God Doesn't Wear a Watch
TL;DR
This essay shows how the modern clock brought with it a new, ideologically loaded sense of time that suddenly treats prayer and fasting like minute by minute obligations. Premodern sources, by contrast, mark time through natural signs like brightness, the position of the sun, or visibility, and deliberately leave room for flexibility. This openness also shaped the science of legal norms: different definitions of when prayer and fasting times begin and end were normal and tolerated. Modern precision, on the other hand, creates a false sense of certainty that breeds conflict, mistrust, and fear of so called mistakes.
When the Quran, the traditions, or premodern texts speak about prayer times, they don’t work with hours, minutes, or even seconds. Instead, we meet expressions that are tied directly to nature: the movement of the sun, the color of the sky, the color of the horizon, brightness and darkness, or even whether faces can still be recognized.
All of these markers have something in common. They are flexible. They mark time, but they do so not as a hairline measurement, rather as an open frame. This is where they differ fundamentally from modern time logic, which not only enables precision, but often makes it feel like a duty.
If we take this shift seriously, we see that it isn’t just a way of measuring that has changed. A whole relationship to time is shifting, and with it the way we relate to ritual practice. What used to be a sensible margin in premodern times is quickly read today as a deviation that needs to be corrected.
Premodern Flexibility
The older way of telling time allowed people to let their own sense of time flow into time itself. It created spaces in which not every deviation had to be seen as an error. With that came a tolerance that wasn’t viewed as weakness, but as part of the practice.
This acceptance of difference left its mark on the traditional books of legal norms. Because of the ambiguity of many texts and the fluidity of the premodern sense of time, legal scholars gave different definitions of when prayer times begin and end, or how the length of fasting should even be determined.
Within this frame, scholars also discussed whether the times of some prayers can flow into each other, as the Maliki view held.1 What matters here is this: people were not obsessed with pinning prayer times down to the exact minute. And they were not afraid of some feared split in the community if not all groups prayed at the exact same numerical time.
Karlheinz Geißler describes this premodern sense of time well:
A defining feature of the era called “premodern” here is the close connection of all of life, especially work, with the periodic rhythms of the cosmos and of nature. In premodern times people were at home in time.2
That is more than nostalgia. It describes a different way of inhabiting time, rather than merely measuring it.
The Modern Clock and the Moral Weight of Precision
With the global standardization of time and the spread of the mechanical, and later the digital clock, time became objectified and quantized. Time is no longer something fluid and somewhat elastic. It now appears precise, exact, and above all infallible.
This idea of an infallible clock creates an illusion. As if you’d inevitably be making a mistake whenever the right ritual act isn’t performed at the exact right time. But the right time here is no longer the open time the Quran and tradition speak of. It is the precise number that the clock hand points to, or that the smartphone displays.
The mechanical clock didn’t stay a mere measuring device. It became a medium through which we perceive both the world and time. In modern times, through this objectification, human beings have created a distance to time that didn’t exist before. The modern human, in this sense, is no longer at home in time.
Geißler describes this tension clearly: “The times of the natural being called the human being and the mechanically produced time of the clock have, since then, been hard, or even impossible, to bring into harmony. And so time conflicts and time problems belong to modernity like darkness belongs to night.”3 In this gap, new anxieties arise, anxieties that dress up in religious clothing but are often fed by a modern need for control.
Fighting Over Minutes: A Modern Problem of False Certainty
Today we hear of communities gossiping about and even attacking other communities just because they perform the night prayer or the morning prayer thirty minutes or an hour earlier or later. The same happens with fasting. Some begin a day earlier or later, or they follow different calculations and calendars.
The idea that only one calculation of time can possibly be valid is itself a modern idea. Its roots lie more in a capitalist time management oriented toward standardization and control than in the sources, which worked with an understanding of time that included a margin for tolerance.
The problem isn’t that people use calendars or apps. The problem appears when small differences are turned into a moral drama, as if salvation were at stake with every passing minute. Time then stops being a frame for practice and becomes a judge over right and wrong.
In this way, minutes turn into matters of faith, and a pragmatic aid becomes a yardstick for judging others. Yet tradition, precisely where natural signs, ambiguity, and local conditions had a voice, was clearly less nervous, less fixated on control, and often more generous.
A Plea for Calm and for Remembering Older Margins
This text is therefore a plea for more calm. You can orient yourself by a calendar or an app without turning differences of a few minutes between calendars into a big issue, an issue that, in the end, even gets discussed at conferences.
This shift in how we sense time has led to problems and anxieties being constructed where almost no premodern legal scholar would have seen one. What is interesting is that, even though Muslims have known fairly developed forms of clocks since the 9th century, they never felt the need to unify time reckoning across all Muslims.
In the books of the legal scholars, determination by clocks and timepieces played almost no role, and when it did, it was secondary. Yes, there was an entire discipline concerned with determining prayer times and measuring time, but even within this science, multiple opinions were tolerated. The understanding of time remained different, because it didn’t live off the idea that there could be only one single, infallible number.
In contrast, the modern sense of time produces questions like: I ate two minutes after dawn. Or: I prayed the evening prayer one minute before the time listed in the calendar of my favorite mosque. If you take the logic of this text seriously, there is only one answer to such questions. God doesn’t wear a watch.
And yet a tension remains, one we shouldn’t sweep away. It is questionable to try to adapt ritual acts that depend on time, like prayer and fasting, to a modern sense of time, while skipping the uncomfortable question of why these times were originally shaped the way they were in the 7th century. That question is often avoided, even though it would be central to any honest conversation about adaptation. But that’s a topic for another text.