Principle Sixty-One: Accurately knowing and regulating time is something Allah has urged, for many legal rulings—general and specific—depend upon fixed periods whose implementation requires precise calculation and record-keeping.

Allah has attached numerous commands to definite spans of time; carrying them out hinges on identifying, counting, and defining those spans. He says, “They ask you about the new moons. Say: They are time markers for people and for pilgrimage” [Al-Baqarah 189].

The words “time markers for people” cover the prescribed times of prayer, fasting, zakah, contracts, and the like, while pilgrimage is mentioned separately because so many of its rites depend on both public and private time limits. The same applies to the waiting periods (ʿiddah — waiting period), debts, leases, and other matters. Concerning the waiting period He says, “Count the waiting period” [At-Talaq 1]; regarding fasting, “Then make them up on other days” [Al-Baqarah 184]; on oaths of abstention, “Those who forswear their wives must wait four months” [Al-Baqarah 226]; and, “Indeed, the prayer has been prescribed for the believers at stated times” [Al-Nisaʾ 103].

He also says about the Companions of the Cave: “Then We raised them up to see which of the two groups would best calculate the length of their stay” [Al-Kahf 12]. This was so that Allah’s perfect power in bringing them back to consciousness might be manifest; had they remained asleep, none of the lessons contained in their story would have been known.

Whenever the careful reckoning of a period brings about benefit in religious or worldly affairs, the Qur’an encourages and directs people toward it. Similar in meaning are His words, “Or like the one who passed by a town that lay in ruins…” [Al-Baqarah 259], and His statement, “so that you may know the number of years and the reckoning” [Al-Israʾ 12], and other verses to that effect.