Symposium report
"Time & Non-Time"
Worcester College, Oxford May 14th to 15th
Writing a report on the recent symposium on "Time and Non-Time" in the continual (if not eternal) delight of the Worcester College gardens, the reporter finds himself in a god-like situation. Everything to be said has been said already, yet to report it requires a certain re-unfolding of time from the apparent past into the imagined future. For God there is no problem, all Knowledge is held in Eternity in perfect focus, the Divine memory is crystal clear and meanings unfold as springs of gushing water. For this reporter no such luck, just a pool of murky notes of half remembered phrases and impressions - illuminated by shafts of light that are the papers whose own transience is inked on wood pulp rather than on impressions in the cerebral cortex. So please forgive any inaccuracies or wrong impressions that may occur, particularly as the increasing passage of time blurs the boundaries of memory!
The symposium was presaged by the death and funeral of the scholar Martin Lings. Jane Clark in her introduction to the symposium paid homage to his great contribution to the understanding of Islam in the West. She went on to remind the eighty or so delegates that Oxford had witnessed the unfolding of many changes in consciousness from mediaeval scholasticism to post modernism, and that grappling with the concept of Time could be seen in this context. Clark introduced the central idea of the "horizontal" axis of time between the past and the future that meet in the "now" and link "vertically" to the eternal or non-time. Her references were to the chapter of Moses in the Fusûs al-Hikam and the seminal paper "Time and Non-Time" written fifteen years ago by Dom Sylvester Houédard, one of the founder fellows of the Society and a man well ahead of his time.
Professor Mahmud Kiliç developed these ideas in his paper "The Spirituality of Time in the Akbarian Tradition", beginning with a quote from St. Augustine: "In time, all events are linked to each other through time". It is their integration and sense of unity that connects the soul to what lies "beyond time". Here time becomes "the measurement of being rather than duration", which explains the allusions in Ibn 'Arabî's writings to days being equivalent to a thousand years, and to cyclical durations (days, weeks, months, years) having correspondences to degrees of being (the Tablet, the Pen, etc). Kiliç also laid down the fundamental differences of degrees of non- and relative time and drew attention in particular to the quality of waqt (the concrete "now" as opposed to the zaman (the continual relative flow of time from past to future). The waqt is the state you are in - either with God or with the world, joyful or sad. As Sahl al-Tostârî said; "Sufism is nothing but the silence of the waqt." It is the changing state of the waqt in the heart that brings the Sufi to the station of "son of time" (ibn al-waqt) and to the state which is free of change - the "father of time" ('ab al-waqt). Kiliç described how Ibn 'Arabî saw waqt flowing from the past (the remembered now) to the future (the projected now) and ended by quoting Rûmî:
"The past and future hides God from all eyes. Put them on fire and all problems are solved".
In response to a question on integration in the essence, Kiliç agreed that annihilation of the self (spiritually) was necessary to get rid of time, and that it was the job of the murîd (the disciple), who is uncomfortable with his or her current state, to undertake this task willingly and with passionate love.
Alison Yiangou in her talk "There is No Time like the Present" evoked the atmosphere of Priene, the Ionian city high above the plain of the Meander in now western Turkey. It was here that she witnessed an archaeologist espy an ancient coin overlooked perhaps for thousands of years. Yiangou was struck by this "gift of the moment" and on contemplating this in the temple of Athene at the crown of the city, she asked that she might be shown something of the wisdom of this goddess as her "gift of the moment". The audience was then led through a beautifully constructed paper, departing and returning to the theme of the talk and the symposium. The arrow of time made an appearance, as did Einstein (we are currently celebrating the 100th year of his revolutionary insights), whose "bottom up vision" of relativity ("everything is relative ad infinitum") can be seen as the correlative of Ibn 'Arabî's vision which sees from "the top down". An image of the nautilus shell passed across our view as an example of the unfolding in time of an ever present reality, following the process of the Fibonacci expansion. Heady stuff, but our guide did not leave us in thin air but gently led us back to the perfect image of the human heart - the polyas (city) of the human where the Divine Wisdom resides - and finished with a poem by Ben Okri.
Professor Muhammad Khajavi took up the discourse on the "The Perfect Man and Time" - delivered in Farsi - but aided by an excellent translation by Yanis Eshots who was sadly unable to attend the symposium himself. We discovered afterwards from Prof. James Morris, who chaired the talk, that Khajavi took advantage of his own "gift of the moment" to discourse way beyond the bounds of the printed paper, a discourse that prompted one delegate to remark privately that it was like being addressed through the unbroken line of Sadreddin Konevi. The paper itself presented many of the subtle dimensions of time described by Mulla Sadra, al-Kashânî and naturally Sadruddin Konevî who identifies the aeon (dahr) as the "root of time", it being the eternal time within which the totality of relative time (zaman) exists. The whole schema follows a five-fold unfoldment, of which dahr is only the second level - a matter which raised discussion later in the plenary session, as dahr was seen by others as the all-including eternal time without any relative aspect. A valuable section of chapter 390 of the Futûhât al-Makkiyya was also included, which outlines the Shaykh's own discourse on time and the different meanings that arise when the question "When?" is asked; this shows the interdependent relationship of the eternal with the "newly arrived things" to be analogous to the Lord-servant relationship. Khajevi concluded by referring to Ibn 'Arab's treatise "The Problems" [Masâ'il] where the concept of the Perfect Man resolves all relations by being
the centre of the circle and its circumference, the mirror of the Real... and the possessor of time itself, not vice versa, while God alone, not anybody else, possesses the Perfect Man.
The 'grave-yard' slot after lunch was raised from its recumbent posture by a lively and sometimes provocative talk from John O'Kane on "Aflaki's Portrait of Chalabi Amir Aref, the Grandson of Jalâl al-din Rûmî". This was delivered, in keeping with its subject matter, with great theatricality. "Was he a saint or a swashbuckler?" we were asked, and the answer remained shrouded in mystery. This reporter was puzzled by the relationship of this paper to the theme of the conference, apart from its evidently enlivening quality and historical interest. It may perhaps be a comment on the relationship of our moment of time - the waqt - with God's own "new creation every moment". For the saint these can coincide, whereas the swashbuckler merely knows of the possibility of their coincidence and thus has the perfect excuse to act outrageously!
Time moved on to Mohammad Haj Yousef's discourse on "Ibn 'Arabî's View of Time", the subject of his PhD thesis that was to be examined at the end of the following week. Yousef (now Dr. Yousef) recapitulated many of the themes already touched upon, emphasising that for Ibn 'Arabî relative time, together with motion and space, is illusory and dependent on the question "when?". Whereas the real time represented by "spiritual entities" is co-existent with God As a physicist Yousef was able to draw parallels with modern science and interestingly highlighted the Shaykh's ideas on the curvature of time and his view that God moves faster than the speed of light in the earth of reality (see also below). He then plunged into the intricacies of cyclical time, where "invisible days are interlinked with physical days" giving rise to complex two and three dimensional relationships. We were surprised to find that there is only one "real" day (which is Saturday) which is imaged according to different relationships. Yousef's Doctoral Thesis promises to be a mine of information and wisdom; a copy will be available in due course in the Society library.
The symposium audience then broke up into three groups led by Mahmoud Kiliç, Mohammad Yousef and Alison Yiangou to explore further aspects of the day's papers. The seminars produced a distinct hum of interest and exchange, and the reporter was reminded of the early universities, such as the Qarawiyyin in Fez, where each class was taken at a separate pillar whilst remaining under the overarching umbrella of the university which itself is the place of worship. This was the first time this format had been tried out at a MIAS symposium in Oxford, with the intention of stimulating discussion. No doubt its success will lead to it being repeated in future years.
The Sunday/Saturday dawned warmer and brighter than the Saturday/Saturday, and Professor James Morris welcomed the gathering and raised the question of the paradoxes of time that had been brought out on the previous days, paradoxes that required resolution through relating to our own experience and to the "time of imagination" - the "twilight zone" inhabited by the mystics.
Adam Dupré began by speaking from human experience taking his title "The Dissection of the Timeless Moment" from T.S. Elliot's Four Quartets - a vision which "does not deny... the temporal dimension, but rather expresses a vision from where everything and every instant is bathed in a deeper significance". However, Dupré went on to contrast this viewpoint with that of Ibn 'Arabî, which demands the "death before dying" of the relative viewpoint to be reborn as the Perfect Servant. Here there were some beautiful allusions, but Dupré's expressed wish to "cocoon any discussion of it with an apparatus of existential content" led to some vigorous interchanges from the floor, due to the apparent denial of the historical context.
So we were thoroughly woken from our early morning torpor by the time Stratford Caldecott presented "Eternity in Time: Implications of the Incarnation". This elegant and scholarly paper, coming from Christian perspective, described Jesus as the incarnation of the Word of God, who represents the pinnacle of God's "Supreme Act of Love" in the image of the human being. He emphasised that Jesus was not the incarnation of God as such, but rather, as God the Son, "of God's self-knowledge" and that the essence was "not a thing but an Act". "Time" following Aquinas and Eckhart is the "spreading of the mode of being" where "existence is identical in being". Caldecott re-reminded us of the late Dom Sylvester's meditation on the timeless moment of intersection of the Nunc Fluens and Nunc Stans, described as "the Kiss" - the perfect act of Love. Living in the moment requires us to act out of receptivity and not from our limited selves, and the entropic decline of relative time requires the intervention of the light of "angelic time", just as the earth requires the light of the sun to revivify it. Finally we were introduced to the contemporary theologian Balthazar's concept of the "super-speed" of God where "He has done everything and yet is never short of things to do"!
Professor Yasushi Tonaga of Kyoto University came with a different "take" on time in his paper. Tonaga was concerned with how Sufism had been perceived in time, in particular in the various "wali-type" and "sufi-type" biographies that appeared in historical time. Sufism we discovered was a term largely coined by orientalists, not one applied by Ibn 'Arabî to himself. The question "What is a Sufi?" Tonaga suggested, should be replaced by "Who are Sufis?" and went on to propose a view of Sufism that encompassed three axes: Mysticism, Popular cult and Ethics, the preponderance of each aspect varying with time from the ethics and mysticism of the "Classical Period" through a balance of the three aspects in the "Middle Period" and with a pronounced emphasis towards the X-factor of Ethics in the "Modern Period". This is an interesting observation since different periods of relative time are expressions of particular Divine Names/qualities contained within the eternal time of God.
This year there were no papers on the Sunday afternoon, and in keeping with the aim of the symposium to develop dialogue and interchange, the last session was devoted to lively round-table discussion in which the "audience" (many of whom had given papers at previous symposia) and "speakers" were gathered into a collective whole. Much of the discussion was concerned with the present state - our own time - and there was a real sense of the need for "heart speaking with heart as an expression of the manifestation of love that overcomes all barriers" to quote from one member.
As for Time, did the symposium pin this down? How could it have done so, when we have already moved on and are looking forward to exploring more of the twists and turns of this elusive matter at the symposium in New York on 15th /16th October.