Foreword
In that sense, this study provides a more demanding, Islamic parallel to such recent popular works such as F. Capra’s Tao of Physics. While the prolific Andalusian Sufi writer Ibn ‘Arabî (1165-1240) is most widely known today as a mystic and spiritual teacher, his voluminous writings—and particularly his immense magnum opus, the Meccan Illuminations, which is the primary source for this study—constantly refer to the insights, theories, and cosmological schemas of earlier Muslim philosophers and scientists, such as Avicenna and the popular spiritual treatises of the “Brethren of Purity” (Ikhwân al-Safâ’).
Despite the initial unfamiliarity (for non-specialists) of some of Ibn ‘Arabî’s Qur’anic symbolism and technical terminology here, his approach to conceiving and intellectually explaining the mysterious relationship between the divine Source and its infinite manifestations clearly mirrors Plato’s classical dialectical enumeration of the alternative ontological hypothesis outlined in his Parmenides.
Preface
To start with, Ibn ‘Arabî considers time to be a product of our human ‘imagination’, without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence. We need this imagined conception of ‘time’ to chronologically arrange events and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects, but for Ibn ‘Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed. Thus Ibn ‘Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, and he explains that they both originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains that this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous.
CHAPTER I Cosmology and Time
Cosmology is the science that studies the universe, the cosmos. Cosmos is a word used in earlier Greek metaphysical thought that means ‘harmony’ or ‘order’, as opposed to Chaos. In one Greek theory of creation, Chaos is the formless matter from which the cosmos, or harmonious order, was created
More than a century later, in 1924, Hubble was able to measure distances to some stars (based on the ‘redshift’), and he showed that some bright dots that we see in the sky are actually other galaxies like ours, although they look so small because they are very far away (Hartmann 1990: 373-5).
Our galaxy, like most other galaxies, is a collection of about 200 billion stars plus thousands of clusters and nebulae that form together a disc of more than 100,000 light years in diameter, and that is about 15,000 light years thick. The nearest galaxy to us lies in the Andromeda constellation, and it is about 2.9 million light-years away.
It is now also well established that everything in the world is moving: nearby stars have proper motion, because they are pulled towards the centre of the galaxy, and galaxies are moving away from us, because the universe is expanding. On the other hand, and despite these various motions, the universe doesn’t have a centre or edges. It is hard to imagine, but the universe is contained or curved around itself so that if you fly straight in one direction and keep moving in a straight line you will one day, if you could live long enough, come back from the opposite direction to the same point (supposing no gravitational fluctuations), just as it would happen to a person travelling around the earth.
The stars that we see in the sky are, just like our sun, huge nuclear fusion reactors that are constantly converting hydrogen into heavier elements and hence producing heat and light.
The Big Bang model was very good in explaining many of the observations, yet on the other hand there were many contradictions (Linde 1990: 4). Many of these theoretical contradictions were resolved by the ‘inflationary scenario’ devised by Alan Guth in 1979. Guth looked at a very early stage in the development of the universe from about 10-32 to 10-43 of a second after the initial creation. During this period matter was in very highly excited states, causing the most extreme conditions of high density and pressure which made the cosmos expand exponentially, filling the universe with an intense dense fire of particles and photons (Linde 1990: 42).
The Path Integral can be calculated by just considering a few geometries that give a particularly large contribution. These are known as ‘Instantons’ (from ‘the instant’, because it aims at omitting time, so it is like a snapshot that takes into account only the three coordinates of space), which describes the spontaneous appearance of a universe from literally nothing.
Once the universe exists, Quantum Cosmology can be approximated by General Relativity, so time appears.
He also unified space and time in a manner that has apparently never been thought of before or since.
Ibn ‘Arabî was not an astronomer, and was never interested in astronomy as a science. But as a sufi and mystical theologian constantly inspired by the cosmological teachings and symbolism developed throughout the Qur’an and in a number of related Hadith (Prophetic sayings), he talks about planets and orbs and their motion as a structure Allah created on His Image (see section III.) and relates them to the divine Names.
William Chittick has devoted an immense volume called “The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology” (this will be abbreviated as ‘SDG’) specifically to Ibn ‘Arabî’s cosmology and ontology, in addition to some chapters of other books like “The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination” (this will be abbreviated as ‘SPK’), and also Henry Corbin discussed some aspects in his pioneering study, now entitled in English Alone with the Alone, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabî (Crbin 1969: 184).
Ibn ‘Arabî’s universe comprises both the material and the abstract, spiritual or noetic (‘aqlî) worlds. He says that the main reason for creating the cosmos is ‘Love’. In explaining this underlying principle he often refers to a famous divine saying (the ‘Hadith of the Hidden Treasure’) which states that Allah ‘loved’ to be known in order to grant the creatures the privilege of coming to know Him.
Following indications in another Prophetic Hadith, Ibn ‘Arabî calls this abstract place al-‘amâ’ (‘the Cloud’). According to his account, the reality of al-‘amâ’ accepted the forms of the ‘Roaming Spirits’ (al-arwâh al-muhayyama) that Allah created directly, without any intermediaries. This direct creation caused these angelic Spirits to roam in the presence of Allah, knowing nothing but Him. They did not even know about themselves (i.e., they had no self-consciousness).
The entire universe, then, is—to use a central Qur’anic symbolism—the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ of Allah that are produced through ‘the Breath of the All-Merciful’. We shall see in section V.) that the fundamental ‘blocks’ in the universe are ‘strings’ or vibrations (‘sounds’ or ‘notes’), which is similar to Ibn ‘Arabî’s notion of the hierarchy of the ‘men of breaths’ (rijâl al-anfâs). Therefore it is not only a symbolism to say that the entire universe is the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ of Allah, and those words are continuously being written by the Highest Pen (the First Intellect) in the Highest Tablet (the Universal Soul).
The Universal Soul has two forces mentioned in the Figure I.: the ‘intellective force’ (quwwa ‘ilmiyya) by which it perceives knowledge, and the ‘active force’ (quwwa ‘amaliyya) by which it preserves its existence through motion. The first thing the Universal Soul gives rise to, as indicated in the same figure, is twofold: ‘the level of Nature’ and the ‘Chaos’ (al-habâ’: literally ‘the Dust’) or ‘the Prime Matter’ (al-hayûlâ al-ûlâ) [I.140.14]. From here on, Ibn ‘Arabî uses the symbolic conjugal imagery of the ‘wedding’ of generative elements and of ‘birth’ at each successive level of creation or manifestation. Thus the Universal Soul first begets Nature and then Prime Matter or Dust. Then Nature and Dust in turn beget their first ‘son’, which is called the ‘Universal Body’ (al-jism al-kull). This symbolic process of cosmic ‘births’ continues in a long and defined series of causes and results until it reaches the ‘soil’ (turâb) [I.140.17] which refers to physical matter in general. So the physical world appeared ‘after’ this Universal Body, while before that all was only spiritual.
Inside (or ‘beneath’) the divine Throne there appeared the ‘Pedestal’ (al-Kursî), whose relative dimensions and plenitude, in comparison to the infinitely vast noetic or spiritual dimension of the ‘Throne’, Ibn ‘Arabî compares here to ‘a tiny ring in a vast desert’. And within this ‘Pedestal’ is the ‘Isotropic Orb’ (al-falak al-atlas), which is shown to contain the sphere of the divisions of the zodiac (falak al-burûj) and the
sphere of the stars (al-falak al-mukawkab), including beneath them the separate orbs of the five planets, sun, moon, and the earth. All this is shown in Figure I. and Figure I.4.
To overcome this objection, Aristotle takes the motion of the heavenly spheres as a reference, and all other motions, as well as time, are measured according to this motion (Badawî 1965: 90). On the other hand, Aristotle considers time as imaginary because it is either past or future, and both don’t exist, while the present is not part of time because it has no extension (Lettinck 1994: 348).
8. Time in Western Philosophy: Aristotle’s notion of circular time, based on an eternal (uncreated) universe, could not generally be accepted by most theologians of the three Abrahamic religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism—insofar as they considered time to be linear, with a definite created beginning and end. St. Augustine, and later Thomas Aquinas, objected to Aristotle’s belief that time is circular, insisting instead that human experience is a one-way journey from Genesis to Judgment, regardless of any recurring patterns or cycles in nature. This latter view was later adopted by Newton in 1687, when he represented time mathematically by using a line rather than a circle.
9.2. The Arrow of Time: Unlike physical space, physical time is inherently directional: it flows in one direction, from the future to the past; this is a necessary truth. In thermodynamics the arrow of time for the world is expressed through what is called the ‘entropy’, which is a description of the degree of order of a system; a highly ordered system is said to have smaller entropy, and vice versa. The world’s entropy is always increasing (i.e., its order is decreasing): this is a free ‘one-way ticket’, and one has to pay dearly for the return.
To overcome time (and space), we therefore have to break out and perceive the reality of existence through the ‘heart’, and in particular the special inner relation or aspect between the ‘heart’ and the Real.
But the problem with time is that we can only normally witness the present moment of it, not the future nor the past; we can only imagine them. Therefore, in order to understand the meaning of ‘circular’ time, we have to imagine that the whole of all existence (what we perceive as future, present and past) exists all at once.
Therefore time, or the present moment, goes in ever repeated circular motion with the re-creation of the world. In other words, the presence, which is time, goes round the world continuously and repeatedly to create it and re-create it again; so it is circular (and cyclic) in this distinctly metaphysical respect. Moreover, this cosmic notion of ‘circular time’ is quite different from ‘cyclical time’, and the two ideas should not be confused in Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings.
282.21]. Those cycles of time are ‘similar’ to each other but never identical, as the terms ‘period’ or ‘cycle’ mean in modern physics. For Ibn ‘Arabî, the cycles of time are similar because they are ruled by the same divine Names, which is why we expect to see similar events. But the reason why we do not see identical events or true repetition is because of the interaction between different cycles of different divine Names, [III.201.14]. For example he says that: ‘the motion of Sunday appeared from the (divine) attribute ‘the All-Hearing’ (al-sam‘)…, and the motion of Monday appeared from the (divine) attribute ‘the Living’ (al-hayât) [II.438.9].