Modern vs Traditional Time

10/25/15

                It had been few weeks I lived at Groningen, city at the northern part of the Netherlands. That was the place where I took my master degree. It was a very cold morning before dawn, and I waited the bus to the Mosque for performing congregation prayer. The bus was always punctual so I made sure that I was ready at the bus stop five minutes before the time. I waited for five minutes, it did not show up. The five turned to ten, then fifteen, still the bus did not come. I decided to go back to my apartment and missed that day prayer. After few minutes I recognized the difference between the time in my watch and my desktop computer. My desktop showed one hour earlier than my watch. That day was the time when Europe moved back the clock to one time earlier. The daylight saving time ended.

                As someone who came from tropical region, daylight saving time seems weird. Why should we arbitrarily switch back or forth the time? Benjamin Franklin came up with this idea in order to make people maximize their daylight time. People are more accustomed with time at their watch or clock instead of the nature time, such as the movement of the Sun. By putting it forward, we will wake up earlier so we will not miss the Sun which rise earlier. Many researches also support this idea because many accidents happened in the morning time when it is still dark. Without that adjustment, people have to go to work or school at the same time every day, despite the fact that the Sun is rising at different time.

                Time is also a cultural symbol. People often use time as indicator of a modern society from the traditional one. I still remember in one of the Chinese Kungfu movie, Wong Fei Hung, shows how Sun Yat Sen who inspired the modernization movement in China always uses pocket watch in their meeting. Pocket watch is used in the movie to symbolize the transition to modern China. Traditional society uses natural phenomenon to mark their time. Because of this, they are often being criticized due to their unpunctuality.

There is a grain of truth in that statement. But to be fair, we need to understand time reference in deeper way. Perception of time is embedded in values. Modern society prefers the clock-time instead of nature-time. Nature-time is dynamic, while clock time is relatively static. Modern society uses clock time because our desire to control. Clock-time is more suitable with modern value of progress and efficiency. It is a good thing but of course, there is cost on it. Our dependence on artificial time remove our awareness of nature. We are so disconnected with what happen in nature. For instance, most of us does not really care of about the movement of the Sun, the moon, and other heavenly bodies. It is quite ironic actually. The study of the Heaven led to the invention of time but eventually has removed us from the heaven itself.

Not only time in term of hour, minute and second but also in term of using the calendar. Most of traditional societies uses stars and moon for marking their holidays. In this essay I want to emphasize the tension within Muslim society related to the use of time or calendar. It also shows the tension between traditional and modern values. It does not necessarily the Muslim cannot be modern, but in each society transition to be modern is always creating tension.

Muslim society felt defeated by the West.  Colonialism woke them up that they need to change their society. They were thinking that the only way to regain their supremacy was by following the Western way. One of ‘the way’ is on changing the time reference used. They switched their Hijri calendar into Gregorian calendar. They changed the names of the day using western name. They used Sunday as holiday instead of Friday. They used astronomical calculation instead of naked-eye new moon sighting to decide their rituals. Many of the rituals are determined by lunar positions. Those were part of so-called modernist movement in Muslim societies. Time reference has become major problem in many Muslim countries. Determining holidays is part of political tension. One group advocates calculation while other prefers sighting. The Government has difficulty on determining the public holidays. Scientific approach is not always better in determining lunar position. Recently, the tide turns on other extreme. The fundamentalists want to go back to 7^th century. They reject everything from the West and want to implement what they think as purely Islamic. They want to use again Islamic calendar in their lives despite its incompatibility. They want to switch the Greenwich Time to Mecca Time. They want to use Saudi Government policy to determine the ritual time globally.

                Time reference is one way to understand the transformation of society. My intention is not to show that the modern reference of time is superior to others. On the contrary, we can see the tension within society just by examining the use of time reference. It is not merely technical tension but also tension in values. Modernity tried to remove this tension by establishing single standard and eliminating others. But it failed due to the fact of ‘embeddedness’ of time to our social values. Our modern reference of time was embedded in the 17^th century of European society in the heyday of industrial revolution and secularism. The drive of that was our human desire to overcome nature. While this has shown us many benefits to our material lives, it is not necessarily always compatible with spiritual values that many non-Western societies hold.