By Time
﷽
In the Name of Allah, the Entirely Merciful to All of His Creation and the Specially Merciful to the Believers.
وَالْعَصْرِ﴿١﴾إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي خُسْرٍ﴿٢﴾إِلَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالْحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالصَّبْرِ﴿٣
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 patience and perseverance.
I have always been fascinated by the hourglass. I love to watch the slow and mesmerising trickling of the sand, from the glass bulb above to the glass bulb below, through a narrow passage at the neck.
Our lives are like the trickling sand in the hourglass. Every breath we take, is like a grain of sand that trickles away relentlessly.
Unlike the hourglass, our lives cannot be flipped back over. Nor do we know how much time we have left.
The day will come when death will knock on our door and our last breath will trickle away. The angels will arrive to draw out our soul from the body, at the appointed time, as ordained by the Creator.
“To God we belong and unto Him we shall return.”
Reflections…
Surah Al-Asr is the 103rd chapter in the Qu’ran.
The word used for time in this surah is ‘asr’ and not ‘dahr’. The difference is that ‘dahr’ means time with no limits placed upon it, whereas ‘asr’ denotes time that is limited; a time that will come to an end; a time that is associated with movement and urgency.
At a linguistic level, one of the meanings of ‘asr’ is something that is pressed or squeezed.
Allah is swearing an oath by time, a time that is limited, a time that will end, and a time that must be squeezed or pressed, so that we make an effort to be as productive as we can from our limited time, with a sense of urgency that time is ticking.
Another meaning that is given to the word ‘asr’ is the declining day, the time of the Asr prayer, when the day is winding down and coming to an end. For Muslims, the next day begins with the evening, when the Asr prayer ends and the Maghreb prayer comes in.
Allah is reminding us that our time is short and limited, and therefore if we do not make the most of it, we are surely the losers, because verily Allah says we are in loss.
Time cannot be bought nor sold. It is a gift from the Creator of time, space and all of creation.
All of our gatherings end with the recitation of this beautiful short surah. Why?
It is a reminder of the four most important concepts to live by as a Muslim: the importance of time in which we must establish our faith, manifest that faith through action in beneficial deeds, offering advice to one another in adhering to the truth because unlike falsehood, the truth survives the world and everything in it, and to be patient and to persevere in this struggle called life.
Time is the most valuable gift we have. Ibn Abbas reported: The Messenger of Allah, ﷺ, said, “Take advantage of five before five: your youth before your old age, your health before your illness, your riches before your poverty, your free time before your work, and your life before your death.”
And Allah and the Messenger know Best
