Time

You know, from the time that humans started using numbers, different people were interested in counting different things.

Some wanted to count sheep,

some wanted to count apples,

and some wanted to count bananas.

But there was one thing that everyone wanted to count, and that was the days of their lives.

And they could see that their world went through different seasons,

so they could know the length of time it took to go from one season through the rest and back again,

so they counted those times as years.

But a year is a long time,

so they needed to divide it up if farmers were to know when best to plant things.

And there in the sky they could see the moon, which also changed shape over time until it came back to the way that it looked when it started.

So they named that length of time after the moon, and called it a month,

and that happens twelve times a year.

Which was good enough for some things, but clearly when they were arranging things amongst themselves they needed something shorter than that.

But they didn't have to look far to find a shorter length of time they all knew about,

as the sun came up each morning, crossed the sky and then vanished, and then came back again.

And it did that about thirty times a month,

and counting days was also good enough for some things,

but a day can also be a long time, so they needed something shorter.

So they could see when the sun was at its highest in the sky, and they called that the middle of the day,

so they could tell the difference between before mid-day and after,

and they took the time between one mid-day and another and called that the middle of the night, midnight.

But as their lives got more complicated, they really needed a unit of time that was shorter than that.

But there was nothing around them that turned around quicker than a day,

so they had to find a way to mark the passing of parts of a day,

and for that they had to invent some way to show them smaller units of time, like the time it took for a candle to burn down.

And they divided the time between mid-day and midnight into twelve hours, like the twelve months of the year.

So mid-day to midnight, plus midnight to mid-day meant there were twenty four hours in one full day.

And muslims mark the passage of time through each year in different ways.

They fast during the month of Ramadhan, and make pilgrimage to Makkah during Dhu'l Hijjah.

And those are Arabic names for months, but they are still moon-length, like the months in English.

And with their prayers each day muslims mark the way that time passes with the movement of the sun.

And nowadays most muslims tell the time for their prayers using some kind of electronic timepiece,

but the Messenger didn't need a clock to know the time for prayer,

any more than muslims do now as long as they can still tell day from night,

and tell the time of day from the position of the sun.