Journal of Islamic Studies Advance Access originally published online on March 23, 2006
Journal of Islamic Studies 2006 17(2):158-176; doi:10.1093/jis/etl003
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Between Time and Eternity: M
r D
md on God's Creative Agency
University of Exeter
E-mail: S.H.Rizvi{at}exeter.ac.uk
The problem of time and creation exercised the ancients and remains a live issue in the philosophy of religion. In Islamdom, the arguments often pitted theologians (mutakallim
n) against philosophers, the former insisting that scriptural accounts entailed a belief in a volitional God choosing to create the cosmos ex nihilo in time, while the latter considered the notion of a cosmos coming into being at a certain point in time a logical absurdity. The real issue at stake as the difference between their notions of the nature of the divine and how an eternal divine principle could act as an agent in a temporal creation and whether an ineffable supra-being could become involved in the world of being and space-time. The aim of this article is to examine the positions on time and creation of a key thinker of the ‘School of Isfahan’, M
r D
md (d. 1631) and demonstrate their significance for his account of the creative agency of God. Through a close contextual reading of his major works, one grasps his solution to the problem through his concept of ‘perpetual incipience’, a concept that provides an account for how an eternal God can act in a temporal cosmos and be both the instrumental knowing cause for that cosmos as well as the volitional agent that brings it into existence. The deployment of this concept permits one to understand further implications for other problems of God-talk such as the supposed incompatibility between divine omniscience and the determination of events in this world.