Metaphysical Time in Rūmī’s Mathnawī: Sufi Terminology of Metaphysical Time

AbstractThis article explores the idea of Metaphysical Time in the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī against more general understandings of time and temporality in Sufi thought and Persian poetry. Various attitudes toward serial time and the subjective experience of past, present, and future are reflected in the poetry of not only Rūmī, but also ʽUmar Khayyām and Ḥāfiẓ. The philosophical approaches toward human temporality discussed here include sentient carpe diem, spiritual carpe diem, and pursuit of the Metaphysical Moment, or Time’s Currency (naqd-i waqt). To understand this, we must examine Rūmī’s understanding of the notion of the Sufi as ‘the son of time’ (Ibn al-waqt), along with the concomitant or related ideas in Rūmī’s poetry of ‘the Father of Time’ (abū ‘l-waqt) and ‘the Brethren of Time’ (ikhwān al-waqt), and the Prophet’s Hadith, ‘I have a time with God….’. The article elaborates on some remarkable homologies between the concepts of time and the ‘Industrious Man’ in the poetry of Mawlānā Rūmī and William Blake, and how the attraction of divine love pulls the lover out of Time into the realm of Eternity, and how love subverts rational categories of time and space, which become illusory and vanish in the mystical experience of unity. Aldous Huxley’s distinction between the Philosophers of Time and the Philosophers of Eternity is also explored in relation to Rūmī’s thinking.