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 Kinds of Events
The Kinds of Events:
Now in each 'Day of event' that is intertwined with the outwardly observable (normal earthly) 'circulated days' as described above, Ibn al-Arabi explains that Allah constantly inspires the Universal Soul to act upon the orbs below it - encompassing and giving rise to all the manifest, material cosmos - so that they move in a specific manner that will cause one particular kind of event in the cosmos. But the effects of this complex composite motion of the orbs will be different, depending on the capabilities and characteristics of individual creatures [Ayyam Al-Sha’n: 11-12].
For example, when Allah inspires the Soul to move the element of fire in order to heat the world, the effects of this single event depends greatly on the individual creatures: those which are ready to burn will burn, and those which accept heat will be heated, and so on [Ayyam Al-Sha’n: 6], and he explains further in the Futuhat that: 'the (divine creative) "Event", in relation to the Real (i.e., God/al-haqq), is one from Him; but with relation to the acceptors of the world it is many events that we would call infinite, were they not confined by (their shared quality of) existence.' [II.82.6]
Table IV.4: The action of the Soul (on the world) in each Day of the seven Days of events and the ratio of contribution by the seven Heavens.
Ibn al-Arabi describes in his Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n the different kinds of events that are particularly associated with each Day of the seven Days of the original divine 'Week' of event. There he also gives a ratio of 'contribution' by each one of the seven heavens. These mysterious symbolic data and concepts are not very easy to understand. However, we will summarize his remarks in the following table for reference, although any attempt to interpret them would require a separate extensive study.
This data in Table IV.4 is extracted from Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n: (pp. 11-16). The contributions are stated to be increments of one-fourth, probably alluding to the equal role of the four basic elements of material Nature (fire, air, water, and earth). The -/- sign means that the corresponding data is not given in the text. For Wednesday, Ibn al-Arabi does not give detailed numbers, but simply says (p. 14) that 'God ordered the spiritual realities to help the Soul according to their corresponding strength'. The '?' indicates that the contribution is done only by way of descent. Some of the data in this table are incomplete or not certain, as the meaning of the original text is often unclear.[1]
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[1] See also 'The Seven Days of the Heart': 157-9, where Pablo Beneito and Steven Hirtenstein gave in the Appendix A and B a good study of Kitab Ayyam Al-Sha’n. They found that the number of contribution for all of the seven Days from all the seven heavens should sum up to 24 which they interpreted as the 24 hours of the day. Therefore, because not all the data is found in the source, they had to deduce the missing slots based on this assumption.
