The Alarm Clock and the Ring in the Desert

People try to impute that onto Allah: how can He be the Creator without having created creation? This goes into the realm of the relationship between His attributes and the effects of those attributes in the world. It can be put this way. Take an alarm clock. This alarm clock has the ability to ring; that is how it has been manufactured. But it is not ringing right now. It has been set to ring at five o'clock in the morning, Fajr. So though it has the ability and the potential to ring, it is not ringing yet. There is a connection between its ability and the ring, but it is a connection that is not immediately materializing.

At five o'clock, when it starts ringing, there is a different association now with the clock. It is a materializing association; it is happening now. The ability that it had, the potential it had, is now being realized.

So, for example, to say that a child has the ability to grow up and be a good scholar, or be a good builder, or whatever it may be… though he does not possess that ability then. It is only when he grows up, and gets strong enough, and gets the right knowledge and the expertise, that he will be able to do those things. With Allah (swt), it is not like that. He has always been the way He is. He just decided to do something. And within that dimension which He created for the human being, in which the human lives — and his entire world is this: there is time, and there is the past, and there is the present and the future — that is something beyond. Allah is beyond that.

It is just as if we took a little capsule, and imagined an entire universe going on in there, with time and so on for them. We would be so mighty compared to that. Yet even that cannot be put as an example for Allah (swt); Allah is way beyond. This is only a very limited example of the relationship between things.

The hadith related by Imam al-Ṭabarī mentions how the entire world, the entire universe, is just like a ring thrown into the desert. How significant is that? It is completely insignificant: a little ring in a vast desert. It could hardly be found if it were lost. That is the relationship between this world and the Kursī of Allah (swt). This is a very vast domain that is impossible for us to understand, until Allah (swt) opens up any of these things for us in the Hereafter. So he makes it very clear here: human tendencies, and things that are seen in humans, are not to be imputed to Allah (swt). He is our Creator.