The Prophetic Concept Of Time And The Modern Age

Bismi-Llah, Al-Rahmani, Al-Rahim. Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad wa Aali Muhammad. As-salamu alaykum to everyone who may be tuning into this short video, and hello to anyone who may be wandering past and chancing upon this video as well.

I am going to be talking a little bit about, in this video, the Prophetic concept of time. So, we are living in a day and age where we no longer really have Prophets. According to Islamic sources, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and his holy progeny, said that he was the first sign of Akhir Al-Zaman, the latter times or the latter period of humanity.

When you look at most religions, you will see that they have all predicted a latter time. And with that latter time, it comes with certain characteristics and certain events are going to happen. So I am going to be talking about this from a secular viewpoint, or thinking about how this concept of the latter times appears from a secular perspective.

So, if you are raised in a secular culture, or you adopt a secular perspective of humanity, of existence, of the world, then the idea of there being end times or latter times seems to be almost like something fantastical. And this is also part of the conflict between the secular worldview and the Prophetic worldview.

The secular worldview holds that there are no higher dimensions of existence other than the material level of existence that we see around us. Modern-day science has been based upon the secular concept of existence. And in fact, so much of that science has been established based upon that worldview that much evidence has been gathered to support that worldview. But as the father of Samba Diallo in one of my favorite books, Ambiguous Adventure, says with regard to modern day secular science, it is a science of the surface, it is a science of the surface of reality. And if you are specializing in the study of the material world, then, of course, you will probably gain much evidence to support your arguments.

In fact, now, some scientists are saying that perhaps time is not just a series of seconds, minutes and hours passing in consecutive fashion, never to be experienced again. There are now some scientists who are questioning this concept of time, and positing that the past is not actually the past. The past is still with us, in some form.

And this is what I want to talk about, because oftentimes when we are talking about religion in inverted commas, from a secular or atheistic perspective, religion consists of this belief in some organizer in the sky who has control over everybody's lives, and it consists of fairy tales and myths that no sensible, normal person would believe in today, especially with people coming into Islam or coming back to Islam as well. Sometimes the question is, what's happened to you? Are you crazy? We have already disproved everything that these religions are purporting is the truth. So what's happened to you? Have you lost your senses to come into a path, a belief, a way of life that acknowledges that there are higher levels of existence than just the material level of existence.

So it is heartening to see that in modern day science, now this linear concept of time is starting to be questioned. A concept of time as something multidimensional is now not so far-fetched. And ironically, that idea is slowly starting to catch up with what religions have always said about time, including Islam. So, Islam holds that there are many different levels of existence. There are also many different levels, even going into what you could call the heavenly realms [Ref: 4:145; 6:83; 6:132; 6:165; 8:4; 17:21; 20:75; 83:7-10; 83:18-28]. And there are different levels going down into what could be called the realms of misery. Maybe that's a better way of putting it, the realms of misery and wretchedness.

So as I said in previous videos, one concept of time, which is now the popular global concept or a perspective of time that has now been globalized, it has been exported, is that time exists only within this material level of existence. It is linear. It consists of seconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years that pass and are gone forever. The secular concept of time is also, as I have said in previous videos, that as time passes, humanity progresses. Humanity gathers knowledge, and with that knowledge, humanity develops. And here we are now in this day and age, the early years of the 21st century, and we are living in a world where actually there is a lot of confusion. People are feeling ill at ease with many things that are happening in the global society.

In fact, looking back, I remember when globalization in the 1990s was quite a optimistic idea, as people used to call it, the global village, used to be something made you feel confident and positive about the future. But globalization today has a different meaning, especially as we see that a big part of that is the increasing levels of global control. So the honeymoon period has worn off, and we are now starting to see some quite strange developments in this era of globalization. And with those developments, when you look at, as an example, what Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and his holy progeny, have said, his successor who came after him, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, also has talked about future times.

And I have often argued that it's not so far-fetched to think that a Prophet or a Prophet's successor, an Imam, might be able to see what the future looks like since even in a more regular day-to-day fashion, we have people who have psychic abilities. I mean, quite ordinary people have psychic abilities, and they are able to see things of the future, although sometimes those things may not be clear. So your average psychic person sometimes may confuse things that they see in the future. But on an anecdotal level, I've spoken to so many people who say, this person said this was going to happen to me, and it happened.

I think there is enough evidence now, for it to be demonstrated that on an ordinary level, the ability to see certain events in the future is not that unusual. So we can then extend that to the idea of Prophets who are meant to be, we could say, fully enlightened people, gifted with insight into many things, many dimensions, and the Prophets and their successors have also been able to see into the future and seen what that future is going to look like, and they have told their followers what that future is going to look like.

So the Islamic tradition, just like the Christian tradition before it, the Jewish tradition before that, and just like other religions as well, has predicted that far from there being an era of technological development, and along with that, increasing enlightenment, what they have predicted is that with this era of technological development, there is going to be a decline in perception. There is going to be a decline in the perception of higher levels of reality.

It's very interesting reading the work of Wolfgang Smith, and one of them, which I read, was called "The Quantum Enigma". Now I didn't understand the mathematical formulae in that book because that is not my background. But what I did find interesting was that when Wolfgang Smith was talking about existence and non-existence, a lot of what he said tallied so closely with what the Prophets and Imams have said, and their students as well, what they have said about existence and non-existence, and how things come into existence as well, how things emerge out of non-existence into existence as an example.

We can see that in certain areas of science, there definitely is a correlation between what the early Prophets and Imams saw and explained and taught and what today's quantum physicists are now seeing and teaching themselves.

So the Prophetic concept of time is that there are different levels of time. There is time that is associated with the material realm in which we live, consisting of hours and seconds and so on and so forth. Then there are higher levels of time. There is what the French scholar, Henri Corbin, has said is the time of the soul. He is referring back to one or two scholars of the Islamic tradition who themselves also called this higher spiritual level to which our souls correspond. They have called that the time of the soul. Zaman and Fusih, they have called it the time of the soul.

This time of the soul is a time that doesn't pass in this systematic fashion in the way that time passes in the material level of existence. So the higher level of existence, which is the level of existence that corresponds with our more immaterial level of existence. At this level, time is different. And I have used as examples in the past, the example of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C. S. Lewis, where the children go into the wardrobe, they go into the land of Nanya, they have lots of experiences. Then when they come back, it's as if only barely 30 seconds has passed.

Our dreams are also like that. So it has been shown scientifically that the length of time that it takes to have a dream in our brain is about two seconds of electrical activity. But within that two seconds, you can have a fully blown, full-length, feature-film dream. Let's not touch yet upon dreams that are also premonitions about what is going to happen in the future as well, maybe I will talk about that in another video. But when you dream and you are having a full-length feature film in your dream, that full-length feature film that in the cinema would take one and a half hours or two hours. In the brain, only takes about two seconds of electrical activity.

The Qur'an teaches that when you dream, God takes your soul on a journey [ref. to 39:42; 6:60]. And then when you wake up, that's when your soul is effectively returned back to your body. So what keeps your body alive, we could say, is your spirit, your soul, and that is what is keeping you breathing. But your soul, and that's a whole other topic as well, what the soul is, your soul moves to this level of existence to which it corresponds. And at this level of existence, it experiences time in a totally different way from how we experience it in this realm.

When one converts from a secular culture to an Islamic culture or a secular worldview to an Islamic worldview, what one is also doing is integrating oneself with the Prophetic concept of time. You are integrating yourself into the idea that you are joining this stream of humanity that links back spiritually to the era of the Prophets. But because as people who adhere to this idea that there are different levels of time, we are living in a world that is predominantly secular now. How we live out our Islamic practice is that we have one foot in the secular world and one foot in the world that acknowledges several different levels of existence and several different levels of time.This is what I tackled in my collection of short stories "Passing Through the Dream". I will put a link to that below this video.

But this is what is happening internally when you move from being a person who has been constructed by the components in your secular society to a person who is constructed by the components of Islam or the components of this Prophetic Path. We are negotiating two different concepts of existence, two different concepts of time, and we are living simultaneously with both of those concepts together within us. We believe in the Prophetic concept of time. We integrate ourselves into that concept and we are living our lives integrated into that. But outwardly, we are functioning in a society that only acknowledges time at the material level of existence.

This is actually what's going on within when you move from being a product of the secular world to a human being that comes from what is sometimes called the realm of pre-existence.

So time at the material level is passing. Death is going to come to all of us. And particularly with regard to this era in which we are living, the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him and his progeny, and his successors have also noted many of the signs of the times in which we are living. And one of the characteristics of those times is that things are going to be turned upside down. Values are going to be turned on their head. Concepts of reality are going to be distorted or ripped up. People's very sense of self is going to be demolished or at the very least, challenged to its core.

There are many other signs that have been given about this day and age, and InshaAllah, in future videos, I will discuss those signs. But I just wanted to initially touch upon the Prophetic concept of time and to highlight the fact that this Prophetic concept of time is now starting to be acknowledged by certain contemporary scientists and that it isn't just something crazy that is associated with these religions from the past that didn't know any better.

We are now moving past the era that said we have moved past the Prophetic era. This era that said we had a previous era that had a certain worldview that had a certain concept of existence as something that consists of different dimensions. We have moved beyond that. We are now progressing into the modern age, and we are going to fire rockets left, right and center unto different planets. And this is so exciting. This era is now going into decline, this era of confidence that scientific progress means that the era of the Prophets is no longer relevant. Ironically, that era is now passing and new scientific discoveries are starting to begin to correlate with what the Prophet said all along.

So thank you for listening. I am just sharing some of my thoughts. And if you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to write that below the video. I hope you enjoyed the video. InshaAllah, I will see you in the next one. As-salamu alaykum.