From Clock Time to God’s Time: Returning to Sacred Rhythms in a Digital World | Blog

As modern Muslims, our relationship with celestial phenomena is contradictory. On one hand, we rely on the movements of the sun and moon to pray and mark our holy days. We open the prayer apps on our phones and take in the times of sunrise, sunset, twilight, and so on. Yet we rarely look up with any sustained interest at the celestial bodies that determine the prayers that make us who we are. We are even less likely to look down at the shadows cast by the gliding heavens as they bounce off the earth. Through the contracts we’ve made with our phones and clocks, we feel secure that we are dutifully minding these magnificent movements. In actuality, we’ve relinquished our stewardship of both nature and the technologies we’ve engineered from nature. As the king relaxes his grip, the trusted adviser plots his coup. 

The persistent cessation of our activities for the obligatory prayers is an invitation to honor time. If we could just pray at our leisure, we would not possess this acute awareness of the passage of time. When the adhan erupts, it announces that prayer is more important than whatever we are currently engaged in. But how do we stop from feeling like the adhan or the prayer is just one more thing in a long line of interruptions we face in our day? And doesn’t it sometimes feel like everything is an interruption, even the things being interrupted?

Studies show that we check our phones over 200 times a day on average and that we fail to stay glued to any given task without interruption for more than a few minutes. What, then, are we preoccupied with? How do we measure the significance of these tasks when one can’t hold our attention any more than the next? If behavior is a language, then our constant interruptions reveal that we do not have a proper appreciation for time. Priorities collapse under our inability to focus, and fragmentation is our norm. My phone beeps to tell me I have a new email message, it beeps again to tell me dhuhr is in, it beeps a third time to tell me I got a text. Digital time collapses all occurrences into one: a beep, ding, or buzz. But if we were to live without digital time, we’d need other markers to navigate our day: the quality of light streaming through the window, the stretch and contraction of shadows, the moment our minds go from groggy to clear, when yellow light saturates into orange as sunset approaches, the twinkle of the first star in a darkened sky. The times for prayer used to flow in and out because we experienced them as a harmonious response to the world’s own worship. 

The American psychologist Robert Levine distinguished between “clock time” culture and “event time” cultures. Clock time is linear, endlessly divisible into equal portions and fixed units. Event time is pre-technological, based on the movements, colors, and changes of nature. Most of us are in touch with it when we go out to sight the new moon of Ramadan or sit tight on sandy beaches to view the sunset. Event time is occasional for us, whereas clock time rules our lives. Productivity culture emphasizes clock time in order to take advantage of every minute of the day.  What productivity culture (and the clock time on which it is based) misses is that attunement to natural cues can also be profoundly productive. Many women who align their schedules with their cycles, for instance, experience increased harmony while maintaining their productivity. Farmers in the regenerative agriculture movement find that the gentler they treat the earth, the more it produces grass for their animals. Likewise, when we honor the soul’s rhythms alongside the body’s, we discover a productivity rooted in wholeness, not just efficiency.

Clock time treats all moments the same. A minute in the morning just after waking is identical to a minute at night as one sinks into bed. A minute of weighty pause at the conclusion of prayer is equated to the frenzied minute spent looking for misplaced car keys in the early hours. Experientially, we know how untrue this is. Time is not reduced to mere quantity without loss. What we find beautiful, enchanting, and at times devastating about time is the way minutes can feel like hours, hours can evaporate in what feels like minutes, and ends sputter on or come abruptly. Time, as we experience it and as it appears to us, is wonderfully asymmetrical. Clock time is symmetrical, perfectly divisible, and therefore of great functional importance for the many tasks that benefit from that sort of structure. However, many of us know there are times in the day when we are more creative. An hour spent on a creative task then is more productive than an hour spent on the same task at a time when creative sensibilities are dulled. 

Allah talks about this subjective experience of time. The hour of tahajjud in the final third of the night, when Allah says He is especially receptive to us, is not like other hours, though the time that elapses on the clock is the same. The mystery of time cultivates wonder and obedience. Wonder opens our hearts to Allah and the spirit of obedience propels us to place ourselves in the way of grace (fadl) at fortuitous times. 

The significance of moonsighting, stargazing, and similar experiences thus extends well beyond telling the time. We reduce it to that with our prayer apps and timetables, which are only useful in quantifying phenomena. Qualifying them is a human activity. That is, only a reflective heart can make meaning out of what the eye perceives. In the Chapter of Noah, we read: “What is the matter with you that you are not in awe of the Majesty of Allah, when He created you in stages? Have you ever wondered how God created seven heavens, one above the other, placed the moon as a light in them and the sun as a lamp, how God made you spring forth from the earth like a plant, how He will return you into it, and then bring you out again, and how He has spread the earth out for you to walk along its spacious paths?” (Qur’an 71:13–20).

Allah speaks of wonder as an experience worth having. There is an impracticality to wonder: It does not address how we’ll pay the bills, manage two feverish kids at once, or reconcile with our spouse. Awe or wonder, unlike other emotions, is not often reactive to the ephemeral circumstances of our lives. Many times, the “furniture of our lives” inspires wonder: you experience the colors around you more vibrantly, your child’s little laugh makes time stop, a singular bee cozied up to a flower lets you hold all the world in your heart at once. Yes, wonder comes when the unusual and miraculous strikes as well, but not only then. Wonder of the kind spoken of in this set of Qur’anic verses is a desirable state in and of itself. It is characteristic of a heart that is alive and open to considering more than itself, and hopefully, eventually, God. 

Wonder is the precursor to curiosity and intellectual discovery. A mind that wonders, asks. Allah seamlessly ties the two together: A wondrous person might ask why things in the sky appear to be at different distances from earth, or question how the moon and sun give light and if they do so the same way, or how it is that humans came to be. Each question is progressively more complex, and yet rooted in our observation of the world. If we only needed the sun and moon to tell time, we’ve developed enough technology based on their movements to not look at them again for years. Ironically, the more we focus on time, particularly to facilitate productivity, the less we pay attention to the phenomena that give us “time.”

Scripture’s invitation to gaze up and out toward the marvels of creation is not only about acquiring astronomical data—it is about cultivating hearts capable of awe. When we learn to read the subtle shifts of light and shadows that announce prayer and also mind our clocks, when we allow the moon’s phases to mark our spiritual seasons and consult a lunar visibility calendar, we reclaim our role as conscious stewards of nature.

To be clear, we owe our Muslim forefathers a debt of gratitude for the prayer apps that are built today on the backs of their discoveries centuries ago. When two people watch the sun set in anticipation of maghrib, they surely won’t agree on the exact second it dipped below the horizon. With our eyes alone, we can’t possibly track a gaseous sphere of explosive light from 93 million miles away with fine precision. Paradoxically, this created a problem worth solving for Muslims of old as well as a circumstance worth embracing. The result, in the long term, was the prayer apps we have today. They serve essential functions, providing accurate calculations across global time zones, reliable reminders in busy lives, and accessibility for those who cannot directly observe the sky. The question isn’t whether to use them, but how to use them without losing our capacity for direct observation and appreciation for God’s creation. These tools become dangerous only when they completely mediate our relationship with the celestial phenomena they calculate. When we check the app but never look up at the sky or down at our shadows, we gain efficiency but lose the spiritual formation that comes from witnessing the signs Allah placed in creation for our benefit. 

One of those benefits is humility. When we take the time to watch the sun set, we gently surrender ourselves to Allah’s unfolding phenomena. The arrival of maghrib is no longer suppressed into a perfectly packaged, unintrusive flash across our phones, but rather is experienced as a cosmic event completely outside of our control. We can smile at our foolhardiness to have thought that we captured the sun on our phones. Moreover, we remind ourselves that the stability and predictability of the world are among God’s favors, not to be taken for granted. 

Keeping God’s time in a technological world begins with small, intentional practices. Watch the sunset before maghrib occasionally, not to replace your prayer app but to witness what it calculates. Notice how shadows shorten and lengthen throughout the day in response to the earth’s movement around the sun, which we perceive as the sun moving across our sky. Familiarize yourself with the moon’s phase and position for several days before a new Islamic month so that you usher in the new moon with anticipation rather than being caught unaware. Just like we learn the meanings of words from context as children before confirming our understanding by asking an adult or consulting a dictionary, we should similarly develop our observational muscles while using apps and other resources to sharpen and confirm our faculties. Use technology to assist you, not replace you. 

Human beings, specifically, are honored with stewardship. In embracing our great fortune to have both ancient wisdom and modern precision, we discover that keeping God’s time isn’t about rejecting digital tools—it’s about ensuring they serve rather than substitute for our direct engagement with the signs Allah embedded in creation for those who reflect.