We try endlessly to shut time and existence inside chains of cause and effect, inside mechanical gears that follow one another, inside the laws of nature. A thing falls, we say, because gravity exists. Yet establishing that gravity exists explains neither why it exists nor why it is fixed at precisely the delicate value that makes life possible. What we call the laws of nature is no more than our own effort to describe the immense order the Creator has placed in the universe. The law itself is not a creative power.
The greatest error of the modern scientific mind is to confuse the veil with what stands behind it. To put it in the words of the old thinkers of the East:
format_quote"Infinite universal power and splendour place the laws of nature before us as a veil, to protect our minds and our reason. Yet the Oneness and the Infinity behind them want us to know that those laws hold no creative power of their own."
Gravity, medicine and biological processes are veils and nothing more, and a veil has never been the playwright who wrote the play. The laws of nature are so flawless, so full of light and so everywhere at once that it is precisely the intensity of that light, and the density of an order that appears perfect, which blinds us to the Artist behind it. As a fierce light dazzles the eye and hides its own source, the sheer obviousness of the order in the universe sometimes conceals the creative power from our minds.
For the absolute Owner of the universe and of time, therefore, bringing something into being answers to a single command. Chains of causation lose all their force before that will. Just as the creation of Adam without mother or father is a proof of infinite power, the coming of the prophet Jesus into the world without any man’s hand, by a divine breath and a command alone, is a manifestation of the same reality.
To grasp the scale and the depth of that miracle, however, one first has to understand the mental and social shape of the society it was born into.
Islamic scholars and the tradition of exegesis draw attention to a point of real weight: every prophet was granted a miracle in precisely the field his society trusted most, specialised in most and grew most proud of. The Palestine under Roman rule to which the prophet Jesus was sent lay inside two great mental vices: materialist causation together with physical medicine, and a formalist idea of religion, hollowed out and hardened.
The blow struck against materialist rationalism falls here. The Greco-Roman world of the period, and the religious authorities under its influence, were used to explaining every event through a rigid chain of cause and effect. In nature every result had to have a physical cause. It was exactly at the point where those causes were being worshipped that God removed the chain of causation. The union of a woman and a man is the ordinary cause of a human being coming into the world; but to a mentality that had forgotten the Creator and made gods of the laws of nature, the answer came with the causes set aside entirely. A human being created without a father, by a single command.
The helplessness of medicine runs alongside it. Greek and Roman medicine was in its golden age. Physicians and natural philosophers had grown proud enough to believe they had fully solved the human body and could cure any illness. That the miracles given to the prophet Jesus were chosen from exactly the places where medicine stood powerless, opening the eyes of the blind from birth, healing the leper, raising the dead, brought the physicians of the age to their knees before the recognition that this was no human science but a divine will.
The third was hearts drowned in formalism. The children of Israel had by then lost the essence of religion, its mercy and its love. Religion had become a rigid bureaucratic machine in which worship was reduced to outward appearance, in which people were squeezed by the prohibitions of the Sabbath, and in which the clergy lived off the people. The prophet Jesus was sent to remind that society of stone hearts of the spirit of religion, of love and of sincerity.
In the middle of such an atmosphere, Mary, the mother of the prophet Jesus, was a person without stain, dedicated before her birth by her mother Hanne to the sanctuary in Jerusalem, and dedicating her own life to chastity, to worship and to submission. In her place of retreat on the eastern side, turned towards her Lord and far from people, the angel Gabriel appeared to her in the form of a perfect man and gave her the news of a son.
For a young woman who had known no man and who guarded her chastity as she guarded her eyes, to meet such news was one of the heaviest trials in human history. Fearing the condemnation of a hard society that judged on suspicion and hungered for gossip, Mary bore an anguish whose weight is given in the Qur’an in these words:
format_quote"Would that I had died before this and been a thing forgotten!"
Yet in spite of that enormous trial and that pain she submitted wholly to the divine command, and beneath a dry date palm in the middle of the desert, alone and in labour, she took the miracle into her arms.
When she returned to her people with the child in her arms, the accusations everyone expected did not keep her waiting. Bound by the fast of silence she had promised her Lord, Mary said nothing at all and only pointed with her finger to the baby in her arms.
At that historic moment, when her people answered with a mocking pride, "How shall we speak with a child in the cradle?", the prophet Jesus, still in swaddling clothes, spoke:
format_quote"I am indeed a servant of God. He has given me the book and made me a prophet. He has made me blessed wherever I may be..."
That first speech was both a divine proof establishing his mother’s spotless innocence in person and the first great blow struck against a rigid society that worshipped the chain of causes.
The prophet Jesus lived his whole life as one of the great prophets, coveting nothing of the world’s goods and standing for honesty, justice, mercy and humility. He waged a relentless struggle against the pride inside a person and against formalist injustice outside.
In the common truths where the Islamic tradition and the Gospel in its own texts do not contradict but confirm one another, what comes forward is his message of love, of mercy and of humility. The Gospel texts give that struggle against worldly pride, and that insistence on sincerity, in these words:
format_quote"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven... Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. (Matthew 5:3-7)"
Named in the Qur’an as Ruhullah and Kalimatullah, a word from God, the prophet Jesus is a symbol of a truth that passes beyond time and place.
In the art of watchmaking, dials and wheels and the seconds running away stand for our helplessness before time and for our need of order. Yet this great story, which begins with Mary’s devotion and the birth of the prophet Jesus, reminds us of an absolute will that stands above mechanical wheels, above the laws of nature and above chains of causation. Worked onto a dial, that symbolic figure is a deep visual seal, whispering to us the passing nature of time, the strength of submission and the timelessness of a divine miracle.
The watch that carries this seal came out of an official collaboration between IFL Watches and Ball that took a year, and it is called the Engineer M Ascension. The dial is painted by hand: the heart at its centre is wrapped in flames, a halo of golden rays fans across the upper field, and the micro gas tubes set inside the indices glow with their own light by day and by night.
The figures run as follows. The case is 904L stainless steel and forty millimetres across; the crystal is anti-reflective sapphire and the back is sapphire too. Water resistance is one hundred metres, and the construction is calculated to survive a shock of five thousand Gs. Inside runs Ball Manufacture’s COSC-certified RRM7309-C automatic, giving eighty hours of power reserve. The watch is made as a limited edition and costs 3,490 euros.
A wristwatch measures time, but it does not set what it measures. The hand that decides how fast the hand will turn, how many hours a day will hold, at what rhythm the sky will revolve, is not our hand. Which makes even the most precise chronometer a confession: we do the measuring, someone else set the measure.
The watch on its maker’s own site: IFL Watches, Ball Engineer M Ascension