99 names of Allah: Difference between revisions

The Quran talks about "beautiful names of Allah" and the hadiths further specify that there is exactly 99 names. Muslims are supposed to learn these names of Allah, but Muhammad didn't offer the full list of these names. Islamic scholars had to rely on ijtihad to find these names in the Quran and sunnah and different scholars came up with different lists. Out of the supposed 99 names of Allah, they together found at least 276 names.

==The phrase "beautiful names of Allah" mentioned in the Quran==

Some apologetic sources (including Wikipedia) claim that according to the hadith, there are ''at least'' 99 names. But the hadith doesn't say "at least". It says simply ninety-nine (تِسْعَةً وَتِسْعِينَ) and even adds that it's one hundred minus one, which seems to emphasize, that it is exactly 99 and not 100 or more. And the hadith also says that who memorizes all these names would go to paradise - such a task would be hard in the time of Muhammad, considering that in that time the ummah was [[Muhammad and illiteracy|illiterate]]. And even today, as we'll see, it seems impossible to find exactly 99 names.

The list (which is based on a weak hadith) probably looks attractive, because it contains references to the Quran. However it gets less amazing when you find out that in some of these references the word is not actually present in the Arabic Quran. When there is more verses containing the name, only one exemplary verse is mentioned. But if there is more verses and none of them actually mentions the name, all of them are mentioned in the list with the addition "(it's not there)".

===Layers of wrongness===

====It is based on a weak hadith====

 

 

Why is the verse 55:27 considered as an instance of both "ذو الجلال والإكرام" and "الجليل"? And what is the difference between الغفور and الغفار? And what about "مالك" and "مالك الملك"?

Arabic doesn't use capital letters for names. So a noun could be understood both as a proper noun or as a regular noun. For example the Arabic name Abdullah (عبد الله) could be understood as the name "Abdullah", but it could also be understood literally "slave of god". In the same way some of the "names of Allah" could be simply his characteristics, not names. In the same way we can understand "الله الرحيم" as both "Allah, The Merciful" and "merciful Allah". That is also a reason why finding the names in the Quran by ijtihad is practically impossible.

Many of the names in the column "In Arabic" are not actually in the Arabic Quran. These names were marked with "(it's not there)" in our table.

Let's analyze, for example, the last name of Allah, الصبور (The Patient).

What? This was a verb and it was a command for the believers, not a name of Allah.

So nowhere in the Quran it mentions الصبور being the name of Allah, that means the 99th name in this list is wrong and therefore the whole list is unreliable. We could analyze many more of these supposed "names" how they are not actually in the Quran. They are even easier ones to debunk, for example The Preventer (المانع) doesn't exist in the verse 67:21, not even a verb derived from the same root منع. Although the word "Preventer" exists in the Quran (50:25 and 68:12), but it is written as مناع, not مانع and it says "preventer of good" about disbelievers.

We could find many other names of Allah in the Quran. The list doesn't even contain the word "Allah" (الله).

As we've seen, the popular list based on the weak hadith is wrong on many levels. [https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B3%D9%86%D9%89#%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D9%81%D9%8A_%D8%A5%D8%AD%D8%B5%D8%A7%D8%A1%D9%87%D8%A7 Arabic Wikipedia article] contains more than 10 different lists by various Islamic scholars. Some of those lists even contain the name "Best of deceivers" (خير الماكرين). The lists together contain 276 names of Allah and we can assume that there are other lists with even more names.

 

 

There are much more names: