The Hour, and the Words for Time

The next section, after īmān and iḥsān, is: tell me about the hour. The word in Arabic for hour is sāʿah, which is related to the moment. One can say that a man got up immediately, from his sāʿah. If the Arabs want to ask what time it is, this is the word they use; and one can answer that it is the time of ẓuhr.

Now this sāʿah does not relate to historical time, which in Arabic would be called zamān; and there is another word used in the Qurʾān, ʿaṣr. Zamān relates to time as a historical phenomenon. ʿAṣr is more like an age or a period, and zamān can be used for that as well. Sāʿah has none of this.

Dahr, if one looks it up, is an interesting word. In the Arabic language there is a hadith that says: do not curse dahr, because dahr is God. And in the earliest Arabic dictionaries, dahr, according to the Arabs, was time stretched out — in other words, time-space. The idea of sāʿah is the actual moment in which the universe comes to an end. It is called the hour traditionally in the English literature: the hour. There is the idea in the Christian tradition of the last hour. There is also an idea of the last days — ākhir al-zamān, the last zamān, the last period of zamān.

So there is an idea that the human being begins in time and is moving inexorably to an end of time. Ādam is the first man, and this is the beginning: Ādam and Ḥawwāʾ. And the human condition, from a prophetic point of view, is that it is prophets who show up throughout time. What is important in the continuity and movement of time is the prophetic tradition itself. This is the way the Qurʾān is looking at it: that there is a conflict going on. And this is why the historical stories in the Qurʾān relate to prophets coming up against oppressors, coming up against tyrants. Pharaoh and Mūsā is the most repeated story in the Qurʾān. A very important story.