Black Gate, Hawking and Ibn Rushd

When I did my PhD research on pesantren in Indonesia, 1970-1, I had to memorise quite many pages in Arabic. One basic text was about the 20 attributes of God, sifat duapuluh. One of the most difficult words was mukhalafah lil hawadith, or 'God is different from anything new'. New here stands for something that once was created and so also may disappear. It is contingent, not necessary, or being from itself alone. Below here the three founders of Pesantren Gontor in their youth, not a I knew them (in fact only Zarkasji and Sahal).

I remembered this terminology while recently reading the collection of thoughts by Stephen Hawking, Brief answers to big questions. The origin of the universe here is described as beginning from a Blach Hole: page 32: When the Big Bang produces a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It's another law of nature.'

Here only Pak Sahal uses a sarong, Pak Zarkasji liked a proper traditional wstern suite!
Hawking quotes some scholars who did not accept a beginning for the universe (page 49), Lifshitz and Khalatnikov. 'I realised that this was a very important question, but I wasn't convinced by the arguments that Lifshitz and K. had used.' I wrote in the margin of the book that also Ibn Rushd was among those who accepted a universe without a beginning and Aquinas even was accused of sharing his opinion. Indeed, Hawking adds a new argument: if there is no matter, there is no time. So, all material things can  be called 'new', hadith in the philosophical meaning of the word. When I will visit Gontor next October I hope to discuss this with old friends of the pesantren. In fact, when I was in Gontor in the early 1970s Ibn Rushd was here better known for his book on the interpretation of shari'a rulings: Bidayatul Mujtahid, where he exposed all conflicts and differences of opinion among scholars in this field and gave much freedom to people to take their own decisions. And perhaps now this had been curbed by the interest towards Ibn Taimiyya or isn't it that bad?