Bahar lamha, bahar sa’at bahar dam
Dagargoon meeshawad ahwal-e-alam
“Waqt se kon kahe, yaar zara aahista —Amjid Islam Amjid
Tujh se milta hoon to is soch mein parh jaata hoon
Waqt ke paaon mein zanjeer daaloon kaise
Ro mein hai rakhsh-e-umr, kahan dekhiye the
Na baag haath mein hai na paa hai rikaab mein-Ghalib
Ishq ki taqweem mein asr-e-rawan ke siwa
aur zamanay bhi hain jin ka nahi koi naam.
Main ke meri ghazal mein hai aatish-e-rafta ka suraagh
Meri tamaam sarguzasht khoye huon ki justuju-Iqbal
I confess to thee, O Lord, I am as yet ignorant, what time is!” – Saint Augustine
Thus begins one of the most profound confessions in the entire tradition of philosophical thought. Saint Augustine, in the Confessions (Book XI), identifies the central paradox of human existence: we live in time, we measure time, we speak of time constantly-yet we cannot say with certainty what it is. Time defies the grasp of language, metaphysics, and even science. We are immersed in it, yet it eludes us. And perhaps it is precisely this ungraspable quality that makes time the most universal and yet the most intimate enigma of all.
Time is the silent horizon of our being: at once the most intimate fabric of our lives and the most elusive domain of our thought. Saint Augustine’s candid confession-“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not” captures the paradox of our condition—immersed in temporality yet unable to grasp it. Philosophers, mystics, poets and scientists have all circled this enigma: time flows, waits, compresses, stretches-but always escapes definition. It is the structure of destiny and the stage of freedom, the discipline of clocks and the abyss of being. In today’s accelerated world, where time seems commodified and fragmented, this ancient question becomes ever more socially urgent: how shall we live when every moment is measured, yet the meaning of our time remains undetermined? This essay proposes that time must be remembered not only as a commodity or metric but as the medium of meaning-shaping our individual lives, our collective destinies, and our shared moral responsibility.
Across civilizations, time and space have inspired profound inquiry-not as inert containers, but as living dimensions shaping reality, consciousness, and the divine. Philosophers like Kant saw them as forms of intuition; Bergson distinguished measurable time from lived duration; Heidegger grounded Being in temporality; Hegel saw history as Spirit’s unfolding; Scheler tied time to value and the becoming self. In science, Einstein unified space-time; Hawking traced its cosmic limits; Rovelli and Barbour challenged its fundamentality; Greene and Carroll made these ideas widely accessible.
To reflect on time is to confront who we are, how we change, and what transcends us. In its mystery lies both our humility-and our hope.
In the gentle cadence of Henry Van Dyke’s 1904 poem Time Is, the human subjectivity of time becomes immediately evident:
“Time is Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love, Time is not.”
This vision of time is not Newtonian or mechanical; it is emotional, experiential, lived. It shifts and reshapes itself according to the inner landscape of the heart. Indeed, contemporary neuroscience affirms that time perception is deeply affected by emotional states—depression stretches time, while moments of joy or trauma compress it. In the silence between ticking seconds lies the architecture of grief, longing, and love. For those who love, Van Dyke says, time is not-a vision echoed across mystical traditions where union with the beloved obliterates temporality.
In literature and mysticism, time becomes intimate and transcendent. Proust, Woolf, Eliot, Borges, and Calvino render it as memory, flow, eternity, and metaphor. Wells imagined time travel as social critique; Dostoevsky grappled with eschatological tension.
Eastern traditions-from Nāgārjuna’s emptiness to Vedanta’s māyā-see time as illusory.Nāgārjuna deconstructed time as conceptually empty and dependent on mental designation; Advaita Vedanta and Vivekananda held time to be māyā, a veil over the changeless Self; Plotinus described time as the soul’s fall from the eternal; Meister Eckhart and Augustine meditated on eternity in being; Ibn ʿArabi saw each moment as divine re‑creation; Rumi dissolved the boundary of past, present and future through love’s immediacy. Krishnamurti offered a stark break: psychological time—the story of who we were and who we hope to become—is the root of fear, conflict and division. “Truth is a pathless land.” Real transformation does not emerge through progression in time, but only in the timeless now. Time is thought, and thought is limitation. In Arabic: fa‑bādirhu idh kull al‑nahy fī bidārihi wa mā al‑waqt illā ṭāʾirun yaqṭaʿu al‑madā — time is like a bird cutting across the sky; it cannot be caught, only witnessed.
Theology echoes these visions: Tillich saw God in historical depth, Eliade distinguished sacred and secular time, and Heschel called the Sabbath a sanctuary in time. From Taoist flow to Kabbalistic ascent, from Zera Yacob’s rational mysticism to Iqbal’s call for becoming-traditions converge on this truth: time is not just measured but lived, shaped, and sanctified.
South Asian and Islamic thought deepen this further.Time in Islamic thought is not merely a measurement of moments but a profound sign of the Creator’s will and the human soul’s journey. The Qur’an opens with the solemn oath: “By Time (al‑ʿAsr)! Indeed mankind is in loss…” (Q 103 : 1‑2) — reminding us that time itself is laden with moral consequence. Classical Muslim theology affirms that time is a creation of Allah, bound to the changing world, whereas God alone is eternal, without beginning or end. Thus, time becomes the arena of human agency, accountability and transformation. It flows toward judgement, yet invites pause; it measures loss, yet points toward infinite mercy. In every fleeting hour, the believer meets both clock‑time and divine‑eternity, and is summoned to live meaningfully within the temporal while keeping sight of the timeless.
Iqbal cast time as creative force in dialogue with Divine freedom. Ghalib, Faruqi, Hyder, and Intizar Hussain explored time as loss, myth, and civilizational memory. Masud suspended it in metaphysical silence.
In Urdu and Persian poetry, especially in the modernist verse of Jaun Elia, Amjad Islam Amjad, and Ibn-e-Insha, this experience of time finds vivid, complex, and textured expression. Amjad writes:
“Ro mein hai rakhsh-e-umr, kahan dekhiye the
Na baag haath mein hai na paa hai rikaab mein”
Here, life is imagined as a steed in full gallop-unbridled, uncontrollable, rushing forward while we watch helplessly. The poet reminds us of our powerlessness in the face of time’s momentum. In another verse:
“Tujh se milta hoon to is soch mein parh jaata hoon
Waqt ke paaon mein zanjeer daaloon kaise”
Love meets existential crisis; in the beloved’s presence, time seems to accelerate, and the poet questions how to chain time’s feet—how to freeze the fleeting moment. In Ibn-e-Insha’s playful yet poignant voice:
“Sa’at chand ke musafir hain
Koi dam aur guftagu logo!”
Time, like the moon, is a transient traveler; we are only allowed a brief conversation before it slips away into silence.
Jaun Elia deepens this despair into a kind of philosophical resignation:
“Aadmi waqt par gaya hoga
Waqt pehle guzar gaya hoga”
A person, perhaps, passed away “on time”—but time itself was already gone. Time, the ever-receding horizon, outruns even our deaths. His couplets suggest the fatality of time: that we are already late in our grasp of it, even in our attempts to mourn it.
Iqbal, however, offers a more ambitious, cosmic meditation. His poetic work—particularly in Saqi Nama, Israr-e-Khudi, and Javaid Nama—positions time as not merely a flowing stream but a crucible of transformation. In his metaphysical verses, time becomes the substance through which selfhood (khudi) is tested, refined, and possibly exalted.
“Silsila roz-o-shab, naqsh-gar-e-hadisat
Silsila roz-o-shab, asal-e-hayat-o-mamat”
Day and night-the sequence of time-are not just chronological but causal. They are the shapers of events, the origin of life and death. In another verse:
“Silsila-e roz o shab, saaz-e azal ki fughan
Jis se dikhati hai zaat zer-o-bam-e mumkinat”
Time, here, is the instrument of eternity’s music. It reveals the inner notes of possibility. It is testing ground and testimony:
“Tujh ko parkhta hai ye, mujh ko parkhta hai ye
Silsila-e roz o shab, saidni-e kainat”
It examines you, it examines me—this string of day and night is the hunter of all existence.
Yet, Iqbal also foresees a realm beyond this temporality:
“Tere shab o roz ki aur haqeeqat hai kya
Ek zamane ki rau jis mein na din hai na raat”
He proposes that our current understanding of time-linear or cyclical-is but a temporary illusion. The real essence of time lies beyond dualities. He calls on us not to measure life by days or tomorrows:
“Tu isay paimana-e-roz-o-farda se na naap
Javedaan, paiham dawan, har dam jawan hai zindagi”
Time is not to be quantified but lived through the energy of ever-renewing being-every moment fresh, every breath transformative.
His vision stretches further:
“Ishq ki taqweem mein asr-e-rawan ke siwa
Aur zamanay bhi hain jin ka nahi koi naam”
In the calendar of divine love, there are times beyond the current moment—unnamed epochs that transcend the limits of historical time. Here, the mystical vision of time aligns with quantum philosophy and contemporary cosmology, both of which posit multiple timelines, alternative realities, and non-linear temporalities.
This resistance to the tyranny of measured time finds echoes in Akhtarul Iman’s verse:
“Yeh ek lamha gurezaan hai, jaise dushman hai
Na tum milo gi na main, hum bhi dono lamhe hain
Woh lamhe jaa ke jo wapas kabhi nahi aate”
Time becomes a fugitive moment-a lamha-that escapes and denies even love its continuity. We are ourselves made of such fleeing moments, and these moments never return.
Iqbal, too, confesses his humility before time:
“Main apni tasbeeh-e-roz-o-shab ka shumar karta hoon dana dana”
Despite counting the beads of night and day like a rosary, Iqbal ultimately concedes:
“Jahan tak waqt ki maahiyat aur asliyat ka talluq hai, main koi qatai aur durust baat na daryaft kar saka.”
(Imam Razi, quoted in Iqbal’s writings)
Even a visionary like Iqbal remained in awe of time’s ultimate mystery.
Amidst this tapestry, time becomes not just a concept but a character: a trickster, a teacher, a tormentor, a test. It is the silence between moments, the fluttering wings of a bird we cannot capture:
“Fabadirhu idh kull al-nahy fi bidarihi wa ma al-waqt illa ta’irun yaqta’u al-maday”
Time is but a bird flying across eternity-so swift that even seeing it clearly is almost impossible.
Modern scientific and philosophical inquiries now echo these insights. In contemporary physics, time is increasingly seen as emergent rather than fundamental. Theories in quantum gravity, including loop quantum gravity and certain interpretations of relativity, suggest that time may not exist independently of matter and motion. Recent research by Nicolas Gisin and others distinguishes between geometric time—which physics can measure—and creative time—the time of becoming, of novelty, of decision. In neuroscience, time is not clockwork but cognitive, constructed by the brain in relation to memory and attention.
And socially, time is not equitably distributed. Saif Sehsarami, Akhtar Madhupuri, and Yousuf Baig Jamal point to this in their poetry. Today’s children, “baligh before their time,” confront traumas and technologies before they are ready. Jamal sees the scars of time in burning skies and wounded souls:
“Dekhti dharti, dehakta suraj, dehakte sham-o-sehar ke manzar
Nawah-e-jaan mein lagta rehta hai karb kitni jarahaton ka”
The modern era, hyperconnected and rapidly evolving, resembles a judgment day—mahshar—a convulsing stage where the pain of centuries plays out in accelerated motion.
But perhaps no line captures the sacred text of time more beautifully than Nasir Kazmi’s:
“Lafzon mein bolta hai rag-e-asr ka lahu
Likhta hai dast-e-ghaib koi is kitaab mein”
The blood of the age speaks through words; an invisible hand writes in the book of time. It is this vision of the poetic, prophetic, and mysterious that helps us remember: time is not merely seconds on a clock—it is the ink in which our collective soul is written.
In the final analysis, the enigma of time persists not because we fail to explain it, but because it is not meantto be explained entirely—it is meant to be lived, felt, and reverently contemplated.
Iqbal’s final words on time resonate as a sublime confession and a challenge. In asking:
Makani hoon ke azaad-e-makan hoon
Jahan main hoon ke khud sara jahan hoon
Woh apni lamakani mein rahein mast
Mujhe itna bata de main kahan hoon-Bali Jabril
He probes not just the nature of time but the place of the self within or beyond space-time. Is man merely a product of time—or a shaper of it? Does time contain us, or do we transcend it through consciousness, love, and imagination?
This existential bewilderment returns us to Augustine’s dilemma and echoes across disciplines. Time is the hinge of every religious narrative—from the cyclical yugas of Hindu cosmology to the linear eschatology of Abrahamic faiths, and the timeless ‘now’ of Buddhist mindfulness. In literature, time folds and unfolds, as in Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or the postmodern storytelling of Calvino and Rushdie. Science, too, is beginning to abandon the notion of time as an absolute. Julian Barbour, in The End of Time, argues that change is real, but time is not—a series of nows, timeless yet experienced in sequence.
Amid this debate, poetry and mysticism stand as the twin altars on which time is both sacrificed and sanctified.
Yeh kainat abhi na-tamaam hai shayad
Ke aa rahi hai damadam sada-e-kun-fayakun
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