Dr. Muhammad Waqas Butt
We live in an age that has forgotten how to wait. Waiting today is interpreted as inefficiency, a temporal void that must be filled — by scrolling, consuming, producing. Capitalist time cannot tolerate suspension. It demands continuity of activity, an unbroken stream of immediacy. In such a world, waiting appears as a form of death. Yet in truth, only those who can wait know how to live.
The modern subject, enslaved to speed, has lost touch with the metaphysics of time. Time, in the capitalist order, is not being; it is currency. It must circulate. Each second must be invested, optimized, and redeemed in the marketplace of productivity. The idle moment is treated as a moral failure. But in older spiritual cosmologies — Islamic, Christian, Taoist — time was not a tool but a trust. It was a field in which the seeds of meaning could grow, unseen, at their appointed pace.
In the Qur’anic vision, time (dahr) is not linear progress but divine unfolding. Each moment is a disclosure of the Real (al-Haqq). To wait is to acknowledge that the world is not ours to command; it reveals itself in its own rhythm. Patience (sabr) is thus not mere endurance but an ontological posture — the acceptance that being itself moves according to divine wisdom, not human haste. The impatient soul seeks control; the patient soul participates in creation.
Byung-Chul Han writes of how modern acceleration abolishes duration, and with it, depth. In the absence of waiting, the self becomes flat — all surface, no substance. The digital instant, which abolishes delay, also abolishes longing. But longing is what gives shape to the soul. It stretches the heart toward something beyond itself. In Sufi thought, shawq (spiritual yearning) is inseparable from waiting. To wait for God is to recognize one’s own incompletion, to dwell in the sacred tension between absence and presence.
Capitalism transforms waiting into irritation because it has destroyed transcendence. When there is nothing beyond the present, every delay becomes intolerable. We no longer wait for anything — not revelation, not growth, not understanding. We simply wait in traffic, in queues, in loading screens. Time is stripped of telos. The only goal is acceleration itself.
But to wait spiritually is to live differently within time. It is to open oneself to the slow maturation of being. A seed does not force itself to sprout; the river does not hurry to reach the sea. Their movement is silent, purposive, patient. The Qur’an repeatedly commands, “Inna Allaha ma‘a as-sabirin” — God is with the patient. This is not a moral consolation but a metaphysical truth: patience aligns human time with divine time. In patience, time ceases to be an object of use and becomes a medium of revelation.
Waiting, therefore, is not passivity but attention. It is a form of active receptivity, a heightened awareness of the unfolding of existence. The mystic waits not because he lacks what he seeks, but because he perceives that the act of seeking itself is the path. The capitalist mind wants to arrive; the contemplative soul knows that arrival is an illusion. The destination is not elsewhere; it is here, in the fullness of waiting.
In digital culture, the logic of immediacy erases this possibility. We no longer approach reality; we refresh it. Each update promises novelty, yet delivers only repetition. The result is spiritual exhaustion — a fatigue not of the body, but of the soul that never dwells long enough to encounter meaning. True waiting restores this dwelling. It teaches the art of staying — with a question, a feeling, a silence.
The ethics of waiting is also the ethics of hope. Hope requires time. It exists in the interval between what is and what ought to be. In Islamic thought, the world itself is this interval — suspended between creation and resurrection. The believer’s waiting is therefore not despair but trust (tawakkul). It is an active surrender to the rhythm of divine providence. In this sense, patience is the highest form of freedom, for it liberates us from the tyranny of urgency.
The spirituality of waiting invites us to inhabit time as a sacred medium, not an economic resource. It calls for a new rhythm of life — one that breathes, listens, and allows. Waiting reopens the dimension of mystery in a world flattened by control. To wait is to believe that not all meaning can be manufactured, that truth must sometimes arrive uninvited, in its own time.
Slowness is resistance; waiting is faith. One belongs to the ethics of the body, the other to the ethics of the soul. Together, they form the counter-temporality of the human — a time that cannot be monetized, accelerated, or optimized. The one who waits truly is already beyond the reach of capitalism, for he has rediscovered the sacred truth that being itself cannot be rushed. And perhaps this is what the age most fears — not slowness, not silence, but waiting: the possibility that behind all our acceleration, there is still another time, a divine time, moving quietly, patiently, toward eternity.