was most likely first used by his critic Ibn Taymiyya. The chapter insists the doctrine is neither pantheism nor monism: Ibn Arabi keeps the distinction between Creator and creation, upholds the revealed Law and accepts the multiplicity we see. What interests the author is how the doctrine explains the cosmos.
5.1 Yes and No: the meeting with Ibn Rushd
The chapter opens with the most famous anecdote in the Futuhat [I.153.33]. In Cordoba the judge Ibn Rushd, a friend of Ibn Arabi's father, asked to meet the beardless young man whose spiritual retreat was being talked about. He rose, embraced him and said "Yes"; Ibn Arabi said "Yes", and the philosopher was delighted; then Ibn Arabi said "No", and his colour changed. Asked whether unveiling (kashf) agreed with what thought had led the philosophers to, he replied: "Yes ... No, and between the "yes" and the "no", spirits fly away from their (bodily) matter and necks from their bodies." Ibn Rushd turned pale, trembled and recited the formula "there is no power and no strength but in Allah".
The episode frames a contrast of methods. Philosophers and scientists work from observation and logic; Sufis claim to leap directly to the unseen through the heart. Observations can err through imperfect senses or instruments, while true visions, as opposed to our interpretations of them, are always correct [I.307.12]. The intellect is unbounded as a receiver but limited as a thinking tool, since it relies on limited senses [I.288.27], and it cannot describe the origin of a world it is part of. Philosophers' observations reach only as far as the Isotropic Orb [II.677.1]. Physics, the author argues, is descriptive, not determinative: every cosmological model needs an initial or boundary condition that reason cannot supply. Sufis, by contrast, have rarely tied their visions to the observable universe, and Ibn Arabi himself said his aim was to know God, not to explain the world. That gap is what the book proposes to bridge.
5.2 From the One, only one at a time
The Pole Idris taught that "the world exists between the circumference and the point" [I.154.22]. The point is the Real, the circumference is the circle of contingent beings, and beyond it lies the "sea" of the impossible.
In chapter 47 Ibn Arabi notes that the centre meets every point of the circumference with its whole entity, without division. So multiplicity can emerge from the One without touching His Oneness. This runs against the philosophers' maxim, central to Ibn Sina's cosmology, that "from the One only one may emerge". Ibn Arabi allows the maxim for physical beings but not for God: "How could He, Who created that rule, fall under it?!" [II.31.11].
He then re-reads the maxim through time. God has a special face (wajh khass) toward every existing thing, and each thing is one: "So if multiplicity exists, it would (only) be with regard to the oneness of time that is the container (of that apparent multiplicity)" [II.434.18]. The editor of the Bulaq edition, 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri, added a rare long footnote here, which the author analyses: each thing's "face" is unique and never repeated, and if we could look at existence from outside time we would see one existence. The author finds both points unsatisfying. Non-repetition does not remove multiplicity, and seeing the whole as one shows its unity (wahidiyya) but not its unicity (ahadiyya).
5.3 God and His Names
God is One (Wahid), not many, and Unique (Ahad), not divisible. His Essence cannot be known; His Names and Attributes can. The author quotes Chittick: "God is known through the relations, attributions and correlations between Him and the cosmos. But the Essence is unknown, since nothing is related to It". Ibn Arabi prays: "it is enough for me that You know my ignorance. You are as I know, and beyond what I know to a degree that I do not know." In his reading of the Hidden Treasure, the best knowledge is "that the knowers know that they do not know", echoing Abu Bakr: "The incapacity to attain realization is a realization." [III.429.7].
The 99 Names are only the principal ones; the Names are countless, every thing in the cosmos is a divine Name, and each Name implies all the others. Number does not rule them with respect to God; "The Names of the Real do not become plural and multiple except in manifestation" [II.122.19]. The words we use are "the names of the Names". Ibn Arabi also contrasts the Names Allah and the All-Merciful: Allah is called by a Name's meaning, the All-Merciful by its form, since the creative Breath belongs to the All-Merciful [II.396.30]. So whatever we know of God belongs to the All-Merciful, who mounted the Throne.
5.4 Threefold structure
There are three kinds of divine Names: of Essence, of Attributes and of Actions. The Perfect Human Being, made in the image of the All-Merciful, therefore has three faces, and everything is built on a kind of triplicity.
| Triplicity | First | Link | Third |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generation | Subject ("father") | Object ("mother") | Act ("son") |
| Creation | Universal Intellect (Pen) | Universal Soul (Tablet) | All that will happen until the Last Day |
| Ontology | Allah | Human Being / Intellect | World |
| The human being | Spirit | Heart | Body |
| Astronomy | Sun | Moon | Earth |
| Divine giving | His Entity | His willing intention | His Speaking ("Be") |
"From the one alone nothing may be produced" [III.126.1]. Ibn Arabi counts three as the first odd number, since one is not a number and two is even: "the least of plurals is three" [III.126.5]. The Intellect is the barzakh between God and the world, with two interfaces: when it faces God, that is our night; when it faces the world, our day. In the Sun, Moon and Earth image, the Earth lives from the Sun, but when the Sun does not face it the Moon reflects its light, and we can look at the full Moon though not at the Sun, as in the hadith of God's 70,000 veils. Yet the Sun also lights the Earth directly, as God has a direct face to each creature.
5.5 The oneness of being
In chapter 198 Ibn Arabi follows Ibn Sina's three categories. Absolute Existence (God) never accepts non-existence; absolute non-existence (the impossible) never accepts existence; the absolutely possible (the world) accepts either through a cause. "So some of it is darkness, and that is the Nature. And some of it is light, and that is the 'Breath of the All-Merciful'" [II.426.26].
The author's summary: the world is a mixture of light and darkness, and darkness is nothing, only the absence of light. Light is ultimately the Real, who is One. Multiplicity is the oneness of light mixed with the darkness of non-existence, and creation is the constantly repeated relative manifestation of the Real, most perfectly in the Perfect Human Being, through the Universal Intellect. Evil is therefore not self-subsistent; it is the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light. The author admits that, out of context, this could give rise to religious and ethical objections.
Ibn Arabi scattered these ideas through his works on purpose, he explains, so that ordinary readers would not misunderstand them [I.38.25]. Following Chittick, the author gives the answer to "Are the things the same as God?" as "Yes and No": they are "He/not He", "not Him, and ... not other than Him". Saying only "Yes" would confine God in objects; saying only "No" would assert other self-subsistent existents. That is "the secret of sincerity", also "the secret of destiny" [III.182.11].
Ibn Arabi often calls the world a mirror. Absolute non-existence stood as a mirror for absolute Existence, which saw its Image there; that Image is the reality of the possible, which is therefore "not the very essence of the Real Himself; yet it is not other than Him" [II.47.32]. Conversely: "If the unreal (non-existence) had a tongue (to speak), it would tell you: 'you are according to my image'" [IV.154.23]. So the world fluctuates at every instant between existence and non-existence, and the Intellect turning to God or to us gives the Qur'anic night and day. The Single Monad itself is one of an unknown number of Roaming Spirits, so there is a further, unknowable multiplicity above it, which the author also places under "He/not He".
5.6 Ever-renewed creation
The arguments are theological. If a form lasted two instants, the creature would be independent of God and God would not always be Creator: "so it is impossible for the (created) form to remain for two instants of time (or longer)" (al-Tanazzulat al-Layliyya: 55). Because of divine Vastness, no form is ever repeated, only similar [I.721.22]. A thing cannot be annihilated by its opposite, which does not coexist with it, nor by an agent "doing nothing", which is nonsense; so it ceases by itself. Ibn Arabi also puts the argument in the mouth of a mysterious "western Imam" near the start of the Futuhat, in kalam language loosely based on al-Ghazali's al-Iqtisad fi al-I'tiqad [I.39.7].
The Ash'arites had held something similar, with a world of substances and accidents re-created in each atom of time. Ibn Arabi's step beyond them is that all monads are copies or reflections of the one Single Monad [III.404.25], which creates and re-creates all forms and monads. Explaining how it does so is the task of Chapter 6. The principle also explains motion (2.6) and intertwining (4.4), and the author promises it will resolve the EPR paradox (7.6). The re-creation must run at extraordinary "rates of refreshment", which the author compares to a screen being redrawn.
Part 6. The Single Monad Model
Chapter 6 is where the author assembles the pieces of the earlier chapters (the Week of creation, the flow of time and the oneness of being) into one picture, which he calls the "Single Monad model". Its epigraph sets the tone: "The cosmos is only imagined, though it is ... in reality ... real." The whole created world, spiritual and manifest, is presented as imaginal forms perpetually re-created by one Single Monad (al-jawhar al-fard), which alone has real existence.
6.1 Three hypotheses
The author stresses that Ibn Arabi does not offer these ideas as philosophical arguments but as the symbolic expression of realities he and other "Knowers" saw by unveiling. With that caveat, the model reduces to three hypotheses.
| Hypothesis | What it claims | Where it was prepared | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Single Monad | Only one Monad has real existence at any time. It manifests forms ("imaging Itself") to build a complete still picture of the cosmos in one divine Week, which for an observer inside is a single moment. | Chapters 2 and 5 | Re-creation |
| Forms cease to exist right after the instant of their creation and are re-created in every Week, that is, at every moment. Six Days make space; we witness only the seventh, Saturday. | Sections 3.6 and 5.6 | The actual flow of time | Each observer waits, "somehow out of existence", six Days to see the next still picture, yet experiences only one infinitesimal moment. Real time is therefore intertwined with earthly days, not linear. |
The Monad is described as indivisible yet compound: it is built from the "Greatest Element", the one real ultimate substance. That tension, one and yet structured, runs through the whole chapter.
6.2 Monads and forms
Ibn Arabi borrows the vocabulary of the atomist kalam theologians: the world is made of substances (jawahir) and accidents (a'rad). The substance exists by itself; the accident exists only through a substance. A monad can only appear "wearing" a form [II.179.26], so we never see monads, only forms. Forms last one instant and vanish "intrinsically", and the same form never returns [II.677.30].
The author notes that jawhar literally meant "jewel", translated the first Aristotelian category, and that the English "monad" (from Greek monados, "ultimate, indivisible unit") was used by the Neoplatonists for the One, God being the "Monad of monads". Ibn Arabi uses the word at several levels:
- for the one real essence of creation, which he identifies not with the transcendent God but with the Universal or First Intellect, the Pen [II.675.6], also called the Perfect Human Being;
- in the plural, for the souls or "partial intellects" of human perceivers;
- for the substance of any entity at all, angel, jinn, human, animal, plant or metal.
These levels are linked, because all monads are images, reflections or shadows of the one Single Monad, which alone may be described as truly existent.
6.3 Names of the Single Monad
The Monad has many names. Ibn Arabi's Al-Durrat Al-Bayda (The White Pearl) gathers names of the First Intellect, and the first chapter of Al-Tadbirat Al-Ilahiyya treats it as the true Caliph. The author admits a "confusion" in the sources: for some names it is unclear whether they belong to the Single Monad or to the Greatest Element.
One name is "the real through whom creation takes place". The author fixes a convention: "the Real", capitalised, is the divine Name (al-haqq); "the real", lower case, is the real-through-whom-creation-takes-place. He then assigns that name to the Greatest Element rather than the Monad, since the Monad is compound and the Element is the most elementary "block". His image: the Single Monad is the seed of the tree of the cosmos, while the Greatest Element is what the seed is made of, down to its cells and particles.
A passage from chapter 364 [II.313.35-314.10] carries the point. The servant heard the divine Command while still non-existent ("immutable hearing") and then by actual hearing; the essence of hearing did not change, only its state. Ibn Arabi concludes that "there is only one essence" distinguished from the Necessarily Existent, and that its states are to it as the divine Names are to the Real: they no more make it many than the Names multiply God. The world is the many states of one essence, the Perfect Human Being.
Two more names are explored:
- Universal Spirit (al-ruh al-kulli). From the verb raha, to go: it "went" through the orbs of knowledge of its Creator, through the states of the cosmos, and through knowledge of itself. "So he has three goings", and there is no fourth state, hence "Universal" (Al-Durrat Al-Bayda, 135).
- Everything (kulla shay'). Ibn Arabi wrote that "in everything there is everything" [Al-Masa'il: 58]. The author reads this two ways: the Monad is in everything, and its inner structure may be as rich as the world. He compares fractals and the black hole, which occupies a point in our space yet counts as a whole world, and suggests this may answer his earlier question whether the moment has sub-moments: seen from outside, the Monad and the moment are points; from inside, a whole world or a whole day.
6.4 The structure of the monad
Al-Tadbirat opens: "The first existent originated by Allah is a simple spiritual Single Monad, embodied according to some doctrines and not-embodied according to others." Ibn Arabi mostly prefers "not embodied", sometimes leaves the question open, and calls the Monad embodied and indivisible when the manifest world is meant [II.438.2]. The author's resolution is that the Monad can be neither solely physical nor solely metaphysical, since it is the whole of creation.
The core text is a long classification from chapter 198 [II.454.1]. Every knowable thing exists in thought; some can receive real existence and some (the impossible) cannot; of the possible, some subsist by themselves and some exist in a substrate; the self-subsistent is either the Necessary (Allah) or the contingent; the contingent is embodied or not; the embodied is either without parts (the Single Monad) or with parts (a body).
The same passage then makes the central claim: "Now you must know that the world is one in substance and many in form". Nothing transmutes. Heat is never coldness, but something hot can come to exist as cold at another time. Earth, water, air, the orbs and all generated things are "forms in the (Single) Monad". Bestowing a form is called generation (kawn), removing one corruption (fasad), and the world is generated and corrupted at every single instant. Even the "necessary concomitants" (the yellowness of gold, the blackness of ebony) are only forms followed by similar forms. Both forms and Monad are permanently needy: forms need creation to exist, the Monad needs it to persist, because its being is conditioned on the forms it carries.
Ibn Arabi adds that philosophers "call the images monad(s)" because they define the monad by its image. The author treats this as the main barrier to seeing the world truly: we attach an image to every concept, but the Single Monad cannot be captured in an image. Hence the turn to unveiling, and the saying of Abu Bakr: "I have seen nothing but I have seen Allah before it." The book also reproduces a circular diagram from Insha' al-Dawa'ir (page 19) that codes each category with two digits, localised or not and self-subsistent or not: spirit is self-subsistent but not localised, colour localised but not self-subsistent.
6.5 The Greatest Element
Ibn Arabi says he would explain the Element's reality had he not been sworn not to disclose it. He does say that its single "close attention" (iltifata) meets every aspect of the Intellect, so that what is one in the Element becomes many in the Intellect, and that through that attention Allah created the First Intellect ('Uqlat: 39).
6.6 Analogies on lower planes
The author then shows the same structure mirrored in human institutions and symbols.
The Kaaba. Pilgrims circling the Kaaba mirror the angels around the Throne [I.50.30], and Ibn Arabi's Lord told him "the Kaaba, in relation to the all-encompassing (divine) Throne, is like your heart with relation to your body" [I.50.29]. So the Kaaba stands to the Earth as the Single Monad to the cosmos. Its cube is the simplest three-dimensional body (eight corners, as in [III.276.4]). The Black Stone in its corner represents the Greatest Element; the seven anticlockwise rounds that start from it correspond to the Element giving rise to the Monad, which then brings forth the world in seven Days, each governed by one of the seven Names. A hadith compares the Stone to "Allah's right hand on Earth" [Kanz: 34729].
The spiritual hierarchy. The lower cosmos is ruled by largely invisible saints: the Pole, two Imams, four Pillars, seven Substitutes, eight Nobles and twelve Chiefs, with living human deputies [II.6.6]. Some correspond to zodiac signs, heavens, climes, cardinal points or the corners of the Kaaba. The Pole corresponds to the Single Monad, which Ibn Arabi often calls "the Reality of Muhammad".
The world of letters. The Arabic letters are "a real world like us" [I.58.13], with their own hierarchy:
| Rank | Letters | |
|---|---|---|
| Pole | alif | Two Imams |
| waw, ya' | Four Pillars | alif, waw, ya', nun |
All letters can be broken down into alif and built up from it, while alif breaks down only into its spiritual principle, the Point [I.78.23]: letters to alif to Point mirrors world to Monad to Element.
The divine Names. Allah is said to mount the Throne of the Single Monad, while "the All-Merciful mounted on the Throne". The All-Merciful stands closer to the multiplicity of the world, the Monad in its hiddenness closer to unity.
6.7 Spreading the shadows
The Qur'an's "Hast thou not seen how thy Lord hath spread the shadow" (25:45) gives the next image. The Perfect Human Being is the primordial shadow of the Real, and the manifest world is the shadow of the Perfect Human Being. In a long passage [III.187.15] Ibn Arabi likens the Perfect Human Being to a person's shadow, implicit when hidden and visible when cast; had He not spread it, nothing would appear in sensible existence. The shadow is withdrawn "with a diminutive withdrawal" like the shadow at sunset, to reappear in a new form: at every instant the Monad casts a new shadow, and the world is the collection of those instantaneous shadows.
The image also maps the spiritual path. The seeker follows the shadows back to their source, and at the height of realisation the shadow seems to vanish, as it does for a moment at noon on the equator. But the noon shadow hides in the object, not in the Sun, so the knower witnesses at most the real-through-whom-creation-takes-place, never the Essence. This, the author says, is why Ibn Arabi avoided and denied "union" (ittihad) and "indwelling" (hulul), and why his prayers ask to be joined to the essence of the Prophet, as in Al-Salawat Al-Faydiyya: "until my essence is unified with his essence and my attributes with his attributes".
6.8 The world as a movie
The chapter ends with its most modern analogy. Ibn Arabi's "shadow-theatre" already recalls the cave of Plato's Republic; the author updates it to a film and then to a computer monitor. A film is a run of still pictures that the mind fuses into motion. A monitor goes further: one beam draws an 800 by 600 grid pixel by pixel, from the bottom left to the top right, then returns to begin again. Each pixel "wears" a colour only while the beam is on it; once the beam moves on the form vanishes and only its trace remains.
The fit, the author argues, extends to the details:
- A pixel's week. A point on the screen exists only while the beam is on it, so its "week" is assembled from instants of many full scans. Likewise each entity lives one instant in each divine Week, and "all our life (as time) is Saturday, while the world as space is the other six Days."
- Foam on the shore. Ibn Arabi's Preface describes the Breath making the water wave and foam, then the water withdrawing to the middle and leaving "its foam on the shore" [I.4.7]. The water is the Single Monad, the foam the forms left behind after each scan, and the Saturday ruler's power of "holding and fixing" is the memory that joins one picture to the next.
- Dimensions. The first line of the screen corresponds to the Real (0-D) and the angels (1-D), the second line opens two dimensions, the jinn; the outside world adds a third, dunya, after 54,000 years, and a fourth, the afterworld, is still to come (see the cycle of life in Part 2).
- The processor. However many jobs a computer seems to run, its processor does one elementary job at a time. A 3.4 GHz chip handles 3.4 billion bits a second, and the Monad, "the fastest of all calculators" (6:62), is faster still.
The author adds a caution of his own. A shadow or a mirror image resembles only one facet of its original: humans do not fully resemble the Real, and computers do not fully resemble humans. And since, for Ibn Arabi, the world would not exist without the observing "eye", we can understand the cosmos only by understanding how we perceive it.
Part 7. Implications for Modern Physics
The last chapter asks how the Single Monad model might be tested and what it would change in physics, philosophy and theology. The author starts with a candid limit: Ibn Arabi says repeatedly that his distinctive insights come from inspiration and unveiling, beyond ordinary intelligence, so "incontrovertible tests may be inaccessible". A first test is simply whether the model resolves known paradoxes of time and motion.
7.1 How might it be tested?
If creation is refreshed like a screen, its "refresh rate" is the smallest quantum of time, the moment (al-zaman al-fard). The author expects it to equal 24 hours divided by the number of states or entities in the world, which is far too small for any device to measure. Even in theory a high-speed camera could not catch the flicker, because the camera is part of the world it observes and cannot record its own non-existence. We miss re-creation for the same reason: we are part of it.
He proposes indirect routes instead:
| Proposed route | The idea | |
|---|---|---|
| Photons | Light, the fastest thing, may undergo no re-creation at all, which is why it is fastest. | Electron jumps |
| An electron changing orbit does not pass between orbits; it is re-created in the new one, so the jump time may equal the moment. | Annihilation and pair production | Electron and positron vanish into light, and two strong photons can make a pair; mass arising from massless light might be related to the Week of creation. |
| Refraction | Light slows in glass or water because atoms absorb and re-emit it; refraction indexes of minerals might correlate with a refresh rate. | Simulation |
Ibn Arabi is cited as having anticipated pair phenomena: "When two monads or atoms ... are joined, it is as though they are two bodies" [I.721.18], since each becomes a "pair" only when joined with another, in line with "of every thing, We created two pairs" (51:49). The author inserts "like two photons" as a gloss.
7.2 Timeless motion: the throne of Bilqis
In the Qur'an (27:38-40) a jinn offers to bring the Queen of Sheba's throne before Solomon can rise, but "the one who has knowledge of the Book" brings it "before your gaze returns unto you". The author identifies him with al-Khidr and says the throne crossed from Yemen to Jerusalem in no time. In the Bezels of Wisdom Ibn Arabi says this was not motion: the throne was annihilated in its place and re-created before Solomon. The text says Solomon saw it placed "steadily", that is, not shaking as an object would after a sudden stop.
The author pairs this with the electron that disappears from one orbit and reappears in another, behaviour that he says drove the discovery of Quantum Mechanics. Strictly, any elementary motion still takes one "Day of event", one atom of time; normally the distance covered is tiny, so motion looks gradual, but in principle it could be any distance at all.
7.3 Simultaneity
Classical physics treated time as absolute, so simultaneity held in every frame; Special Relativity made it frame-dependent. In the Single Monad model it becomes more relative still. For us, as partial monads, each moment shows a still picture full of events, so simultaneity looks classical. For the Monad, which "wears only one created form at each instant", nothing is simultaneous at all: "each Day He is upon some (one, single) task" (55:29). Multiplicity and simultaneity appear only because of re-creation.
7.4 Zeno's paradoxes
Parmenides held that only the unchanging One is true and that multiplicity and change are appearance; his pupil Zeno defended this with paradoxes, four of which survive through Aristotle's Physics.
| Paradox | Argument | What it attacks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dichotomy | To cross a line you must first reach the half, then the quarter, and so on without end, so motion cannot begin. | Infinite divisibility | Achilles |
| Running at ten metres a second against a tortoise at one metre a second with ten metres' start, Achilles always reaches where she was, never where she is. | Infinite divisibility | Arrow | At each instant the arrow occupies a position, so it is at rest; or the instant must be divisible. |
| Discreteness | Stadium | Leads, like the Arrow, to the conclusion that time and space cannot be discrete. | Discreteness |
The first two can be met by atomism; the last two then strike atomism itself. Aristotle called them fallacies without refuting them, the author says, and while mathematics shows that halving series converge, Bertrand Russell kept pressing the arguments and a "quantum Zeno effect" has been observed in radioactive atoms.
The re-creation principle dissolves the dilemma. Nothing moves gradually; the object is re-created in distinct places one after another [II.457.31], just as nothing moves on a television screen. Ibn Arabi agrees with Zeno and Parmenides that the world manifests one entity; his contribution is to show how multiplicity arises within the Single Monad.
7.5 Discrete or continuous?
The author quotes Frankel on the dilemma: "The human mind, when trying to give itself an accurate account of motion, finds itself confronted with two aspects of the phenomenon." Either we follow the flow and lose the position, or we fix a position and freeze the object. Physics has lived the same split: waves seemed to win in the nineteenth century, then Planck's quanta, Bohr's atom and Einstein's photoelectric effect brought back discreteness, while Relativity, a continuous theory, handles motion better.
At the level of multiplicity the mind must classify things as discrete or continuous, but at the level of unicity the terms lose meaning. Even within multiplicity the author will not decide: events are discrete, yet the change from one to the next flows like day into night, and the Earth's turning that makes separate days is itself continuous. Ibn Arabi calls the two "disconnected" (munfasil) and "connected" (muttasil), and holds that apparent continuity or discontinuity exists in our imagination, not in reality [II.324.35-325.18].
7.6 The EPR paradox
This is the test the author rates most highly. In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that two entangled particles seemed able to influence each other instantly over any distance, against Relativity's locality; they concluded that Quantum Mechanics was incomplete and posited hidden variables. Bohr rejected hidden variables; John Bell proposed a test in 1964; and the experiments of Alain Aspect and his colleagues in 1982, on pairs of photons from calcium atoms, violated Bell's inequalities. The correlations held as if time "stops" between the particles, and, the author says, no adequate theoretical explanation has been found.
In the model, each still picture of the world is a closed system: any change in one part requires synchronising changes elsewhere so that the whole stays unchanged. The entangled particles "never existed together". The Monad wears the form of the first, then other forms in sequence, then the second, wherever it lies in space; the first is already gone and "encountered no time", and its change is held in the Monad's memory so that the second is created consistently. The author generalises: every change anywhere causes synchronising changes everywhere, which he offers as a more precise statement of causality and a possible account of "para-psychological" phenomena.
7.7 Causality and induction
Habit ('ada), for Ibn Arabi, is the main obstacle to seeing creation, and our trust in causality and induction is habit. Apparent causes (asbab) are "chronologically arranged, but ontologically unrelated", in the author's phrase; Ibn Arabi says "Allah creates things "next to" ('inda) the causes and not "through" (bi) them" [II.204.13]. He also argues that "in reality induction (al-istiqra') does not give any (true divine) knowledge" [I.285.3], because nothing is ever truly repeated. This, the author suggests, is the meaning of the "yes" and then "no" given to Ibn Rushd.
Yet causes are not to be dismissed. God established them deliberately, so they are unavoidable and we must use them [II.653.11]. They are veils that can only be removed by other causes: "So the very removing of causes is in fact fixing them" [II.553.31]. Even in the state of "abolishment" (mahw) what goes is reliance on causes, not the causes; the greatest veil, one's own self, remains, because God wants to be known through it. The Badr verse shows the pattern [II.553.5]: "and you threw not" abolishes the Prophet's role, "when you threw" affirms the cause, and "but Allah threw" (8:17) names the true agent, who threw by the Prophet's hand.
A passage on "Be!" (16:40) [II.413.35] traces the chain that veils the creative word: rain, fertile land, sprouting seed, sunlight, harvest, bread, digestion, blood and the vapour of life, all under the Universal Soul and the First Intellect. Faith flows into hearing and sight until the believer hears "Be" behind the chain.
From all this the author draws a new causality principle. Since creation was finished in the six Days and Saturday adds only changes "from (one) state to (another) state" [I.61.14], the world is a closed system: a change in one part demands a compensating change elsewhere so that the total state does not change. He notes that this matches a principle of Quantum Mechanics, and suggests that saints' wonders (karamat) such as telepathy follow from access to the Monad, where all of space and time is already encoded.
7.8 Superstrings and the science of letters
String Theory, around 1985, proposed that particles are vibrating strings, open or closed, whose modes give their masses and spins, in a space-time of ten dimensions with six curled up. The author finds "deep and exciting similarities" with Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi names four fundamental principles of existence plus six derived from them [III.404.22], and above all he has the science of letters, the "world of Breaths".
- The cosmos is the words of the Real spoken through the "Breath of the All-Merciful", as our words are vibrations of breath.
- The letters are "a nation like other nations" [I.58.12]; chapter 2 of the Futuhat, some 40 dense pages, and the long chapter 198, "On Knowing the Breath", detail them.
- Alif "is not from (other) letters" [I.65.23], yet all letters are built from it [I.78.22], and every sound begins with it as breath leaves the larynx. Alif is thus the Single Monad, the ultimate string.
- Written letters are open like alif or closed like mim and waw, as strings are open or closed.
- Ibn Arabi calls the single Days the "Days of Breaths" [III.127.34]; in each, the string vibrates to produce an alif, and the world is the words those alifs make.
The book places letter-number science (jafr) in a wider esoteric tradition and back to Pythagoras. It also quotes Ibn Arabi on the hadith of the Pen ("write!") [I.139.23] and on hearing, divided into "divine hearing, spiritual hearing and natural hearing" [II.367.7-9], in which "the Pens speak out, and the ears of the minds hear". Ibn Arabi divides the letters among four kinds of being (the real, angels, jinn and humans) [I.53.1], which the author renders as vibrations in 0, 1, 2 and 3 dimensions.
7.9 The properties of matter
Against common sense, Ibn Arabi holds that weight, density, transparency and softness belong to the perceiver, not the object [II.458.14]; only colour and shape may belong to the object itself. The author accepts this as a consequence of re-creation: if only monads and forms truly exist, other properties are effects. Ibn Arabi also says the structure of the heavens "is different from what the cosmologists say", though their claims rest on proofs and God could have made it so, "but He did not" [II.670.7]. The author reads this as treating scientific models as logically possible solutions to observation but not as the truth.
7.10 Dimensions of the unseen
To bridge physics and theology the author proposes, admitting that "Ibn 'Arabi never arranged the creations in terms of dimensions", a dimensional ordering of beings. Only the three spatial dimensions count as real; with two directions each they give Ibn Arabi's six directions.
| Being | Dimension | Made of | Evidence offered | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Real (in creation, the Greatest Element) | 0-D, a point | (no description) | The point at the centre of the circle of creation [III.275]; the dots of ba' and nun | Angels |
| 1-D, a line | light | A line needs two points [III.276.3]; the angel "does not have any bending" [I.54.21]; forces act as vectors; 19:64 names front and back but no sides | Jinn | 2-D, a plane |
| fire | Satan's four approaches, front, back, right, left (7:17), and no up or down [I.53.8] | Humans | 3-D, a volume | clay |
| Can decompose to 2-D, 1-D and 0-D to meet jinn, angels and the Real [I.168.20] | The Hereafter | 4-D and perhaps beyond | (not described) | Throne-bearers four now, eight then (69:17) |
The angels receive the closest reading. "There is no place in heaven or Earth but that there is an angel in it" [I.123.2], and malak, the author reports, means "force". Four archangels bear the Throne now and eight will bear it in the Hereafter [I.148.2, I.149.29], and the author pairs them with physics' four forces:
| Archangel | Duty given by Ibn Arabi [I.148.3] | Author's suggested force | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seraphiel (with Adam) | forms, bodies | gravity | Michael (with Abraham) |
| subsistence, food | electromagnetism (food comes from sunlight) | Gabriel (with Muhammad) | spirits |
| weak or strong nuclear force, "not easy to establish" | Malik (with Ridwan) | threat and promise, Gehenna and Paradise | weak or strong nuclear force; Gehenna "fuelled by stones" |
The book notes that in another list Ibn Arabi names Azrael instead of Malik. Senses follow dimensions too: hearing takes in one dimension a bit at a time, sight a two-dimensional picture, and imagination builds three dimensions by integrating pictures over time. In the Hereafter a faculty beyond imagination might grasp four dimensions; Ibn Arabi says the people of Paradise will create by the command "be", and some do even in this world (al-fi'l bil-himma). The Pen writes a dot (the real), a line (angels), a plane (jinn) and a volume (us), and at a set term, death or the "voluntary death" of spiritual opening, starts a new dimension. Since "seeking ... is always requested in this life and also in the Hereafter" [Al-Masa'il: 203], dimensions may go on increasing without end, which the author thinks such a framework could help computer simulations test.
Notes on the Text
The list below records only slips that the book itself shows to be slips: a reference that disagrees with the same reference elsewhere, a gloss that contradicts its own sentence, a number printed two ways. Nothing here depends on outside knowledge.
Who's Who
People named in the book, with dates only where the book prints them (hijri/CE as printed). Figures for whom the book gives no date are listed without one. The Foreword is by James W. Morris; the scholars of Ibn Arabi the author cites most are William Chittick and Henry Corbin.
| Name | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Arabi | AH 560-638/AD 1165-1240 | The subject; author of the Futuhat, Fusus and Ayyam al-Sha'n |
| Ibn Rushd (Averroes) | AH 520-595/AD 1126-1198 | Chief judge of Seville; the "Yes ... No" meeting with the young Ibn Arabi |
| al-Ghazali | AH 450-505/AD 1058-1111 | Ash'arite critic of the philosophers in The Incoherence of the Philosophers |
| Ibn Sina | AH 369-428/AD 980-1037 | Defined time as the number of motion |
| al-Kindi | AH 185-256/AD 805-873 | Early philosopher on time and the created world |
| al-Razi | AH 251-313/AD 865-925 | Held absolute time among the eternal principles |
| al-Farabi | AH 259-339/AD 870-950 | Generation and corruption "in no time" |
| Ibn Barrajan | d. 536/1141 | Source of the name "Everything" for the Single Monad |
| Ibn Taymiyya | Critic credited in the notes with first using "oneness of being" | |
| al-Baqillani | Ash'arite theologian of atomic time | |
| Ibn al-Farid | Poet whose Ta'iyya speaks of union | |
| al-Qashani; Bali Effendi | Commentators on the Fusus, on the throne of Bilqis | |
| Abu Bakr al-Siddiq | "I have seen nothing but I have seen Allah before it." | |
| Idris | Prophet and spiritual Pole; source of the point and circumference teaching | |
| al-Khidr (Asif bin Barkhya) | Brought the throne of Bilqis "before your gaze returns" | |
| al-Sabti | Son of Harun al-Rashid; the "Saturday man" met at the Kaaba | |
| Parmenides of Elea | b. 510 BC | The One alone is real; change is appearance |
| Zeno | b. c.488 BC | Paradoxes of motion |
| Pythagoras of Samos | 582-504 BC | World as harmony of number |
| Euclid | c.300 BC | Geometry of points, lines and planes |
| Nabonassar | 747-734 BC (reign) | Chaldean king in whose reign Babylonian astronomy is dated |
| Plato; Aristotle | Classical theories of time; Aristotle's report of Zeno | |
| Ptolemy | Geocentric model that lasted until Copernicus | |
| Nicolai Copernicus | AD 1473-1544 | Heliocentric model |
| Augustine; Newton; Leibniz; Kant; McTaggart; Russell | Western theories of time; Russell on Zeno | |
| Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen | 1935 (paper) | The EPR thought experiment |
| Niels Bohr | Copenhagen interpretation; first quantised atom | |
| John Bell | 1964 (proposal) | Inequality test for hidden variables |
| Alain Aspect | 1982 (experiment) | Photon-pair test that violated Bell's inequalities |
| Max Planck | 1899 (as printed) | Quanta of energy; the black body problem |
Synthesis
Key takeaways
- For Ibn Arabi time is "imagined" yet real: a measure the mind lays over motion, with no existence of its own, which still governs everything we experience.
- The world was not created in time; time came with the world. Asking what God did "before" creation is a malformed question.
- Space and time are one structure. Six divine Days build the six directions of space, and the seventh, Saturday, is time itself, the manifest instant we live in.
- Time is discrete, and the quantum of time is, surprisingly, one day: a full day happening all around the globe at every moment, divided among all the states of the world.
- Days have no fixed length. The length depends on which orb or Name defines them, from the single Day of the task to the 50,000-year day, and no day ever repeats.
- Seven is not arbitrary. Seven Attributes (Living, Knowing, Willing, Powerful, Hearing, Seeing, Speaking) govern seven Days, and the Week is the primary cycle of creation.
- The days we live are "taken out" of and "intertwined" with each other, so each ordinary day is woven from parts of many divine Days. Real time is not a line.
- From the One only one thing proceeds at a time. Multiplicity is real at its own level but arises in series, not all at once.
- The oneness of being, as the author presents it, is neither pantheism nor monism: "He is He, and the things are the things", yet nothing exists apart from Him.
- Everything except God is re-created at every instant; nothing lasts two moments, and the same form never returns.
- Motion is not travel but re-creation in a new place, so there is no real "between".
- The Single Monad, the Perfect Human Being and First Intellect, is the one creative reality that wears every form; the many monads are its reflections.
- Beneath the Monad lies the Greatest Element, linked to the Intellect by 46,656,000 luminous links, about which Ibn Arabi says he was sworn to silence.
- The world is one in substance and many in form; generation and corruption happen at every instant.
- The best image for the model is a monitor: one beam draws every pixel in turn, the scan makes space, and the return stroke is time.
- A knower can at most realise unity with the "real through whom creation takes place", never with the divine Essence. This is why Ibn Arabi denied "union" and "indwelling".
- Causes are real as veils and must be used, but they do not produce their effects; God creates "next to" causes, not through them.
- Induction yields no certain knowledge, because nothing is ever truly repeated.
- Miracles break habits of perception, not laws; the laws of physics describe the usual order of re-creation.
- Re-creation offers answers to Zeno's paradoxes and, in the author's view, to quantum entanglement: two particles never exist at the same instant.
- Most physical properties (weight, density, softness, transparency) belong to the perceiver, not the object.
- Ibn Arabi treats scientists' models of the heavens as logically possible but not true.
- The author's dimensional reading places the Real at 0-D, angels at 1-D, jinn at 2-D, humans at 3-D and the Hereafter at 4-D or more, an extrapolation he labels his own.
- The book's method is a bridge: it lays Ibn Arabi's unveiled statements beside physics, and claims that each clarifies the other.
Frameworks in the book
| Framework | Elements | Where | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four constituents of the world | time, space, monad (substance), form (accident) | Part 2 | Three kinds of day |
| normal days; single Day of the task; divine Days of the Week | Parts 2 to 4 | Week of creation | six Days of space + Saturday, the Day of eternity |
| Part 3 | Quadratic rule | four Attributes, four cycles | Part 3 |
| Flow of time | Days of event, circulated, taken-out and intertwined days | Part 4 | Necessary, possible, impossible |
| the Real, the circle of contingent things, the sea of non-existence | Part 5 | Unicity versus oneness | ahadiyya (no other) and wahidiyya (the One of many) |
| Part 5 | Single Monad model | Single Monad, re-creation, actual flow of time | Part 6 |
| Element, Monad, world | clay, brick, building; point, circumference, Tablet | Part 6 | Causality as closed system |
| change in one part balanced by changes elsewhere | Part 7 | Dimensions of being | 0-D to 4-D |
| Classical physics | Modern physics | Ibn Arabi (per the author) |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute, flowing uniformly | Relative to frame; joined to space | Imagined measure; joined to space as the seventh Day |
| Continuous | Continuous (Relativity) or quantised (Quantum Theory) | Discrete in events, continuous in flow; both only in imagination |
| Objects move through space | Particles jump between states | Nothing moves; forms are re-created in new places |
A closer look
The book's strength is its close reading of Ibn Arabi's scattered statements on time, gathered from the Futuhat and short treatises such as Ayyam al-Sha'n and Kitab al-Azal, and its clear tables of days and cycles. The author is also open about limits: he says outright tests may be impossible, that the Single Monad model and the dimensional scheme are his own constructions, and that Ibn Arabi's cosmic cycle "clearly do not agree with modern cosmology and geology". Several points still call for caution, all visible from the book itself.
- Its own note 1 to Chapter 1 says modern cosmology gives the universe no centre, which weakens the heliocentric point, and the light-year reading turns on a single number.
- Analogy treated as fit. The monitor analogy is said to be "quite accurate in most of the details", and the archangels are paired with the four forces; yet the author concedes the Gabriel and Malik pairings are "not easy to establish" and that a mirror image resembles its original in one facet only. The analogies illuminate; they do not demonstrate.
- Testability. The refresh rate is defined as one day divided by the number of states in the world, a quantity no instrument could reach; the proposed tests (electron jumps, refraction indexes, simulations) are suggestions, not designs. The model's account of EPR is consistent with the experiments but makes no new prediction the book states.
- Terms and sources. The base-60 system is called "hexadecimal" in section 4.7 and "sexagenary" in 6.5. A Sumerian zodiac start in 11000 BC rests on one popular source. The book's own list of slips (see Notes on the Text) shows references that need checking.
- Unveiling as evidence. Many central claims rest on Ibn Arabi's unveiling, which the author treats as authoritative. Readers who do not share that premise can still follow the logic, but should read the cosmology as a coherent picture rather than an established result.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| zaman | Time; for Ibn Arabi an imagined measure, a word the Qur'an never uses |
| al-zaman al-fard | The single, indivisible time; the moment or quantum of time |
| yawm al-sha'n | Day of the task: the single Day in which God is "upon some task" (55:29) |
| al-dahr | The Age: one Day that never repeats, equal to the single Week |
| azal, abad | Eternity without beginning, eternity without end |
| al-an al-da'im | The eternally ongoing present |
| al-waqt | The moment or "timing"; the Sufi as "son of his moment" |
| Days of event | The original divine Days of creation, from which ordinary days are made |
| Taken-out days | Days drawn out of one another, a daytime from a night and the reverse |
| Intertwined days | Days woven into each other, so each normal day contains parts of many divine Days |
| Saturday (al-sabt) | The Day of eternity; the manifest instant in which the created world appears |
| Isotropic Orb | The starless outer orb whose motion defines the day |
| jawhar, pl. jawahir | Substance, monad; literally "jewel" |
| 'arad, pl. a'rad | Accident, form; lasts one instant |
| al-jawhar al-fard | The Single Monad; in kalam physics also the atom |
| al-'unsur al-a'zam | The Greatest Element, the substrate beneath the Single Monad |
| al-haqq al-makhluq bihi | The real through whom creation takes place |
| al-insan al-kamil | The Perfect Human Being; identified with the Single Monad |
| Pen and Tablet | First Intellect and Universal Soul; writer and written-on |
| al-'ama' | The Cloud, first stage of the cosmos |
| al-haba' | The Dust, prime matter receiving forms |
| wahdat al-wujud | Oneness of being; a later term, not Ibn Arabi's own |
| ahadiyya, wahidiyya | Unicity that admits no other; oneness of the One with the many |
| tajdid al-khalq, khalq jadid | Ever-renewed creation |
| kawn, fasad | Generation, corruption |
| asbab | Apparent or secondary causes; divine veils |
| 'ada | Habit, the habitual perception that hides re-creation |
| mahw | Abolishment of reliance on causes and of self-witnessing |
| kashf | Unveiling, direct spiritual perception |
| fana', ittihad, hulul | Extinction; union; indwelling (the last two denied by Ibn Arabi) |
| qutb, awtad, abdal | Pole, Pillars, Substitutes of the spiritual hierarchy |
| 'alam al-anfas | World of Breaths: the letters and the spiritual hierarchy |
| Breath of the All-Merciful | The creative breath through which the cosmos is spoken |
| munfasil, muttasil | Disconnected and connected: discrete and continuous |
| al-fi'l bil-himma | Acting by spiritual intention |
About this book
Ibn al-'Arabi: Time and Cosmology by Mohamed Haj Yousef, 2008. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions