The Untime of the Imam

The Untime of the Imam names the Imam’s promised escape from history’s onward movement: a timeless order in which clocks are destroyed, age ceases to pass, and divine eternity replaces political and human change. In Gibreel Farishta’s vision of the revolution in Desh, this promise culminates in a paradoxical sign: after the end of Time is announced, every clock in the capital begins to chime without stopping.

The Doctrine of Timelessness

The Imam presents time as a condition binding both the Empress and her subjects. The Empress, he argues, is imprisoned by the prospect of aging and by the succession of moments; she is reduced to the tick and tock of a clock. Against this, he sets the timelessness of God, which encompasses past, present, and future without needing to move through them. His projected revolution will abolish clocks and birthdays, leaving everyone the same unchanging age in God’s sight. The Untime is therefore not simply a pause in ordinary life but a replacement of historical change with an eternal order.

The Imam’s account makes this temporal ideal part of a wider rejection of history. Through Bilal’s voice, broadcast from a ham radio in Kensington into the imagined Desh, the Imam declares that the revolution is directed not only against a tyrant but against History itself. Progress, science, and rights are treated as delusions that draw people away from the completed truth of revelation. The Untime follows from this premise: if knowledge and divine guidance are already complete, historical development offers no necessary advance toward truth. The promised return to Paradise requires history’s veil to be undone, not improved upon.

Voice, Power, and the Promise of Revolution

The Untime is delivered as political doctrine through a strikingly mediated voice. The American convert Bilal is chosen because his trained, authoritative voice has already been accustomed to commanding an audience; it carries the Imam’s words over the radio and emerges in Desh as the Imam’s own thunderous speech. The transmission turns a voice associated with popular culture into an instrument of revolution. The Imam also describes power as something that can be absorbed through proximity: even those oppressed by the powerful may acquire its habits and manner. The revolution’s rhetoric thus opposes the Empress while warning that domination can reproduce itself in those who resist it.

In the vision, the promise of timelessness is tied to water, fertility, and the defeat of decay. The Imam contrasts himself as water with the Empress as decay, and describes the people’s love for him through his rejection of clocks. The final announcement joins the Untime to the exile’s return and to the victory of water over wine. Time is not merely stopped for private consolation; its abolition is presented as the foundation of a new collective order, born from the overthrow of the Empress.

The Vision’s Ending

The revolution reaches its decisive turn when the people reach the guns and silence them, then walk toward the darkened palace. Al-Lat bursts from the palace in a winged, black apparition, falls, and is left dead in the palace gardens. The Imam appears monstrous in the forecourt, swallowing the people as they enter. The vision does not present the new order as an uncomplicated image of liberation: the Empress’s defeat coincides with the Imam’s engulfing of the crowd.

After Al-Lat’s body shrivels away, the clocks throughout the capital begin chiming past twelve, past twenty-four, and beyond any count. Their unceasing measurement announces the end of Time and the beginning of the Imam’s Untime. The image works through contradiction: the clocks mark the arrival of a state in which clocks are supposed to have no authority. Their chiming makes the promised break with history audible, while its excess of numbered hours suggests that ordinary measures cannot contain the event.

Narrative Time and Uncertainty

The Untime belongs to one of Gibreel’s recurring night narratives. When the story shifts from Mahound’s world in Jahilia and Yathrib to the struggle between the Imam and the Empress, Gibreel briefly hopes that his disturbing dreams have returned to ordinary randomness. Instead, the narratives resume where they stopped whenever he falls asleep, and Gibreel re-enters them in the form of an archangel. The Untime’s claim to end historical sequence therefore appears inside a narrative structure shaped by recurrence: the dream does not simply move forward but returns, resumes, and binds its episodes together.

That structure sits alongside uncertainty about how revelation is received. In another dream, Mahound describes listening as a form of asking and feels that Gibreel may come from within his own deepest self; Gibreel, in turn, experiences their connection as reciprocal, with neither clearly dreaming the other. This does not explain the Imam’s doctrine, but it places the Untime within a novel where authoritative messages and their sources are not always separable. The promised eternity is spoken with absolute political confidence, even as the surrounding dream form unsettles any simple division between an externally delivered revelation and an inwardly generated vision.