Ramadan Reflections 1444/2023 Part 12
By The Passage of Time…
Time is fleeting and passes swiftly. The first ten days of mercy of Ramadan came and went. Now Alhamdulillah, we are in the middle ten days of forgiveness. It makes me sad that these blessed days are rushing by us.
Surah 103 Al-Asr (The Passage of Time/The Declining Day) talks about time. One of my teachers, may Allah Bless all of them, explained ‘asr’ as time that is squeezed out, as if from half a citrus fruit, and this swift squeezing is finite, because eventually the juice will run out, as will our time in this stage of existence.
There are two types of time. There is profane time, which is finite, on the horizontal axis, and the time we are currently living in. Then there is sacred time, on the Vertical Plane, which in Divine Time and Infinite.
Surah 103 Al-Asr
In the Name of Allah, The Entirely Merciful to all of His Creation, The Especially Merciful to the believers.
1. By the ˹passage of˺ time.
2. Surely humanity is in ˹grave˺ loss,
3. except those who have faith, do good, and urge each other to Truth, and urge each other to patient & perseverance.
Surah Al-Asr is an Oath by Time, that humanity is in a state of loss, except for those who have the following four characteristics:
1. Those who faith
2. Those who do good
3. Those who urge each other to The Absolute Truth (not my truth or your truth but The Truth according to Al-Haqq, one of the attributes of Allah).
4. Those who urge each to ‘sabr’, which has the English translation of patience in the passive sense and the English translation of perseverance in the active sense, indicating that sabr is both a state of being and a state of movement in the struggle of the worldly life, ‘the duniya’.
I try to recite this chapter as least once a day, as a reminder to myself of how fleeting and urgent the passage of time is. It is a blueprint, with what is most important, to navigate life on both the horizontal plane of profane time and on the vertical plane of Sacred Time.
والله أعلم
