Publisher's Synopsis
The Single Monad Model of the Cosmos or: the Days of God, is a book about Ibn Arabi's Concept of Time and Creation in Six Days. This book explores Ibn Arabi's cosmology and in particular his view of time in that cosmological context, comparing his approaches to the relevant conclusions and principles of modern physics whenever possible. Ibn Arabi had a unique and comprehensive view of time which has never been discussed by any other philosopher or scientist, before or even after Ibn Arabi. This view is based to a model of the cosmos that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks and paradoxes in the current cosmological models of modern physics. This model, called the Single-Monad Model, is capable of solving many time-related paradoxes in current models of physics and cosmology, such as the famous EPR paradox, thus potentially reconciling the two great theories of 'Quantum Mechanics' and 'Relativity' in modern physics, how it offers a new understanding of the historical Zeno's paradoxes, and how it potentially explains the reason behind quantization, how quantities are either discrete or continuous. In Koran we read in many verses that Almighty Allah created the heavens and the earth in six days, and we wonder how long these days are, or are they similar to our own days, or indeed does Allah need a duration of time to create something? Also we notice that Allah, the Exalted, mentions different days of different length such as a day equal to "a thousand year of what you count" and a day equal to fifty thousand years, yet we also notice that the word "time" (zaman or zamaan) is never mentioned in Koran at all, but only as days, months and years. And finally we notice that the day is composed of two parts: the daytime and the night, but Allah, the Exalted, mentions some important relationships between these two parts of the day; for example: Allah takes (salkh) the daytime out of the night [36:37]. Allah also encircles (takwir) the daytime over the night and encircles the night over the daytime [39:5]. Allah also covers (yughshi) the daytime with the night [7:54, 13:3]. But most important of all is that Allah the Almighty intertwines (yulij) the daytime with the night and intertwines the night with the daytime [22:61, 31:29, 35:13, 57:6]. The greatest Sheikh Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi is the only intellectual scholar who was able to dive into the bottomless sea of these mystifying ontological issues. He was able to tie together all these verses above and other similar verses in Koran to formulate a unique cosmological model that is capable of explaining our ordinary everyday observations as well as many phenomena in physics and cosmology, and even solve some perplexing historical riddles in science and philosophy such as the EPR paradox and Zeno paradox. One of the first pearls Ibn Arabi extracted to us out of this unfathomable sea of cosmological verses in Koran is the fact that this cosmological model (we shall call the Single Monad Model) explains for the first time in history the importance of the Week as a basic unit of space and time together, since otherwise, and unlike the day or the year, the week does not seem to have any astronomical significance, as there is no any astronomical cycle that happens in one week. This prodigious theory is based on the notion of the intertwining days where Ibn Arabi shows that at every instance of time there is indeed one full week of creation that takes place in the globe. For example now it is morning somewhere and noontime in other places and evening in others, so this makes a full day. The other six days accounts for space as will be explained inside the book.
