Zamān, Dahr, Sarmad—and the Secret of the Present
Ibn ʿArabī and Rumi on succession, eternity, and renewed creation
Time is one of those words that seems perfectly clear until we try to define it. We speak of time passing, time healing, time destroying, and time running out. Yet we do not see “time” as a thing. We see bodies move, faces age, seasons turn, memories accumulate, and possibilities become acts.
Muslim philosophers developed a subtle vocabulary for these differences. Three terms became especially important: zamān, dahr, and sarmad. They do not simply mean short time, long time, and endless time. They distinguish succession, a non-successive relation to succession, and eternity without before or after.
Ibn ʿArabī does not merely repeat this threefold scheme. He shifts the question from “What kind of container is time?” to “What is time if, in the temporal order, what exists are moving things rather than a separate entity called time?” He then joins cosmology to spiritual life: creation iss renewed without repetition, and the human being encounters that renewal in the waqt—the present moment with its particular divine demand.
Rumi, Ibn ʿArabī’s younger contemporary, gives poetic form to closely related insights. His verses serve here as poetic parallels; no claim of direct dependence, or of Rumi’s adoption of the philosophers’ technical system, is required.
The Three Terms—and a Necessary Caution
Islamic scripture does not set out a formal doctrine of “three times.” The noun zamān does not occur in the Qur’an. Dahr appears in Qur’an 76:1 and 45:24, while sarmadan in Qur’an 28:71–72 means something made unceasing or continuous. Their later technical meanings arose in Islamic philosophy.
Mullā Ṣadrā reports the distinction in a compact formula:
| Term | Technical Meaning | Corresponding Order of Existence | What It Is Not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zamān (زَمَانٌ) | The relation of changing things to changing things; measurable succession | The corporeal world of motion, generation, decay, and bodily life | Merely a mood or illusion in the everyday sense |
| Dahr (دَهْرٌ) | The stable in relation to the changing; a comprehensive, non-successive relation to temporal succession | In Mīr Dāmād’s strict system, an intermediate order of archetypal realities; in broader usage, the supratemporal order encompassing change | Just a very long period, the afterlife, or an infinite clock |
| Sarmad (سَرْمَدٌ) | The stable in relation to the stable; eternity without succession | Divine eternity—not a created world or cosmic location | Time stretched endlessly forward |
The language of “corresponding worlds” therefore requires care. These are not three clocks installed on three floors of the cosmos. Later thinkers, especially Mīr Dāmād, made them into sharply distinguished ontological orders; other authors used the vocabulary more flexibly. It would be misleading to identify zamān, dahr, and sarmad automatically with mulk, malakūt, and jabarūt, or to call Paradise sarmad. Paradise is created and everlasting by God’s gift; divine eternity is not created duration.
“Timeless time” can serve as a deliberately paradoxical description of dahr, provided that it means a non-serial relation encompassing succession. Sarmad is stricter: it is timeless eternity, not time of any kind.
Zamān: Measured Succession
Zamān is the time of before and after. A seed becomes a tree; a child becomes an adult; the sun rises and sets; one prayer time follows another. In the philosophical definition, time is bound to motion and change. It belongs most directly to the physical order because bodies do not possess all their states at once: they receive one state after another.
Zamān is therefore the time of action and moral consequence. We repent after wrongdoing, keep promises made earlier, prepare for what is likely to come, and discover that missed opportunities do not always return. The fleetingness of temporal life is not a defect in creation. It is the condition under which intention, patience, fidelity, and return to God become meaningful.
Yet Ibn ʿArabī asks a more radical question: Does time itself exist, or do changing things exist while “time” names the relations we measure among their changes?
Ibn ʿArabī: Time Has No Independent Substance
In chapter 59 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, devoted to existent and measured time, Ibn ʿArabī writes:
“Imagined” here does not mean that history is a dream, that aging is unreal, or that prayer times are optional. It means that time has no independent essence alongside the things that move. The sun, earth, body, and motion exist; days, months, and years are measured relations abstracted from recurring changes. Time is not an invisible fluid through which the universe travels.
Ibn ʿArabī notes that a “day” need not always equal twenty-four hours. The Qur’an speaks of a day measured as a thousand years (32:5) and another as fifty thousand years (70:4). The Prophetic report about the Antichrist likewise describes days of unusual apparent length and commands believers to estimate the prayer times. Measurement remains valid and necessary, but the unit is relational rather than an independently existing substance.
This account does not empty temporal life of meaning. Instead, it makes temporal existence radically dependent: no moment possesses the power to carry itself into the next.
Dahr: The Encompassing of Time
The Qur’an reports the materialist claim:
The claim treats time as an impersonal power that produces and annihilates. A sacred hadith answers this habit of blaming time:
The usual theological explanation is straightforward: God is not identical with a created dimension called time. Rather, people curse “time” for events whose disposer is God. Ibn ʿArabī gives the hadith a further metaphysical depth. He treats al-Dahr as a divine designation—the divine face toward temporal creation, under which changing events are encompassed and governed.
This does not make al-Dahr one of the conventionally enumerated Ninety-Nine Names, nor does it mean “God is time” in the ordinary sense.
Commenting on Qur’an 45:24 in chapter 390 of the Futūḥāt, Ibn ʿArabī makes a characteristically fine distinction: those who attributed destruction to dahr had pointed, unknowingly, toward the true Agent, but they misunderstood the name by confusing dahr with serial zamān (see Kalin’s discussion).
Here dahr resembles the philosophical relation of the stable to the changing, but the two uses should not be collapsed. Philosophically, dahr explains how succession stands in relation to a non-successive order. In Ibn ʿArabī’s theological language, it also points to the divine governance by which night and day are turned and every temporal possibility receives its appointed manifestation.
If zamān is like hearing a melody note by note, dahr may be compared—only approximately—to the composition as a whole. The whole does not erase the sequence; it encompasses it without becoming another note within it.
Sarmad: Eternity Without Duration
Sarmad names the relation of the stable to the stable. Applied to God, it negates succession, measure, and the passage from one state to another. God does not have a very long lifetime. He does not wait for tomorrow to learn what tomorrow contains.
The Qur’an says:
To call divine eternity sarmad is not to place God inside a higher temporal container. The term marks the failure of “before” and “after” to delimit the Divine. Even the concept of eternity is our way of denying temporal limitation; it does not comprehend God’s Essence.
The central distinction can now be stated plainly. Zamān is succession. Dahr is a non-successive order comprehending succession. Sarmad is not duration at all, but eternity without before and after.
Every Breath: Creation Renewed Without Repetition
Ibn ʿArabī’s account becomes most vivid in his teaching of the renewal of creation at every instant, tajdīd al-khalq fī al-ānāt. The Qur’an declares:
And it says of those who deny resurrection:
In its immediate context, the second verse concerns resurrection. Ibn ʿArabī reads the phrase “new creation” more widely as a metaphysical truth: creatures possess no self-sufficient continuity, so God grants existence anew at every instant. Every divine self-disclosure is unique—“there is no repetition in self-disclosure” (lā takrār fī al-tajallī). What we call the same world is a continuity of divine giving, not a static object that sustains itself.
This renewal concerns the creature’s continual reception of existence and the endlessly differentiated effects of the divine Names. It does not imply change in God’s Essence or eternal knowledge, and it is not a physical theory of measurable cosmic frames.
Rumi renders this difficult idea through images of running water and a swiftly moving spark:
The stream retains a name while its water changes. The moving spark presents a continuous appearance because its movement is too swift for the eye to divide. Likewise, personal identity is real, but it is received continuity rather than independence. At each breath, existence is a gift before it is a possession.
Here the three orders meet without confusion. In zamān, the new disclosures appear successively. Dahr names a non-successive relation encompassing their sequence. Sarmad denies that the divine Source is carried along by the change He gives.
Waqt: The Servant’s Lived Present
Ibn ʿArabī’s most important spiritual term for time is not a fourth cosmic category. It is waqt: the moment as presently lived. In chapter 238 of the Futūḥāt, he records a Sufi definition:
The past is no longer present to us; the future is not yet present. The waqt is where divine command and human response meet: gratitude when blessing arrives, patience when trial arrives, repentance when sin becomes clear, and courage when action becomes due.
To be “the child of the moment” (ibn al-waqt) is not to obey impulse. It is to recognize the claim God has placed upon this moment rather than hiding in one that does not presently exist.
Ibn ʿArabī’s wider vocabulary also values the ṣāḥib al-waqt, the person capable of discerning and observing the moment’s rightful demand, over someone merely swept along by circumstances. The measure of presence is therefore not intensity of feeling but adab: a fitting response under divine and revealed guidance.
Rumi turns the teaching into a warning against spiritual postponement:
Rumi is not condemning responsible plans. Planning can itself be the duty of the present. He condemns the imagined “tomorrow” used to delay truthfulness, reconciliation, worship, or love. A person may plan for years ahead while remaining fully present; another may have no plan and still flee the moment through fantasy.
When Past and Future Become Veils
Memory and anticipation are divine gifts. Without memory, there is no learning, repentance, covenant, or identity; without anticipation, there is no prudence, preparation, or hope. They become veils when the self attempts to live in them instead of using them faithfully now.
Rumi writes:
“Sobriety” here is the Sufi technical opposite of ecstatic self-forgetfulness: the ordinary self-aware condition that reconstructs identity from memory.
The “fire” is not amnesia or irresponsibility. It burns the claim that the past must forever determine the self, and the fantasy that life will begin only after some future condition is met. A reed cannot sing while its inner obstructions remain. The human heart likewise becomes responsive when regret is transformed into repentance and anxiety into trustful action.
What the Three Times Ask of Us
Zamān teaches mortality: every created form changes, and every opportunity has an appointed measure. Dahr teaches that succession is not abandoned to an impersonal force: the turning of night and day is encompassed by divine knowledge and command. Sarmad teaches transcendence: God is not aged by the world He creates, nor divided by its before and after.
But Ibn ʿArabī does not ask the servant to escape temporal life and pretend to inhabit divine eternity. The servant is given a waqt—an unrepeatable present in which to answer God. Rumi’s river appears continuous only because its renewal is too swift to see; his reed begins to sing when the knots of regret and anticipation loosen.
These are not three competing theories of a single clock. They are three relations between change and permanence. Zamān tells us what follows what. Dahr points to the non-successive order encompassing that succession. Sarmad denies that divine eternity is duration at all. And waqt asks the question on which spiritual life turns:
What does faithfulness require now?
References and Further Reading
- The Qur’an: 28:71–72, 32:5, 45:24, 50:15, 55:29, 57:3, 70:4, and 76:1.
- Al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, no. 4826, “I am al-Dahr; I alternate night and day.”
- Ibn Sīnā, al-Taʿlīqāt, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, pp. 141–142; compare his less rigid use of dahr and sarmad on p. 43.
- Mullā Ṣadrā, al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī al-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa, vol. 3, pp. 147–148.
- Mīr Dāmād’s three ontological orders are summarized in Sajjad H. Rizvi, “Dāmād, Mīr,” Encyclopaedia Iranica. See also Rizvi, “Between Time and Eternity,” Journal of Islamic Studies.
- Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, chapters 59, 238, 348, and 390; see chapter 59, Arabic text on time, and chapter 238, Arabic text on the moment with its continuation. Pagination varies by edition.
- William C. Chittick, “Ibn ʿArabī,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, especially the discussion of renewed creation and non-repetition in divine self-disclosure.
- Ibrahim Kalin, “From the Temporal Time to the Eternal Now: Ibn al-ʿArabi and Mulla Sadra on Time,” Journal of Religious Thought 6, no. 19, pp. 135–164, doi:10.22099/jrt.2013.1338.
- William C. Chittick, “Presence with God in Ibn Arabi’s Teaching,” Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society.
- Eric Winkel, “Time Is Not Real,” Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, a close reading of Futūḥāt chapter 59.
- Gerhard Böwering, “Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Concept of Time,” Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 3 (2012), pp. 108–23, reprinting his earlier study.
- Rumi, Mathnawī, Book I: verses 133–34, verses 1144–46, and verses 2201–03. Persian text checked against Ganjoor; the English renderings in this article are original translations.
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