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Is the Hadith: "Do not revile time, for verily Allah is time" authentic from the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and how can it be interpreted if it is authentic?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

The authentic hadith states: "Do not revile time, for verily, Allah is time." Its meaning is that the Arabs used to revile time when calamities struck. The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, forbade them from doing so because the doer of calamities and misfortunes is Allah. Thus, if they reviled time, the revilement would fall upon Allah Almighty. "Time" is not among the names of Allah; rather, its attribution to Him is an attribution of creation and management. Reviling time falls into three categories: permissible if it is intended purely as a statement of fact, major shirk (polytheism) if one believes that time itself is the doer, and forbidden if one believes that Allah is the doer but reviles time due to disliked matters, as this contradicts the obligatory patience. Likewise, one should avoid cursing the hour or the day because they are created circumstances that have no fault, and cursing them reverts back to their Creator.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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