The Greatest Master Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi

Most of these introductory articles are exracted from Volume I of the Single Monad Model of the Cosmos: Ibn al-Arabi's View of Time and Creation... more on this can be found here.

The Intertwined Days

Starting with the night of Sunday - because its name al-ahad ('the First', 'the Unique') is a Name of Allah, it is the first day, and also it is the day of the sun that is the heart or centre of the manifest world [Ayyam Al-Sha’n: 11] - Ibn al-Arabi reconstructs the Days of events from the hours of the circulated days, starting with the first hour of the night of Thursday, then the eighth hour, and so on with seven-hour intervals until the full twelve hours of the night of Sunday are completed. Then he moves on to 'deconstruct' the daytime of Sunday in the same way, as illustrated in the Table IV.2 and Figure IV.2.

Table IV.2: The intertwined Days (example of Sunday alone). The shaded background indicates the nights of the normal days, and bold font indicates the nighttime hours of the intertwined Days. The data in this table is extracted from Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n, pp. 11-12.

Then he moves on to analyse the night of (the circulated day of) Monday in the same way, but starting from the daytime of Friday, and so on for the full seven Days, as indicated in the following Table IV.3 and Figure IV.2.

Table IV.3: The intertwined Days (all Days). The shaded background indicates the nights of the normal days, and bold font indicates Night hours of the intertwined Days. The data in this table is extracted from Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n, pp. 11-16.

Demonstrating the Intertwined Days:

As can be readily seen from Tables IV.2 and IV.3, the flow of time for the 'intertwined' days is even more complicated than that of the taken-out days. This complex relationship is shown graphically in Figure IV.2. Again, it would be more accurate to imagine this graph in three dimensions, but the graphic depiction is already very complicated in two dimensions. (A more accurate approach to what Ibn al-Arabi is actually describing would be to simulate this on the computer, taking into account smaller time-scales than hours.)

Figure IV.2: The intertwined days, and their relation with the circulated days. The information in this figure is extracted from Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n, pp. 11-16.

Figure IV.2 demonstrates how the 24 hours of each day of the normal circulated days are distributed over the seven Days of events. The 24 hours of the Day of Sunday for example (the 24-fold zigzag circle in the front) are distributed over the normal week days, starting from the first hour of Thursday night and moving with the seven-hour intervals already described.

The Significance of the Intertwined Days:

The flow of time according to the intertwined days is the real flow, because it indicates the manifest, outward order of events. The reason why there is a constant seven-hour step, as in the Tables IV.2 and IV.3 and Figure IV.3 above, is that the order of creation proceeds according to the seven main divine Names (and divine 'Days' of creation). For example, on Sunday (of the original Days of creation) the world starts 'hearing' the divine Command, which initiates the first dimension in creation. Then once the Sunday cycle (i.e., of the divine Attribute 'the All-Hearing') is over, the Monday cycle starts granting the world the attribute of 'the Living', and so on (see Table III.1 in the preceding Chapter). Thus the manifest world gains the qualities of these fundamental divine Attributes one after the other.