Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Divine Time and Human Time: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Commentary on the Qur’anic Verses of Time in Light of Relativity

Abstract

This commentary examines the Qur’an’s treatment of time — and especially its recurring contrast between divine time and human time — across roughly a dozen verses, reading them simultaneously through three lenses: modern physics (Einstein’s special and general relativity, time dilation, and the physics of time travel as presented in Paul Davies’ chapter “Is Time Travel Possible?”), the philosophy of time (A-theory vs. B-theory, presentism vs. eternalism, the block universe, and classical accounts of divine eternity), and Islamic theology and tafsir. The central thesis is deliberately modest and, I will argue, more honest than the popular alternatives: the Qur’an’s time-ratio verses (a day equalling a thousand years in 22:47 and 32:5; fifty thousand years in 70:4) and its perception-of-time verses (the Sleepers of the Cave, the man revived after a century, the resurrected saying they tarried “a day or part of a day”) do not “predict” relativity, and the classical exegetes did not read them as physics. Yet they resonate powerfully with the two great discoveries of relativistic physics — that there is no absolute, universal “now,” and that elapsed time is frame-dependent — while remaining anchored in a different and older insight: that the Creator’s relation to time is categorically unlike the creature’s. My governing analytical move is to distinguish three senses of “relative time”: (1) subjective/psychological time (how duration is felt), (2) physical proper time (how much time elapses for a clock on a given worldline), and (3) theological “divine time” (God’s atemporal or supra-temporal relation to the whole of creation). Conflating these — as much popular i’jaz ‘ilmi (“scientific miracle”) literature does — produces category errors; distinguishing them lets each domain speak in its own register. The commentary proceeds verse by verse and closes with a thematic epilogue on freedom, the block universe, and dahr.

Part I: The Time-Ratio Verses

Surah Al-Hajj 22:47

Arabic: وَيَسْتَعْجِلُونَكَ بِالْعَذَابِ وَلَن يُخْلِفَ اللَّهُ وَعْدَهُ ۚ وَإِنَّ يَوْمًا عِندَ رَبِّكَ كَأَلْفِ سَنَةٍ مِّمَّا تَعُدُّونَ

Sahih International: “And they urge you to hasten the punishment. But Allah will never fail in His promise. And indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of those which you count.”
Yusuf Ali: “Yet they ask thee to hasten on the Punishment! But Allah will not fail in His Promise. Verily a Day in the sight of thy Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning.”
Pickthall: “And they will bid thee hasten on the Doom, and Allah faileth not His promise, but lo! a Day with Allah is as a thousand years of what ye reckon.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “And they ask you to hasten on the torment! And Allah fails not His Promise. And verily, a day with your Lord is as a thousand years of what you reckon.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “They challenge you ˹O Prophet˺ to hasten the torment. And Allah will never fail in His promise. But a day with your Lord is indeed like a thousand years by your counting.”
Abdul Haleem: “They will challenge you to hasten the punishment. God will not fail in His promise — a Day with your Lord is like a thousand years by your reckoning.”

Classical exegesis. The mainstream tafsir reads this verse contextually, not cosmologically. Its function is consolation and warning: the disbelievers mock the Prophet for a punishment that has not yet arrived, and the verse answers that God’s apparent “slowness” is an illusion born of the creaturely experience of time. Al-Razi, as summarized by Muhammad Asad, glosses it thus: “what men conceive of as ‘time’ has no meaning with regard to God, because He is timeless, without beginning and without end, so that ‘in relation to Him, one day and a thousand years are alike.’” Alim Ibn Kathir and the Ma’arif al-Qur’an tradition record two readings: (a) the “day” is the Day of Resurrection, which will feel a thousand years long because of its severity; or (b) the phrase expresses the incommensurability of divine and human time in general — a thousand years of human history are, to God, a single “day’s work.” Quran.com

Scientific resonance and disanalogy. It is tempting to hear in “a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of your counting” an anticipation of time dilation — and the resonance is real. Relativity’s deepest lesson is precisely that the phrase “a day” is incomplete until you specify for whom and on what worldline. There is no universal clock. But the disanalogy is equally important. Relativistic time dilation is a symmetric, quantitative relation between two physical frames connected by relative velocity or gravitational potential; the verse concerns the relation between a temporal creation and a Creator whom the same exegetes describe as outside time altogether. A ratio of 1:365,000 (a day to a thousand years) is not a Lorentz factor; it is, in the classical reading, a rhetorical figure for incommensurability. To read it as a physics constant is to make a category error the mufassirun themselves avoided.

Surah As-Sajdah 32:5

Arabic: يُدَبِّرُ الْأَمْرَ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ إِلَى الْأَرْضِ ثُمَّ يَعْرُجُ إِلَيْهِ فِي يَوْمٍ كَانَ مِقْدَارُهُ أَلْفَ سَنَةٍ مِّمَّا تَعُدُّونَ

Sahih International: “He arranges [each] matter from the heaven to the earth; then it will ascend to Him in a Day, the extent of which is a thousand years of those which you count.”
Yusuf Ali: “He rules (all) affairs from the heavens to the earth: in the end will (all affairs) go up to Him, on a Day, the space whereof will be (as) a thousand years of your reckoning.”
Pickthall: “He directeth the ordinance from the heaven unto the earth; then it ascendeth unto Him in a Day, whereof the measure is a thousand years of that ye reckon.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “He arranges (every) affair from the heavens to the earth, then it (affair) will go up to Him, in one Day, the space whereof is a thousand years of your reckoning.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “He conducts every affair from the heavens to the earth, then it all ascends to Him on a Day whose length is a thousand years by your counting.”
Abdul Haleem: “He runs everything, from the heavens to the earth, and everything will ascend to Him in the end, on a Day that will measure a thousand years in your reckoning.”

Classical exegesis. Al-Tabari preserves two early glosses that are strikingly “spatio-temporal.” From Qatada: the “day” measures the journey of the divine command — “five hundred years its descent and five hundred years its ascent, that together a thousand years.” Tabari From al-Dahhak: “the angels ascend to the heaven, then they descend in one of these days of yours, and that is a distance of a thousand years.” Tabari The key term is yudabbir al-amr — God’s continuous administration or governance (tadbir) of creation. This is not primarily a statement about the length of Judgment Day but about the cosmic hierarchy through which the divine decree is executed and returns. Yusuf Ali’s note captures the devotional intent: “How could the immense mystery of Time behind our ideas of it be enforced on our minds better? Our Day may be a thousand or fifty thousand years, and our years in proportion.” Alim

Scientific resonance. The verse’s imagery of a “distance” that is simultaneously a “duration” — a thousand years measured as the traversal from heaven to earth — is, at the level of metaphor, oddly congruent with relativity’s unification of space and time into a single four-dimensional spacetime, in which a “distance” between events genuinely has a temporal component and light itself takes measurable time to traverse space. One should not over-read this. But the classical gloss (distance = time of angelic traversal) and the relativistic insight (spatial separation is convertible with temporal separation, and no separation is absolute) share a structural intuition that time and space are not the independent absolutes of Newtonian common sense.

Surah Al-Ma’arij 70:4

Arabic: تَعْرُجُ الْمَلَائِكَةُ وَالرُّوحُ إِلَيْهِ فِي يَوْمٍ كَانَ مِقْدَارُهُ خَمْسِينَ أَلْفَ سَنَةٍ

Sahih International: “The angels and the Spirit [i.e., Gabriel] will ascend to Him during a Day the extent of which is fifty thousand years.”
Yusuf Ali: “The angels and the spirit ascend unto Him in a Day the measure whereof is (as) fifty thousand years.”
Pickthall: “(Whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “The angels and the Ruh [Jibril (Gabriel)] ascend to Him in a Day the measure whereof is fifty thousand years.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “˹through which˺ the angels and the ˹holy˺ spirit will ascend to Him on a Day fifty thousand years in length.”
Abdul Haleem: “by which the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him, on a Day whose length is fifty thousand years.”

The 1,000 vs. 50,000 problem — and why it matters. Here is the decisive test for any “scientific miracle” reading. If 22:47 and 32:5 encode a physical constant of time dilation (1 day = 1,000 years), why does 70:4 give a different ratio (1 day = 50,000 years)? The classical mufassirun confronted this apparent discrepancy directly, and their solutions are illuminating precisely because they are non-physical:

Different referents. Ibn Kathir and al-Tabari note that the verses concern different things: 32:5 measures the administration of the cosmos (tadbir), while 70:4 measures the Day of Resurrection as experienced by the disbeliever. Al-Suyuti’s Tafsir al-Jalalayn records that the fifty-thousand-year day is “from the perspective of the disbeliever, on account of the calamities he will encounter in it — but as for the believer it will be easier for him than an obligatory prayer which he performs in this world.” Surah Quran
Subjective duration. This is the most theologically significant reading: the same physical event has different experienced lengths depending on the moral-spiritual state of the observer. The day is long for the damned and short for the saved. This is a doctrine of psychological, not physical, time-relativity.
Different “horizons.” Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, in Bayan al-Qur’an, suggested the difference “may be due to different horizons,” noting that even in our world the length of day and night differs by latitude. Quran.com

The upshot: the classical tradition treated the differing ratios as expressing different contexts — the length of Judgment Day, the speed of angelic ascent, the scope of cosmic administration — rather than as a unified physics of time. This is the strongest internal evidence against the i’jaz reading of these verses as relativity, and it should be stated honestly. The verses are about the incommensurability of God’s time with ours, dramatized variously, not about Lorentz transformations.

Part II: The Perception-of-Time Verses

A second and distinct cluster of verses concerns not “divine days” but the collapse of felt duration — beings who traverse enormous spans of time yet experience them as “a day or part of a day.” These verses are, if anything, a closer phenomenological analogue to relativistic time dilation than the ratio verses, though again the mechanism is theological rather than physical.

The Companions of the Cave — Surah Al-Kahf 18:19 and 18:25

18:19 (Sahih International): “And similarly, We awakened them that they might question one another. Said a speaker from among them, ‘How long have you remained [here]?’ They said, ‘We have remained a day or part of a day.’ They said, ‘Your Lord is most knowing of how long you remained…’”

18:25 (Arabic): وَلَبِثُوا فِي كَهْفِهِمْ ثَلَاثَ مِائَةٍ سِنِينَ وَازْدَادُوا تِسْعًا

Sahih International: “And they remained in their cave for three hundred years and exceeded by nine.”
Yusuf Ali: “So they stayed in their Cave three hundred years, and (some) add nine (more).”
Pickthall: “And (it is said) they tarried in their Cave three hundred years and add nine.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “And they stayed in their Cave three hundred (solar) years, and add nine (for lunar years).”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “They had remained in their cave for three hundred years, adding nine.”
Abdul Haleem: “[Some say] they stayed in their cave for three hundred years, and some added nine.”

The Sleepers spent 309 lunar years (≈ 300 solar years) in the Cave, yet on waking judged it “a day or part of a day.” Importantly, the classical tafsir (Ibn Kathir citing Qatada and Mutrif ibn ‘Abdullah) treats the number “300 plus nine” as a report of what people said, immediately relativized by v. 26 — “Say: Allah knows best how long they stayed.” Quran.com The verse is thus doubly about the unreliability of human time-reckoning: the Sleepers misjudge grossly, and even the transmitted figure is held at arm’s length. The theological point — God alone knows the true measure — again foregrounds the gap between creaturely and divine time-knowledge.

The Man Revived After a Century — Surah Al-Baqarah 2:259

Arabic (excerpt): فَأَمَاتَهُ اللَّهُ مِائَةَ عَامٍ ثُمَّ بَعَثَهُ ۖ قَالَ كَمْ لَبِثْتَ ۖ قَالَ لَبِثْتُ يَوْمًا أَوْ بَعْضَ يَوْمٍ

Sahih International: “…So Allah caused him to die for a hundred years; then He revived him. He said, ‘How long have you remained?’ The man said, ‘I have remained a day or part of a day.’ He said, ‘Rather, you have remained one hundred years. Look at your food and your drink; it has not changed with time…’”
Yusuf Ali: “…but Allah caused him to die for a hundred years, then raised him up (again). He said: ‘How long didst thou tarry (thus)?’ He said: ‘(Perhaps) a day or part of a day.’ He said: ‘Nay, thou hast tarried thus a hundred years…’”
Pickthall: “…And Allah made him die a hundred years, then brought him back to life. He said: How long hast thou tarried? (The man) said: I have tarried a day or part of a day…”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “…So Allah caused him to die for a hundred years, then raised him up (again). He said: ‘How long did you remain (dead)?’ He (the man) said: ‘(Perhaps) I remained (dead) a day or part of a day’…”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “…So Allah caused him to die for a hundred years then brought him back to life. Allah asked, ‘How long have you remained ˹in this state˺?’ He replied, ‘Perhaps a day or part of a day.’ Allah said, ‘No! You have remained here for a hundred years!…’”
Abdul Haleem: “…So God made him die for a hundred years, and then raised him up, saying, ‘How long did you stay [like this]?’ He said, ‘A day, or part of a day.’ God said, ‘No, you stayed like this for a hundred years…’”

Ibn Kathir explains the psychological mechanism the scholars proposed: “since the man died in the early part of the day and Allah resurrected him in the latter part of the day, when he saw that the sun was still apparent, he thought that it was the sun of that very day.” Quran.com The undecayed food is offered as evidence correcting the man’s mistaken time-sense — a narrative structure in which subjective time and “objective” (here, God-measured) time are explicitly pried apart and shown to disagree.

The Resurrection Verses — 23:112–114, 20:103–104, 30:55, 46:35, 10:45, 79:46, 17:52

The Qur’an repeatedly depicts the resurrected as radically underestimating the time they spent in the world or the grave:

23:112–114 (Sahih International): “[Allah] will say, ‘How long did you remain on earth in number of years?’ Quranic Arabic Corpus They will say, ‘We remained a day or part of a day; ask those who enumerate.’ Quranic Arabic Corpus He will say, ‘You stayed not but a little — if only you had known.’”
79:46 (Sahih International): “It will be, on the Day they see it, as though they had not remained [in the world] except for an afternoon or a morning thereof.”
10:45: “And on the Day when He will gather them, [it will be] as if they had not remained [in the world] but an hour of the day…”
30:55: “And the Day the Hour appears the criminals will swear they had remained but an hour…”
46:35 and 17:52 echo the same motif of drastically foreshortened felt duration.

Ibn Kathir’s comment on 20:103–104 states the theology plainly: on the Day of Judgment the damned “will sense the shortness of the worldly life,” Quran.com Quran.com and the verse’s purpose is moral — “you would have preferred the eternal life over the temporal life.” Quran.com Quran.com This is subjective time-compression in the service of eschatological perspective, not a claim about clocks.

The Instantaneous Command — Surah Al-Qamar 54:50

Arabic: وَمَا أَمْرُنَا إِلَّا وَاحِدَةٌ كَلَمْحٍ بِالْبَصَرِ

Sahih International: “And Our command is but one, like a glance of the eye.” Quranic Arabic Corpus
Yusuf Ali: “And Our Command is but a single (Act),— like the twinkling of an eye.” Qur’an Wiki
Pickthall: “And Our commandment is but one (commandment), as the twinkling of an eye.” Alquran english
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “And Our Commandment is but one, as the twinkling of an eye.” My Islam
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “And ˹the execution of˺ Our command is but a single word, done in the blink of an eye.” QuranV
Abdul Haleem: “when We ordain something it happens at once, in the blink of an eye.” My Islam

If the ratio verses stretch a day to millennia, 54:50 does the opposite: it compresses the creative/decreeing act to an instant. The two directions together frame the theological point — for God, temporal magnitude is not a constraint. The instantaneity of kun fayakun (“Be, and it is”) is the counterpole to the millennial “day.”

He is the First and the Last — Surah Al-Hadid 57:3

Arabic: هُوَ الْأَوَّلُ وَالْآخِرُ وَالظَّاهِرُ وَالْبَاطِنُ ۖ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

Sahih International: “He is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and He is, of all things, Knowing.”
Yusuf Ali: “He is the First and the Last, the Evident and the Immanent: and He has full knowledge of all things.”
Pickthall: “He is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward; and He is Knower of all things.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “He is the First (nothing is before Him) and the Last (nothing is after Him), the Most High (nothing is above Him) and the Most Near (nothing is nearer than Him). And He is the All-Knower of every thing.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “He is the First and the Last, the Most High and Most Near, and He has ˹perfect˺ knowledge of all things.”
Abdul Haleem: “He is the First and the Last; the Outer and the Inner; He has knowledge of all things.”

Al-Awwal wa’l-Akhir — “the First and the Last” — is the Qur’an’s most concentrated statement of divine relation to time: God bounds the temporal series at both ends without being a member of it. This is the anchor verse for the theological discussion of divine eternity below.

Every Day He is upon Some Matter — Surah Ar-Rahman 55:29

Arabic: يَسْأَلُهُ مَن فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ كُلَّ يَوْمٍ هُوَ فِي شَأْنٍ

Sahih International: “Whoever is within the heavens and earth asks Him; every day He is bringing about a matter.”
Yusuf Ali: “Of Him seeks (its need) every creature in the heavens and on earth: every day in (new) Splendour doth He (shine)!”
Pickthall: “All that are in the heavens and the earth entreat Him. Every day He exerciseth (universal) power.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “Whosoever is in the heavens and on earth begs of Him (its needs from Him). Every day He has a matter to bring forth!”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “All those in the heavens and the earth are dependent on Him. Every day He performs some task.”
Abdul Haleem: “Everyone in heaven and earth entreats Him; every day He is at work.”

This verse stands in productive tension with the doctrine of divine timelessness. “Every day He is upon some matter” (kulla yawmin huwa fi sha’n) suggests dynamic, ongoing divine activity in time — a resource for those Muslim theologians (and their Christian counterparts) who prefer everlastingness to strict atemporality. It resonates strongly with Mulla Sadra’s picture of continuous creation (discussed below).

Man’s Origin in Time — Surah Al-Insan 76:1

Arabic: هَلْ أَتَىٰ عَلَى الْإِنسَانِ حِينٌ مِّنَ الدَّهْرِ لَمْ يَكُن شَيْئًا مَّذْكُورًا

Sahih International: “Has there [not] come upon man a period of time when he was not a thing [even] mentioned?”
Yusuf Ali: “Has there not been over Man a long period of Time, when he was nothing — (not even) mentioned?”
Pickthall: “Hath there come upon man (ever) any period of time in which he was a thing unremembered?”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “Has there not been over man a period of time, when he was not a thing worth mentioning?”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “Is there not a period of time when each human is nothing worth mentioning?”
Abdul Haleem: “Was there not a period of time when man was not even a mentionable thing?”

The word here is dahr — the great sweep of time, the aeon — which will return as the key term in the theology of time. The verse locates the human being within time and after a stretch of non-existence, sharply distinguishing the temporally-originated creature from the First and the Last.

Part III: The Night of Decree — Surah Al-Qadr 97:1–5 (Special Attention)

Arabic: بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ ١ إِنَّا أَنزَلْنَاهُ فِي لَيْلَةِ الْقَدْرِ ٢ وَمَا أَدْرَاكَ مَا لَيْلَةُ الْقَدْرِ ٣ لَيْلَةُ الْقَدْرِ خَيْرٌ مِّنْ أَلْفِ شَهْرٍ ٤ تَنَزَّلُ الْمَلَائِكَةُ وَالرُّوحُ فِيهَا بِإِذْنِ رَبِّهِم مِّن كُلِّ أَمْرٍ ٥ سَلَامٌ هِيَ حَتَّىٰ مَطْلَعِ الْفَجْرِ

Sahih International: 1. “Indeed, We sent the Qur’an down during the Night of Decree.” 2. “And what can make you know what is the Night of Decree?” 3. “The Night of Decree is better than a thousand months.” 4. “The angels and the Spirit descend therein by permission of their Lord for every matter.” 5. “Peace it is until the emergence of dawn.”

Yusuf Ali: 1. “We have indeed revealed this (Message) in the Night of Power:” 2. “And what will explain to thee what the night of power is?” 3. “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.” 4. “Therein come down the angels and the Spirit by Allah’s permission, on every errand:” 5. “Peace!… This until the rise of morn!”

Pickthall: 1. “Lo! We revealed it on the Night of Predestination.” 2. “Ah, what will convey unto thee what the Night of Power is!” 3. “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.” 4. “The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the permission of their Lord, with all decrees.” 5. “(The night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.”

Muhsin Khan/Hilali (The Noble Qur’an): 1. “Verily, We have sent it (this Qur’an) down in the night of Al-Qadr (Decree).” 2. “And what will make you know what the night of Al-Qadr (Decree) is?” 3. “The night of Al-Qadr (Decree) is better than a thousand months (i.e. worshipping Allah in that night is better than worshipping Him a thousand months, i.e. 83 years and 4 months).” 4. “Therein descend the angels and the Ruh [Jibril (Gabriel)] by Allah’s Permission with all Decrees,” 5. “(All that night), there is Peace (and Goodness from Allah to His believing slaves) until the appearance of dawn.”

Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): 1. “Indeed, ˹it is˺ We ˹Who˺ sent this ˹Quran˺ down on the Night of Glory.” Quran.com 2. “And what will make you realize what the Night of Glory is?” 3. “The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months.” 4. “That night the angels and the ˹holy˺ spirit descend, by the permission of their Lord, for every ˹decreed˺ matter.” 5. “It is all peace until the break of dawn.” Quran.com

Abdul Haleem: 1. “We sent it down on the Night of Glory.” 2. “What will explain to you what that Night of Glory is?” 3. “The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months;” 4. “on that night the angels and the Spirit descend again and again with their Lord’s permission on every task;” 5. “[there is] peace that night until the break of dawn.”

The polyvalence of qadr. The surah’s title word carries three interlocking senses that together make it the theological hinge of the entire theme of time: qadr as decree/destiny (the night on which the year’s affairs are apportioned — cf. the tanazzul of angels “for every matter”), qadr as measure (the same root as miqdar, the “measure” of the days in 32:5 and 70:4), and qadr as power/worth (the night’s surpassing value). The single word thus binds together the ordering of time (destiny), the measuring of time (duration), and the transcending of time (a night worth more than a thousand months).

“Better than a thousand months.” Classical tafsir (via Bukhari and Muslim on the authority of Abu Hurayra) understands this as a superabundance of merit: worship on this one night outweighs roughly 83 years and 4 months of ordinary devotion. Noble Quran Maududi cautions against a merely arithmetic reading — “a thousand” in Arabic idiom denotes “a very long period,” so the verse means that “in this one night a task was accomplished for the welfare of mankind the like of which had not been accomplished even during an indefinitely long period of history.” My Islam Surahquran This is a third kind of time-relativity, neither physical nor merely psychological but axiological: the value-density of time is not uniform. A night can outweigh a lifetime.

The continuous descent — tanazzalu. The verb in v. 4, tanazzalu (a form-V imperfect, here with the sense of repeated or continuous descent), is why Abdul Haleem renders it “descend again and again.” The angels and al-Ruh (understood by most exegetes as Gabriel, singled out for honour) descend “for every matter” — the annual decree, the apportioning of provisions, lifespans, and events. This links directly to 32:5’s yudabbir al-amr: the same cosmic administration of time, here concentrated into a single luminous night. And the closing salam — “peace until the emergence of dawn” — is not merely the absence of evil but, in al-Razi’s reading, the night’s saturation with blessing from dusk to dawn.

Scientific and philosophical resonance. One should resist the temptation to make Laylat al-Qadr a physics parable (a “night” of dilated proper time). The surah’s own logic is theological: it is God’s valuation and God’s decree, not a clock, that makes the night “better than a thousand months.” Yet there is a genuine philosophical point of contact. Both relativity and the surah dismantle the assumption that time is a homogeneous, featureless container in which every interval is equivalent to every other of the same length. In relativity, intervals differ by frame; in Al-Qadr, they differ by divine valuation and decree. Neither view is Newtonian. The surah’s deepest claim — that the meaning of a duration is not fixed by its clock-length — is one a physicist and a theologian can both affirm, for different reasons.

Part IV: Time Itself as Oath and Loss — Surah Al-Asr 103:1–3

Arabic: ١ وَالْعَصْرِ ٢ إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي خُسْرٍ ٣ إِلَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالْحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالصَّبْرِ

Sahih International: “By time, / Indeed, mankind is in loss, / Except for those who have believed and done righteous deeds and advised each other to truth and advised each other to patience.”
Yusuf Ali: “By (the Token of) Time (through the ages), / Verily Man is in loss, / Except such as have Faith, and do righteous deeds, and (join together) in the mutual teaching of Truth, and of Patience and Constancy.”
Pickthall: “By the declining day, / Lo! man is a state of loss, / Save those who believe and do good works, and exhort one another to truth and exhort one another to endurance.”
Muhsin Khan/Hilali: “By Al-‘Asr (the time). / Verily, man is in loss, / Except those who believe and do righteous good deeds, and recommend one another to the truth, and recommend one another to patience.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab (The Clear Quran): “By the ˹passage of˺ time! / Surely humanity is in ˹grave˺ loss, / except those who have faith, do good, and urge each other to the truth, and urge each other to perseverance.”
Abdul Haleem: “By the fading day, / man is [deep] in loss, / except for those who believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness.”

Commentary. Al-Asr swears by time itself — al-‘asr, the declining day, the age — and then delivers a verdict framed as an economic loss (khusr, the language of a failing trade: capital depleting). The surah’s theology of time is the mirror-image of the ratio verses. There, the point was that God stands above time; here, the point is that the human being is inside time and running out of it. Time is the wasting asset; every breath is capital spent; only faith, righteous action, and the mutual counsel of truth and patience convert the depleting stock into profit. The oath by time is, on the classical reading (al-Razi, Ibn Kathir), an oath by the very medium of human loss and possible redemption. Read alongside the hadith of dahr (below), the surah completes a circle: time, which humans are tempted to curse as the agent of their decay, is in fact the arena of moral striving and belongs wholly to God.

Part V: The Scientific Framework

Special relativity: moving clocks run slow

Einstein’s 1905 special relativity established that time is not absolute: a clock moving relative to an observer ticks slow by the Lorentz factor γ = 1/√(1 − v²/c²). At everyday speeds the effect is minuscule (a long-haul flight shifts a clock by only nanoseconds), but as v approaches the speed of light c, γ diverges and proper time — the time elapsed for the moving object itself — approaches zero. Concretely, as Oxford Sparks (University of Oxford) states, “the particles in the LHC are travelling at speeds of 0.999999991 of the speed of light, making their apparent mass 7000 times as large as if they were static.” Oxford Sparks At a Lorentz factor of about 7,000, one second experienced by the proton corresponds to roughly 7,000 seconds — about two hours — in the laboratory frame.

The most dramatic natural example is the “Oh-My-God particle,” which, per Wikipedia’s 2026 entry, was “detected on 15 October 1991 by the Fly’s Eye camera in Dugway Proving Ground, Utah… As of 2026 it is the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed,” Wikipedia with energy estimated as “(3.2±0.9)×10²⁰ eV, or 51±14 J.” Eshikshya Moving so close to c that (by one calculation) it would trail a photon by only about 50 nanometres after a year of racing, such a particle experiences extreme time dilation: in its own frame it could cross the Milky Way galaxy in minutes of proper time, while roughly 100,000 years elapse for observers on Earth. Briankoberlein Extended to a human traveller, the principle implies that at sufficient speed one could, in principle, reach Earth’s year 3000 in a mere couple of seconds of one’s own experienced time. This is genuine, uncontroversial, experimentally confirmed forward time travel.

The light-speed limit and the photon’s zero proper time

No massive object can reach c, because γ diverges and the kinetic energy required tends to infinity. Photons, being massless, travel at c — and consequently experience zero proper time: along a light ray the spacetime interval is exactly zero (ds² = 0), so a photon “registers” no elapsed time between emission and absorption at the far side of the universe. The frame of a photon is not a valid inertial reference frame at all; there is no “view from light.” This is a striking physical fact with obvious theological suggestiveness (a mode of existence for which duration collapses to nothing), but the suggestiveness must be handled carefully: the photon’s timelessness is a degenerate limit of physical time, whereas divine timelessness in classical theology is not a limit of time at all but its transcendent ground.

General relativity: gravity slows time

Einstein’s 1915 general relativity added that gravity, too, dilates time: clocks deep in a gravitational well run slow relative to clocks higher up. Near an extremely massive body — approaching the event horizon of a black hole — time can be slowed almost without limit relative to a distant observer, so that one could in principle “fast-forward” into the cosmic future by lingering near a strong gravitational field and returning. This gravitational time dilation is not exotic speculation: it is measured daily.

GPS: relativity confirmed every second

The Global Positioning System is the standard everyday proof. As Professor Richard W. Pogge (Ohio State University) states in “Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System,” “the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day” Ohio State University Astronomy from the weaker gravity at orbital altitude (general relativity), while special-relativistic velocity dilation subtracts about 7 microseconds per day, so that “the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45−7=38)!” Ohio State University Astronomy Uncorrected, this would introduce position errors accumulating to kilometres within a day. Every functioning satellite-navigation fix is thus a continuous experimental confirmation that time genuinely runs at different rates for differently-situated observers — the physical core of the “relative time” that the Qur’anic ratio verses evoke metaphorically.

Paul Davies on time travel: “Is Time Travel Possible?”

In his chapter “Is Time Travel Possible?” (chapter 15 of What’s Eating the Universe?, University of Chicago Press, 2021), the physicist Paul Davies distinguishes sharply between the two directions of time travel. Forward travel is, as above, physically sound and well-understood — a matter of relativistic time dilation. Backward travel is far more problematic, threatening the notorious grandfather paradox (a traveller who prevents his own grandparents’ meeting, thereby preventing his own existence, thereby being unable to prevent the meeting — a self-contradiction) and other causal-loop paradoxes.

Davies surveys the theoretical routes by which backward travel might, in principle, be permitted by Einstein’s equations. In his 1949 paper “An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation” (Reviews of Modern Physics 21, 447), the logician Kurt Gödel found an exact solution — the first cosmological solution with rotating matter arxiv — describing a rotating universe that contains closed timelike curves, worldlines that loop back to their own past, such that (in the paper’s own implication) an observer travelling in this universe could reach his own past. IOPscience X But Gödel’s universe is not our universe: observations, including constraints from the cosmic microwave background, indicate that the real universe is not rotating (to the limits of measurement), Universe Today so this route appears closed to us. A second route is the wormhole — a hypothetical shortcut connecting distant regions of spacetime, which, if its mouths were kept at different time rates, could function as a portal to the past. Substack Yahoo! Whether nature permits stable traversable wormholes remains unknown and depends on unresolved questions in quantum gravity.

Against all such schemes stands Stephen Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture, argued in his 1992 paper “The chronology protection conjecture” (Physical Review D 46, 603–611), which proposes that the laws of physics conspire to forbid closed timelike curves at macroscopic scales. Wikipedia In Hawking’s own words: “It seems that there is a Chronology Protection Agency which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians.” arxiv Wikipedia He added, half in jest, that there is “strong experimental evidence in favour of the conjecture from the fact that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.” Vuw The conjecture remains unproven; a definitive verdict likely awaits a full theory of quantum gravity. Scientific American

Davies also notes that consistent causal loops are logically possible — self-consistent histories in which any journey to the past only ever brings about the very events that already happened, so nothing is changed and no paradox arises. Such consistency, however, comes at a price: it constrains freedom. A time traveller in a self-consistent loop cannot do otherwise than what was already done. Davies observes that physics routinely restricts our freedom in ways we accept unthinkingly (we cannot walk through walls or exceed light speed), and consistency constraints on time travel would be another such restriction — one that bears directly on the free-will discussion below. Finally, in a personal touch that underscores the traffic between physics and imagination, Davies recounts (in his own words in an Edge.org exchange with the novelist) that he himself appears as a character in the physicist-novelist Gregory Benford’s Nebula-winning 1980 novel Timescape — “the first time I appeared in somebody’s novel” Edge.org — in which scientists use hypothetical faster-than-light particles (tachyons) to signal warnings backward in time, from a near-future world facing ecological collapse to physicists in the early 1960s.

Editorial caveat on sourcing: the substance of each of Davies’ points above is corroborated by independent primary and authoritative secondary sources (Gödel 1949; Hawking 1992; the Edge.org Davies–Benford exchange; and standard relativity references). The precise wording of Davies’ own chapter 15 could not be quoted verbatim from open sources; readers wishing to cite Davies directly should consult the printed/e-book edition.

Part VI: The Philosophy of Time

A-theory vs. B-theory; presentism vs. eternalism; McTaggart

In 1908 J. M. E. McTaggart distinguished two ways of ordering events in time: the A-series (past / present / future — the tensed, “flowing” view, in which the “now” moves) and the B-series (earlier-than / simultaneous-with / later-than — the tenseless, static ordering of relations). From this grew two families of position. The A-theory (including presentism, the view that only the present moment is real, and the “growing block” view) takes temporal passage and the privileged “now” as objective features of reality. The B-theory (associated with eternalism) holds that past, present, and future are all equally real, and that the “flow” of time and the specialness of “now” are perspectival — features of how conscious observers are embedded in the four-dimensional whole, not of the whole itself.

The block universe and the relativity of simultaneity

Relativity weighs heavily on this debate. The relativity of simultaneity — the result that two events judged simultaneous in one inertial frame are not simultaneous in another moving relative to it — implies that there is no absolute, universal “now” spread across the cosmos. One observer’s present can Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lie in another’s past or future. As the standard Rietdijk–Putnam argument (1966–67) concludes, if there is no privileged global “now,” then all events — past, present, future — must be treated as equally real, favouring eternalism and the block universe: spacetime as a single, tenseless, four-dimensional “block” in which every event simply is, timelessly, at its own location. (Presentists resist this by positing a preferred but undetectable frame, or by dissolving the debate; the argument is not universally regarded as decisive, and I flag it here as contested rather than settled.)

Theological resonance of the block universe

The block universe has a striking theological corollary. If, from the “outside,” all events of history exist tenselessly and equally, then the block universe furnishes an almost literal model of how a timeless God could “see” all of history at once — every moment present to Him not because He races through time infinitely fast, but because His vantage is not in the temporal series at all. This is precisely the classical picture of divine eternity, to which we now turn — and it converts the Qur’an’s “a day with your Lord is like a thousand years” from a claim about a very large clock-ratio into a claim about a fundamentally different mode of relation to the temporal series.

Divine eternity: timelessness vs. everlastingness

Western philosophy of religion distinguishes two models of divine eternity. On the timeless (atemporal) view — canonically stated by Boethius (d. 524) and developed by Aquinas — God is wholly outside time, possessing His life all at once. Boethius’ definition became standard: eternity is “the complete possession all at once of illimitable life” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio). Aquinas, quoting Boethius, held that “the primary intrinsic difference of time from eternity is that eternity exists as a simultaneous whole and time does not.” WordPress On this view God does not foresee the future as future; He sees all times in one atemporal “now,” related to every moment as (in Boethius’ and Aquinas’ image) the centre of a circle is related equidistantly to every point on the circumference. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy On the rival everlasting (omnitemporal) view — defended in modern times by Nicholas Wolterstorff and (with qualifications) Richard Swinburne — God is in time but without beginning or end: “backwardly and forwardly everlasting,” present in every time that was, is, or will be. The Qur’an’s al-Awwal wa’l-Akhir (57:3) can be read either way, and Islamic theology, like Christian theology, contains both tendencies.

Divine time in Islamic thought (kalam and falsafa)

Classical Islamic theology (kalam) generally affirmed that God is the creator of time and not subject to it. The dominant Ash’ari and Maturidi schools held that time (zaman) is created (hadith) and that God’s attributes and acts are not measured by it, guarding divine transcendence against any implication that God changes or endures through temporal succession the way creatures do. Al-Ghazali, in his critique of the philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifa), defended the temporal origination of the world against the Aristotelian–Avicennan thesis of its eternity, insisting that time itself began with creation — a position close to the modern cosmological picture of time beginning with the universe, and structurally parallel to Augustine’s answer that God did not create in time but created time itself. Ibn Taymiyya took a distinctive line, more comfortable than the Ash’aris with attributing a kind of successive activity to God (relevant to reading 55:29, “every day He is upon some matter”), while still denying that any created thing is co-eternal with God. Most strikingly, Mulla Sadra (d. c. 1636), building on his teacher Mir Damad’s notion of huduth dahri (“atemporal origination”), developed a metaphysics of substantial motion (al-haraka al-jawhariyya) in which time is not a container but the very dimension of the renewal of existence — the world is perpetually being re-created, “continuously evolving in alignment with substantial motion,” so that time is “the fourth dimension of existence.” IIUM Repository Sadra’s view is remarkable for a seventeenth-century thinker: time as an intrinsic dimension of the existence of physical things rather than an independent absolute — a conception more congenial to relativity’s spacetime than to Newton’s absolute time, and a natural metaphysical home for the Qur’anic picture of a God who “every day is upon some matter” continuously sustaining a world that is itself intrinsically temporal.

Dahr and the hadith “I am ad-Dahr”

The Arabic lexicon of time distinguishes waqt and zaman (measurable, clock-and-calendar time) from dahr (the total sweep of time, the aeon; cf. 76:1, “a period of dahr“). A famous hadith qudsi, recorded in both Bukhari and Muslim on the authority of Abu Hurayra, reads: “Allah Almighty said: The son of Adam injures Me by cursing time (al-dahr), for I am Time (ana al-dahr); in My hand is the affair, I alternate the night and the day.” Qurananswers The classical scholars (al-Shafi’i, al-Nawawi, Ibn Kathir) were emphatic that this does not make “Time” a name of God (Ibn Hazm’s contrary view was rejected). AbdurRahman.Org Rather, since the pre-Islamic Arabs blamed dahr for the calamities that are in truth decreed by God, to curse time is really to curse its Author. Islam Question & Answer The theological payload is exactly the theme of this commentary: time is not an autonomous force but a creature and instrument of God, who “alternates the night and the day.” Al-Asr’s oath by time and this hadith’s prohibition of cursing time are two sides of one doctrine — time belongs to God.

Part VII: Free Will, Foreknowledge, and the Constraints of Consistency

The block universe and the doctrine of divine foreknowledge raise the same ancient worry: if the future already exists (physically, in the block; or epistemically, in God’s timeless knowledge), is human freedom an illusion? Here intellectual honesty requires distinguishing the arguments and resisting the slide to determinism.

First, the block universe does not by itself entail determinism. Eternalism is a thesis about the ontological status of future events (they are real), not about whether they are necessitated by prior events plus laws. A libertarian can hold that free choices are real features of the block — genuinely up to the agent — while still being tenselessly “there.” What eternalism removes is the metaphysical privileging of the “now,” not the causal openness of choice. The inference “the future is real, therefore it is fixed and unfree” conflates existence with necessity.

Second, Boethius’ classic solution to the foreknowledge problem exploits exactly this. If God is timeless, He does not know our choices in advance (there is no “advance” for Him); He knows them in an eternal present, as one might see an event by witnessing it rather than by predicting it. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Witnessing an act does not make it unfree. Thus, on the timeless-eternity model, divine omniscience and libertarian freedom are compatible: God’s knowledge is responsive to (not determinative of) what the creature freely does. This is the reading most hospitable to a libertarian view of free will, which I take to be the more defensible position: the arguments from relativity establish at most the reality of future events, not the unfreedom of the agents who bring them about.

Third, Davies’ point about consistency constraints on time-travel loops is the genuinely sharp challenge — and it is instructive precisely because it shows how physics can restrict freedom without abolishing it. In a self-consistent causal loop, a would-be past-changer cannot do otherwise than what was in fact done; the space of possible actions is constrained by the demand for global consistency. But note the careful conclusion: this constrains freedom only if backward causal loops actually exist, and Hawking’s (unproven) Chronology Protection Conjecture, if true, would mean nature forbids them altogether — leaving ordinary forward-flowing agency untouched. Davies’ broader observation is the right note on which to leave the matter: physics restricts our freedom in many ways we accept without complaint (we cannot exceed light speed, cannot un-break an egg), and the theological tradition has long held that operating within a lawful, ordered creation is the very condition of meaningful agency, not its negation. Neither the block universe nor divine foreknowledge, properly understood, forces the surrender of libertarian free will.

Part VIII: Abrahamic Parallels and the Hermeneutics of “Scientific Miracles”

Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8

The Qur’an’s “a day with your Lord is like a thousand years” has close Biblical cousins. Psalm 90:4: “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.” Bible Study Tools 2 Peter 3:8: “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” ESV Bible The contexts are strikingly parallel to 22:47: 2 Peter deploys the ratio precisely to answer scoffers who mock the delay of the promised Day — exactly the polemical setting of Al-Hajj 22:47. The shared Abrahamic intuition is not a shared physics but a shared theology: God’s relation to time is not the creature’s, and divine “delay” is a category mistake. Christian commentators (as the mainstream reading of 2 Peter insists) are careful to add that the verse does not make God’s time literally proportional to ours; it denies that God is bound by our timetables at all. This is the same guardrail the Muslim mufassirun placed around the Qur’anic verses.

The promise and peril of i’jaz ‘ilmi

A large modern literature — the i’jaz ‘ilmi or “scientific miracle” genre, popularized by figures such as the French physician Maurice Bucaille — reads the time-ratio and perception-of-time verses as anticipations of Einsteinian relativity. The enthusiasm is understandable: the verses genuinely resonate with the relativity of time, and the resonance can be spiritually and apologetically stirring. But the scholarly critique is serious and, in my judgment, largely correct:

The hostage-to-fortune problem. Pegging scripture to current science makes revelation’s credibility rise and fall with theories that are, by nature, revisable. If a verse is proved to “contain” a 1905 theory, what happens when the theory is superseded or refined? Tying the eternal to the provisional is a poor bargain.
The retrofitting problem. The differing ratios (1,000 vs. 50,000 years) show that a single consistent “physics of time dilation” cannot be extracted from the verses without special pleading — and the classical exegetes, who had every incentive to harmonize, reconciled the numbers by appeal to context and subjective experience, not physics.
The methodological problem. As critics writing in venues such as the journal Zygon have argued, the genre repeatedly blurs the line between science and pseudoscience, “reading in” modern results rather than “reading out” what the text and its first audience could have meant. The classical tafsir of al-Tabari, al-Qurtubi, Ibn Kathir, and al-Razi on 22:47, 32:5, 70:4, and 97 is unanimous in reading these verses theologically — as statements about divine transcendence, the terrors and mercies of Judgment, the administration of the cosmos, and the merit of the Night of Decree — and not as descriptions of time dilation.

The honest and, I think, more fruitful posture is the middle one: neither to claim the Qur’an “predicted relativity” nor to dismiss the resonance as accidental, but to say that both the Qur’an and relativity, in their different registers, unseat the naïve assumption of a single, absolute, universally-shared time — and that this shared unsettling is worth contemplating without being over-claimed.

Epilogue: The Three Times

Reading these verses through physics, philosophy, and theology together, a single clarifying distinction emerges. There are three things we call “the relativity of time,” and most confusion — including most of the i’jaz over-reach and most of the sceptical dismissal — comes from conflating them.

The first is subjective time: how duration is felt. This is the register of the Sleepers of the Cave who judged three centuries “a day,” of the man revived after a hundred years, of the resurrected who swear they tarried “an hour.” It is the fifty-thousand-year Day that is agony for the damned and a single prayer’s length for the saved. The Qur’an is a masterwork of this psychological phenomenology of time, and modern science fully agrees that felt duration is elastic and detachable from clock-time. But subjective time is not the subject of relativity.

The second is physical proper time: how much time actually elapses for a clock on a given worldline. This is the register of the LHC proton for which two lab-hours are one second, of the cosmic ray that crosses the galaxy in minutes of its own time, of the GPS satellite gaining 38 microseconds a day, of Davies’ traveller reaching the year 3000 in two seconds. Here time dilation is real, measured, and woven into working technology. This register genuinely dismantles absolute Newtonian time — but it is symmetric, lawful, and quantitative, and it is not what the Qur’anic “divine day” is describing.

The third is theological time: the relation of the Creator to the whole temporal order. This is the register of “a day with your Lord,” of al-Awwal wa’l-Akhir, of kun fayakun in the twinkling of an eye, of “I am ad-Dahr.” Whether one models it as Boethian timelessness (God possessing all of history in one eternal present, as an observer of a block universe possesses all events tenselessly) or as Sadrian everlastingness (God continuously renewing an intrinsically temporal creation, “every day upon some matter”), the claim is that God’s mode of relation to time is categorically unlike ours — the very point the classical mufassirun drew from 22:47 and the very point 2 Peter drew from Psalm 90.

The deepest convergence is this. For three centuries after Newton, educated intuition held that time was a single absolute river, flowing at one rate everywhere, carrying all things alike. Relativity shattered that picture from below (there is no universal now; elapsed time depends on one’s path through spacetime); the block universe reframed it from the side (perhaps passage itself is perspectival); and revelation had always pressed it from above (the Creator is not carried on time’s river but is its First and its Last, its measure and its Lord). None of these three is the other. Relativity is not theology, the block universe is not the divine eternity, and a “divine day” is not a Lorentz factor. But together they retire the same idol — the idol of absolute, autonomous, self-sufficient Time — and return us, by three different roads, to a humbler and stranger truth: that time is not the fixed backdrop of reality but one of its contingent, created, and deeply relative features. Al-Asr swears by it; the hadith forbids cursing it; and both, in the end, say the same thing the physics of clocks says in its own tongue — that time is not ours to command, and not what we naïvely took it to be.