Guide

Each Name is given in seven parts. Three are literary: a story, a poem, a reflection. One is lexical — an entry on the Name itself, the root it is built from, the range that root carries, and the distinctions the tradition has drawn where two Names lie close together. Three are scriptural: the Qurʼanic verses in which the Name stands, a transmitted supplication that invokes it, and an authenticated hadith that mentions or expounds it. A separate study page carries the root and the sources behind the entry, for readers who want to see the ground it stands on.

No part depends on the others, and there is no prescribed order. The row of links at the head of every page moves between the seven parts of the same Name, so a reader who wants only the poems, or only the verses, can keep to one form for all ninety-nine.

Three of the seven parts are literature: a story, a poem, and a reflection. The stories and poems were written years apart and do not explain each other; they are two attempts at the same impossible thing, set side by side and left that way. The reflections speak more directly, addressing the reader as ‘you’ rather than working through character and image, and are best read in that spirit — as a second, more exposed attempt at the same Name — rather than as a continuation of the fiction.

The entry on each Name is not a fourth literary form and should not be read as one. It is the plainest writing in the book, and deliberately so: it sets out what the Name means, where the tradition has divided over it, and — where it matters — that a Name is used of God alone and never of a creature. The stories, poems, and reflections take liberties an entry cannot. Where an entry rests on a verse, a hadith, or a named authority, the citation is kept on the study page rather than in the text, so that the entry can be read straight through and the sources checked separately.

A small number of authentic reports describe God using wording that also names a human faculty — a Hand, drawing near, a Face. This book affirms such wording exactly as it has been transmitted: without asking how, without likening it to anything created, and without reading it as evidence that God possesses an attribute in the manner a human being does. This is the settled position of the classical mainstream, summarized in the phrase bilā kayf — without asking how. It governs every such passage in this book and is not repeated at each occurrence.

The ninety-nine Names — al-Asmāʼ al-Ḥusnā — are drawn principally from the Qurʼan and the prophetic traditions. That there are ninety-nine rests on sound authority: a hadith recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim states that whoever preserves them enters Paradise, and the count itself is not in question. Which specific ninety-nine make up that count is a separate matter, and a less settled one. The familiar itemized list descends from a narration in Jāmiʻ at-Tirmidhī, which at-Tirmidhī himself graded gharīb — rare, meaning its chain narrows to a single transmitter at some point. Hadith scholars have generally judged the item-by-item enumeration to be a later transmitter’s addition to the authentic opening statement, rather than part of what the Prophet ﷺ himself said — one reason the traditional lists vary: different compilers, working independently from the Qurʼan and the hadith literature, have arrived at different ninety-nine. The Names used here follow one of the most commonly cited enumerations. Readers familiar with other traditional lists may find minor variations.

A small number of Names sit inside larger patterns that span several entries, and readers moving through the book in sequence may notice them. Names 73 through 76 — Al-Awwal, Al-Ākhir, Aẓ-Ẓāhir, and Al-Bāṭin — are named together in a single verse, 57:3, and are treated here as a connected set for that reason. Al-ʻAẓīm (33) and Al-ʻAlī (36) are the two Names invoked in the two postures of the prayer itself — subḥāna rabbiya l-ʻaẓīm in bowing, subḥāna rabbiya l-aʻlā in prostration — a pairing readers will recognize from their own worship before they ever reach this page. And the stories for Aḍ-Ḍārr and An-Nāfiʻ (91–92) follow a single character, Yusra, across both entries — a deliberate diptych, not two unrelated stories that happen to share a name. None of these connections is announced in the text itself; they are left for the reader to find.

Three of the seven parts are scriptural: the places where the Name occurs in the Qurʼan, or the usage from which it is derived; transmitted supplications that invoke it; and authentic hadith that mention or expound it. Of the ninety-nine, seventy-three stand in the Qurʼan as the Name itself; twenty-two are derived from a verbal or related usage rather than appearing as nouns; four occur in no form at all and are preserved by the enumeration alone. Each page states which of the three cases it is before the verses begin, and seven hundred and twenty-three distinct verse references are carried on the Qurʼan pages across the ninety-nine, a number of them standing at more than one Name.

Only transmitted supplications appear — Qurʼanic prayers and authenticated Prophetic formulas; none has been composed for this book. Where no transmitted text employs a Name directly, the nearest passage is given and the distance is stated plainly. A supplication carries a grade wherever the same report stands at more than one Name, so that both pages say the same thing about it, and wherever scholars disagree about its status or one of them grades it weak; a few others keep the grade they were entered with. Citations follow common editions, whose numbering varies; hadith gradings follow the judgments of the collectors and later verification. Almost every hadith printed here is graded ṣaḥīḥ or ḥasan. The few that are not are marked as such where they stand, and are of two kinds: two sayings of a companion rather than of the Prophet ﷺ, and a small number of reports the authorities divide over, where the disagreement is printed rather than resolved.

Long vowels are marked with macrons: ā, ī, ū. Emphatic consonants are marked with subdots: ḥ, ḍ, ṭ, ẓ, ṣ. The letters ʻ and ʼ represent two Arabic consonants with no English equivalents — ʻ (ʻayn) is a voiced pharyngeal fricative; ʼ (hamza) is a glottal stop.

The definite article al- assimilates in pronunciation to certain consonants, the sun letters. Where this occurs the transliteration reflects it: Ar-Raḥmān not Al-Raḥmān; Ash-Shakūr not Al-Shakūr.

Everything is in one file. Once the page has loaded it needs no connection of any kind, and can be saved to a device and read where there is no signal. The index lists the ninety-nine by section, and the search field looks through the text as well as the Names, in transliteration or in plain spelling.

Anything written in the note field at the foot of a page, and any Name saved from the toolbar, stays on the device it was written on. None of it is sent anywhere, and none of it is visible to anyone else — including me. It will not follow you to another device, and clearing the browser’s stored data will erase it.

The stories, poems, and reflections are written for any attentive reader and assume no prior Islamic literacy. The Study Notes (accessible from the Guide) deliberately use denser technical language for readers who want the evidence trail. That split is intentional.

Every Name has been source-verified against the Qurʼanic text and the major ḥadīth collections. Contested forms, weak chains, and derived rather than directly attested Names are flagged without softening. The creative writing is never treated as evidence. Full verification records and a short account of the method appear in the Study Notes tab of the Guide.

Text, stories, poems, and reflections © Yusef Rawashdeh. All rights reserved. Source apparatus compiled and verified against primary collections. This digital edition is complete: ninety-nine Names, each in seven parts, with full Study Notes. No substantive claim about any Name rests on the creative writing alone.

Sources. The Qurʼanic Arabic follows the text of the Tanzil Project, Tanzil.net (http://tanzil.net), used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. The ḥadīth texts and their grades are those of the six collections — al-Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, at-Tirmidhī, an-Nasāʼī and Ibn Mājah — in the Arabic editions of the hadith-api dataset. The commentaries are read in the tafsir_api dataset. The typefaces are Amiri (© 2010–2022 The Amiri Project Authors), Spectral (© 2017 The Spectral Project Authors) and Archivo (© 2020 The Archivo Project Authors), each used under the SIL Open Font License, whose notice each embedded font carries.