Time

Now we know that humans divide their time up in different ways,

some long times like years,

or even longer, like decades or centuries or millennia,

or much shorter times like days and months,

and dividing up the day

into twenty four hours.

And some clocks show the time that way,

but a lot of their clocks only show twelve hours

as that can be easier to see,

and they assume that you know whether you are in the day or night.

And sometimes they use clocks that show much smaller bits of time,

splitting minutes into seconds.

And you might need to be that accurate

if you are timing a hundred metre race,

but if things are racing fast enough

you might need something even smaller than a second.

Formula One cars go so fast that their place in a race

can be decided by a thousandth of a second.

And of course, in science they use special atomic clocks

to time things to a millionth of a second.

That's faster than a human can feel going by,

but they can still use machines to measure it.

Actually, people always have to use machines

to measure time with any sort of accuracy,

as they don't seem to have any kind of organ to measure it,

even though they all experience it

and talk about it

and think about it

a lot of the time.

They experience being in a hurry,

feeling that they are late

like the white rabbit,

having not enough time

time seeming to race past

before they have enough of it to do what they want to do

or get where they want to go.

Yet sometimes

when they are eager for something to happen

it can feel like time has almost stopped,

and the clock has slowed right down

while they are waiting,

like the last few moments of injury time in a game of football.

In fact, in the end people realised

that time wasn't as fixed as they had always thought it to be,

that different people can experience time in different ways

depending on how fast they were travelling relative to each other.

They realised that it was much better to think of time

not as something existing

in and of itself,

but only as part of the creation that we live in,

that time and space are actually linked together,

part of each other, something they call

space-time.

Now with muslims being so interested in time

throughout the year,

with its sacred months,

and throughout the day,

with its prayer times,

you may wonder what they've got to say about time in the creation.

For muslims, the measure of time moves,

as the months of Ramadhan and Hajj and Muharram

move through the year,

and as the prayer times move

as the earth moves with the sun.

And they remember when time seems to be moving too slowly

that the Wonderful Reading

tells them that God loves those who show patience.

And when time seems to be moving too fast

muslims are told not to get angry.

In a precious saying of the Messenger

we are told that God says

“Do not get angry against time, for I am Time”.