لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ
Qur'an 42:11
Every other room in this library has something you can draw. This one has the names He gave Himself, and the light they are read by. The Book spends as much of itself saying what He is not as saying what He is, and that is where this room begins.
Begin
قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌ
اللَّهُ الصَّمَدُ
لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ
وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌ
Surah al-Ikhlas · 112
The Prophet ﷺ was asked to describe his Lord. The answer that came down is four short verses, and it is mostly a list of what He is not. He is not begotten. He does not beget. Nothing is comparable to Him. The shortest complete theology in the Book spends three quarters of itself clearing the ground.
Al-Asma al-Husna · The Most Beautiful Names
Touch any name to sit with it. Each one is a door, not a definition: the Arabic carries a weight no English line can hold, and the line beneath is a hand pointing, not the thing itself.
99 names
This is the enumeration narrated in Jami' at-Tirmidhi. The hadith that the names are ninety-nine is agreed upon; the list itself is a narration, and scholars have differed over which ninety-nine it names. The Arabic is the name. The English beneath it is a translation, and every translation of a name of God is a smaller thing than the name.
Open any name and it will tell you where it comes from. Seventy-four of them are used of God in the Qur'an, and the verse shown is one place the word itself appears. The other twenty-five reach us through the enumeration rather than as words the Book applies to Him; for those, the verse shown is where the Qur'an says the same thing in other words, usually as a verb.
Every line of Arabic in this room was checked against the text of the Qur'an itself: the verse exists, the words shown are a real run of words from it, and the word each entry says is there is there. This room cites the Qur'an and nothing else, because the Qur'an is the part that can be checked to the letter; you will find no hadith number here. The English under each verse is our own plain rendering, and the reference is printed so that you can go and read it for yourself. If you find an error, please send it to us — it will be fixed and the page will say so.
What He is not
Most of what a person gets wrong about God is a picture they brought with them. The Qur'an spends a great deal of itself taking pictures away, and every one of these is a sentence of denial rather than description.
Al-Hashr 59:22-24
The names are not scattered evenly through the Book. At the end of Surah al-Hashr fourteen of them come one after another in three verses, which is the densest the Qur'an ever gets about who He is. Press the button and watch where they fall in the ninety-nine.
Ayat al-Kursi · 2:255
لَا تَأْخُذُهُ سِنَةٌ وَلَا نَوْمٌ
Every created thing that keeps watch eventually stops keeping watch. The verse the Prophet ﷺ called the greatest in the Book makes its case by naming a limit and then denying it: the One holding the heavens and the earth in place is not tired by holding them.
وَلَا يَئُودُهُ حِفْظُهُمَا
And their preservation does not weary Him
Why they were given
A name is for calling with. The command in the Qur'an is not to memorise the ninety-nine but to use them, and the classical practice is to match the name to the need: to ask the Provider for provision, the Forgiving for forgiveness, the Guide when you do not know which way to go.
وَلِلَّهِ الْأَسْمَاءُ الْحُسْنَىٰ فَادْعُوهُ بِهَا
To Allah belong the most beautiful names, so call upon Him by them · Qur'an 7:180
Tawhid · The three doors
The classical scholars divided the oneness of God into three, not because He is three, but because there are three ways a person forgets it.
That He alone creates, owns and sustains. The part almost everyone concedes, and the part that settles nothing on its own.
Open → الأُلُوهِيَّةThat He alone is worshipped. This is the one the messengers were sent with, and the one their people fought them over.
Open → الأَسْمَاء وَالصِّفَاتThat He is as He described Himself, without denying a word of it and without picturing Him as a larger version of something made.
Open →
What it asks of you