The calculation of time, a “divine affair” in Islam

In Islam, calculating time is not that practical necessity but also act inscribed in the vision of a world linked to its “existentor”. Universal practice, the calendar is based on stars: sun or moon. This choice would be “anthropological”: the comput of the nomad is lunar, that of the solar peasant. It sometimes becomes lun-solar, as in pre-Islamic Arabia (then in Islamized regions where the cult time is combined with that of harvests). But the lunar year is only 354 days: the Arabs therefore intercoured a month (nasî) Every three years to make it coincide with the sun; what the Koran will abolish.

Islam gives the comput a sacred scope: “The number of months is twelve for God, as inscribed in his book the day he created the heavens and the earth (…)this is the eternal religion “ (Koran 9, 36). In fact, duration has a metaphysical source: “I am the time (…)I alternate the day and the night ”, said God. His calculation is therefore a divine case and, depending on the word of a beautiful book just published on this subject, “A superhuman task” (1); or prophetic.

A return to the time of the origins

Thus, during his last pilgrimage a few months before his death, the Prophet announced: “Time has become again as it was during the creation of the heavens and the earth, the year is twelve months. »» Symbolically, the end of its mission therefore coincides with the lap nasî-s, now prohibited. Islam wanting to return to “Eternal religion” is also a return to the time of origins: its regeneration, literally.

This Hegian calendar, which begins with exile (Hegire) from Muhammad to Medina, is therefore steeped in sacred. Blessed moments are identified there, watched by believers each year: pilgrimage; young ; Night of the “Descent” of the Koran (during which God inscribes the fate of each, Layla al-Qadr); night when the prophet known his ascent (mi’râj).

Determine cycles of the day and beginning of the month (by the vision of the new croissant) – crucial for rites – is the business of the learned astronomer and mathematician, broken with multiple sciences (sometimes esoteric) and composer of the calendar: the “Master of time”(Muwaqqit). For him, “The movement of the sky remains the stallion”, and evolves according to the seasons because it “Looks more like a pace than a mechanical beat”, According to Titus Burckhardt, who describes in superb lines the practices of a muwaqqit met in Fez in the 1930s (at the “Unusual, in the royal face; Light gray eyes that shone like two stars with triumphant inner happiness; with white beard falling on its large chest ») (2).

With this sacred vision, the poet Ahmed Hâshim recalls: “What we expected from“ the hour ”was not to be an instrument to measure time. But to be the time itself. »»