God's Timeless Names

The Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, informed us that God revealed the following simple, yet infinitely profound words: "Do not insult time, for verily I am time." In that God encompasses all time, chronology -- a phenomenon that is relative to our perception and understanding of the world -- is irrelevant to God. That being the case, the great considerations that inform how we humans generally understand knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori, are irrelevant in relation to God.

Kant is credited with doing to philosophy what Copernicus did to astronomy: he changed the way we look at the world and the place of the world in a grander scheme -- metaphysically. Perhaps if we step outside of time we can see that the question of who, what, or how God will be in the twenty-first century is a baseless one in that God's power and ontological reality are unaffected by time. Perhaps a change in perspective will allow us to discover the timelessness of God.

We wrestle with the idea of God, and as our intellect is shaped by realities, which vary from one time to another, that idea from our temporal perspective is subject to change and variation. However, there is one constant in our intellectual quest for knowledge of the Divine, something captured in the opening phrase of The Critique of Pure Reason:

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its power, it is also not able to answer.

Muslims -- at least those who still take revelation seriously (and revelation is the key to resolving the apparent conundrum Kant describes) -- are spared the anguish that results from the pursuit of unanswerable questions. Revelation and the connection it gives us to God enable us to find a contentment that frees us from the desire to ask unanswerable questions about God and instills in us the need to ask answerable ones about ourselves. "God will not be asked about what God does, but you will be asked about what you do," the Qur'an reminds us. Questions of who, what, where, how, or why, as they relate to God, we are instructed, are best left to God. Rather, our task is to observe God's timeless names and attributes as they unfold in the world and cultivate the light, that Divine light, once it has been ignited in our hearts, in order to align ourselves with those perfect names as best we can.

The tasks of observation and spiritual cultivation are timeless ones, and they have yielded consistent results to the faithful for as long as we have been able to record their fruits. However, they are tasks that require humans to gracefully accept the limitations of our knowledge; they require humility and oftentimes a change of perspective. When we find within ourselves the ability to undertake these tasks, we ignite a light that can grow to illuminate every level of our being and reveal to us insights some may deem intellectually inaccessible.

Imam Zaid Shakir is scholar-in-residence and lecturer at Zaytuna Institute, where he teaches courses on Arabic, Islamic law, history, and Islamic spirituality. His essays have been collected in Scattered Pictures (Zaytuna Institute, 2005).