THE CONCEPT OF ISLAMIC TEMPORALITY IN THE QUR’ĀN: DIVINE, EXISTENTIAL, AND LIVED DIMENSIONS OF TIME

Abstract

In this article, a multi-layered model of Islamic temporality is developed and structured across three interrelated levels: divine, existential, and lived time, noting a distinction between divine and human temporality as asymmetrically related structures. It is argued that Islamic temporality functions as a stratified semiotic system in which metaphysical order, human life-course, and embodied practice are not separate domains but mutually constitutive layers of meaning production. At the divine level, time is conceptualized as created and bounded within a transcendent order, where temporal succession acquires intelligibility only through divine determination and eschatological structuring. At the existential level, human temporality unfolds as a directional trajectory from worldly life through death and intermediate existence (barzakh) toward final judgment, embedding temporal passage within a framework of moral accountability. At the level of lived practice, this structure is re-inscribed through ritual segmentation, cyclical obligation, and life-course regulation, through which abstract temporal order is translated into embodied and socially stabilized forms. This study treats the Qur’ān as the primary source text, focusing on explicit Qur’ānic temporal references and limiting the use of classical tafsīr to cases where it systematizes clearly discernible textual patterns. The analysis is informed by Eco’s Model Reader and cultural semiotics (Eco, Lotman), treating temporality as a meaning-producing structure that emerges through the interaction  between text and reader as a system of signification. Within this interpretive configuration, Islamic temporality is approached as a recursive system of culturally encoded meaning in which time functions simultaneously as ontological principle, existential horizon, and ethically enacted order.