99 Names of Allah

The doctrine of the names begins in the Quran, which four times declares that to God belong al-asma al-husna, the most beautiful names, and commands, call upon him by them. Scattered through the scripture are the names themselves, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King, the Holy, the Source of Peace, the Mighty, the Wise, sometimes gathered in clusters, as at the end of Surat al-Hashr, which strings a dozen names into a single doxology. The number comes from the hadith.

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim transmit the Prophet's saying that God has ninety nine names, one hundred less one, and whoever enumerates them, ahsaha, enters paradise, a word the scholars weighed carefully, reading it variously as memorizing the names, counting them, or living by what they mean. The familiar written list of ninety nine appears in the narration transmitted by al-Tirmidhi, and the learned tradition itself notes that this enumeration was compiled within the transmission rather than dictated as a fixed list, which is why alternative lists exist and why theologians insist the names of God are not limited to ninety nine. The names became the backbone of Islamic theology's account of the divine attributes, grouped by the scholars into names of majesty and names of beauty, jalal and jamal, severity and mercy held together in one God.

Devotion gave the names a physical culture. The misbaha, the string of ninety nine beads, or thirty three counted three times, exists to count them and the remembrance formulas built from them, and the recitation of the whole list, in the sung styles of every Muslim region, is a devotional genre of its own, performed in gatherings, broadcast in Ramadan, and taught to children as a first theology lesson, each name a one word answer to the question of what God is like.

Calligraphy made the corpus visible. Panels of the ninety nine names adorn mosques and homes across the Muslim world, the names circle domes and fill grilles and gateways, and contemporary architecture has continued the tradition on a monumental scale. Sufism took the names as a map of the path, with masters assigning particular names as dhikr to particular disciples, and Ibn Arabi built much of his metaphysics on the names as the modes through which the unknowable divine essence turns toward creation, every existing thing the trace of some name. Popular practice attaches particular names to particular needs, the Healer recited in sickness, the Provider in want, the Opener at beginnings, a devotional pharmacology of the divine attributes. In all these forms the underlying act is the same, the believer answering the Quran's command to call upon God by the most beautiful names.