The Beautiful Names of Allah

The Beautiful Names of Allah

Opening Supplications

اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَى سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ وَعَلَى آلِ سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ كَمَا صَلَّيْتَ عَلَى سَيِّدِنَا إِبْرَاهِيمَ وَعَلَى آلِ سَيِّدِنَا إِبْرَاهِيمَ فِي الْعَالَمِينَ إِنَّكَ حَمِيدٌ مَجِيدٌ

Allahumma salli ala sayyidina Muhammad wa ala aali sayyidina Muhammad kama sallita ala sayyidina Ibrahima wa ala aali sayyidina Ibrahima fil alamina innaka hamidun majid

اللَّهُمَّ لَا عِلْمَ إِلَّا مَا عَلَّمْتَنَا إِنَّكَ أَنْتَ الْعَلِيمُ الْحَكِيمُ

Allahumma la ilma illa ma alamtana innaka anta al-alima al-hakeem (Quran 2:32)

اللَّهُمَّ عَلِّمْنَا مَا يَنْفَعُنَا وَانْفَعْنَا بِمَا عَلَّمْتَنَا وَزِدْنَا عِلْمًا

Allahumma alamna ma yunfa'una wa nfa'na bima alamtana wa zidna ilma

وَصَلِّ اللَّهُمَّ عَلَى سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ وَعَلَى آلِهِ وَصَحْبِهِ وَسَلِّمْ تَسْلِيمًا كَثِيرًا وَلَا حَوْلَ وَلَا قُوَّةَ إِلَّا بِاللَّهِ الْعَلِيِّ الْعَظِيمِ

Wa sallillahumma ala sayyidina Muhammad wa ala aalihi wa sahbihi wa sallim tasliman kathira wa la hawla wa la quwata illa billahi al-aliyyi al-azim

Introduction: Standards of Excellence in Islamic Work

Before I start, I'm not going to talk very long because we've had several sessions and I know people have been here patiently. Quite a few people have left already, so I just wanted to say about this: this is a non-profit group. I'm not making any money from that, and I also do not make money from my tapes. It's not that it's impermissible—it's permissible to do that. I've just tried to keep that separate from my life for personal reasons. But the Alhambra has become a non-profit. It was before a business; it's become a non-profit organization dedicated to raising the level of dissemination of materials through media like documentary films and tape series.

I think that Yusuf Islam, may Allah protect him, has really raised the standard for all of us in his productions. Obviously, the man was a professional before he became Muslim and worked at the highest levels of production, but he's brought that over into Islam. The Mountain of Light productions have really set a standard, I think. There have also been efforts in the United States with other organizations, but I really think this is what we need to do to appeal to non-Muslims as well as honoring the deen by producing things of ihsan and itqan.

The Prophetic Standard of Excellence

The hadith says that Allah loves a servant that when he does something, he does it with itqan or perfection (Sahih Muslim 1955). This was a hallmark of Muslims wherever you went. The Muslims did things with such

extraordinary perfection: the art that they created, the buildings, the architecture—all of these things. We need to return to that level.

Many of the Muslims in this country, it always surprises me, are working at the highest levels in the non-Muslim world, and yet when they come to Islamic work, somehow all the standards become back-home standards. They give to Islam what their own jobs wouldn't accept as a standard—the finished product. This is something we have to really get out of this mentality and start giving Islam the best from our efforts. That will reflect out and people will recognize that Muslims should set standards.

Commitment to Improvement and Constructive Feedback

I've been told that this conference is now considered one of the most successful conferences, but there are still a lot of areas where I think there are shortcomings that we need to focus on. One of the things that people can do is to write in constructive criticisms. This is really important: to get feedback, to have post-mortems, to dissect what went right and what went wrong. This is part of the way in which we improve. We can't get content or become complacent because we've reached some standard or level. There has to be a commitment to improvement, and this is what ihsan is really about: a commitment to improvement.

The Divine Names: The Secret of This Deen

Now having said that, I'll just speak briefly. There's no doubt that one of the secrets of this deen is the Asma Allah al-Husna. Allah has given us these names and He has told us:

Lillahi al-asma al-husna - To Allah belong the most beautiful names (Quran 7:180)

The Importance of Studying Arabic

One of the things about the Arabic language is—and I would recommend all of you if you don't know Arabic to really commit to studying the Arabic language, and this includes the Arabs because many Arabs have a compounded ignorance about Arabic. Because they can speak dialectical Arabic, they really make some assumptions about the language. There are many Arabs that don't understand the subtleties of the Arabic language and really miss some of the extraordinary nuances of the Quran and rhetoric: (علم المعاني والبيان والبديع والبلاغة - ilm al-ma'ani wal-bayan wal-badi' wal-balagha). These sciences really open up the power of the Quran to the person who studies it.

The Linguistic Precision of Arabic

Now in the Arabic language, if you look, there's a word that the Arabs use for a non-Arab—they call him an ajami. Now ajami, if you look at it, there's another word: (بهيمة عجماء - bahima ajma), which means a dumb animal. And ajami has the idea—it's come to mean that—but if you look at the original root meaning of ajami,

which is a non-Arab, the word comes from ajama, which doesn't mean to be dumb. It means to try by biting—to try by biting.

If you look at the word Arab, the Arab themselves, arab means to cut. It means to cut, or to eat fully as well, to eat fully. So the ajami, if you look at the word in Arabic for word——(كلمة - kalima)—or pen, these come from root words that have to do with cutting. Now the difference between biting and cutting is that biting is not precise, whereas cutting is precise. So the nature of the Arabic language is that it's a precise language. It has absolute precision.

The Nature of Language and the Phoneme

Another very interesting thing about language is that if you look at some of the dominant theories of language, almost all of the Western theories—if you move outside the religious realm-almost all of the non-religious linguistic theories state that the phoneme is a meaningless symbol. The phoneme is something like a, i, u. These are phonemes, and we have in language an extraordinary thing that they call doubling.

One of the things about language is a lot of people don't know this, but there's only about a hundred sounds that the human being can make. A trained voice can make more, but most human beings can only make about a hundred sounds. The average language has about forty-five sounds in it. Most animals can only make a handful of sounds. In fact, one of the most sophisticated of all the creatures in terms of sound are the birds, which is interesting because Allah talks about (منطق الطير - mantiq al-tayr) - the language of birds (Quran 27:16). That which is most adept to linguistic prowess is the bird, not the monkey. The monkey is actually incredibly limited.

The Human Capacity for Language

This idea of doubling is that we can actually take phonemes and add them together to create sounds based on more than one phoneme. So if you look at animals like a dog, a dog barks- (ينبح - yabah)—but you don't notice that if you listen to a dog's bark, he's not doing this doubling. No other creature can do this. They can't do this. So a dog can make these crude sounds, but he can't make subtle sounds. He can't say "hello, how are you?" He can't say (كيف حالك - kayfa haluk). He can just bark. That's all he can do.

The human being can do this doubling, which gives him power because it means that instead of having a hundred sounds—which would mean the maximum number of meanings that you could have in your language is a hundred—the average animal, they've got about seven or eight. Some of the most sophisticated monkeys have about twenty-five. In other words, that's all they can say: look out, something like that. They can say watch out, or a hawk can shout something that has a meaning to the other animals and they'll run. We know this in observing and watching them. But human beings have the ability to produce language.

The Divine Origin of Arabic

Now Allah has chosen the Arabic language, and my belief is that it is in accordance with the opinion of Imam

Suyuti and others that the Arabic language is (توقيفية - tawqifiya), which means that it is from Allah. The language is not conventional. It didn't come together out of like the ding-dong theory—that's a linguistic theory they call it the ding-dong theory. For instance, they said one day somebody dropped something like you take two rocks and they make that sound, they say "clank"—that sounds like a clank, you see. That's a ding-dong theory of language: that originally human beings, like a rock dropped and it went "kum" and they said "rock." This is how stupid these people get, but this is actually a theory in linguistics.

The Quranic View on the Meaning of Letters

Now they don't believe the phoneme has meaning. They say the phoneme is meaningless, but when you add it to other things it becomes meaningful. The Quran rejects this, and this is one of the most fascinating things to me about the Quran: it begins with letters. And every mufassir who has ever existed and written on the Quran always will say:

Allah knows what that means

Or (الله أعلم بمرادي منهم - Allah a'lam bi-muradi minhim). In other words, meaning goes all the way down to the letter itself. There's no other explanation for that. You can't say منهم is meaningless, because that's saying that there's something in the Quran that doesn't have meaning. And yet these people with their dominant linguistic theories believe that the phoneme is meaningless.

Examples of Meaning in Arabic Root Letters

What does that mean in terms of Arabic language? Well, for instance, you can look at a word in the Arabic language and understand something of its meaning because of the letters. Like for instance, Ibn Faris and Ibn Jinni, some of our great linguists—and we had linguistics before these people ever knew there was a word or a science. We had linguistics a thousand years before they were even thinking about these things. In fact, phonetics is a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and our tajweed science preserved the sounds of the Arabic language, the points of articulation. This is what they're called now in modern phonetics: the points of articulation. We had (مخارج الحروف - makharij al-huruf) over a thousand years ago. This is the ilham from God.

The greatest proof of the truth of Islam is the preservation of the Arabic language in that the meanings of Quran are absolutely preserved. The Jewish people didn't work out until a Farsi Jew, a Jew from Morocco in the ninth century, worked out that Hebrew was based on triliteral roots. They didn't even know that. A thousand years, two thousand years ago, the Bible is over two thousand five hundred years—the Torah—and they didn't even know their words were built on triliteral stems until the Arabs pointed it out to them.

The Jews didn't even make a dictionary to preserve the meanings of the Torah until the Arabs all of a sudden started seeing the Arabs making dictionaries and they said, "We should have done that a couple thousand years ago." I'm not making this up. Really, they made that. That's why the Jewish people, when they study the

meanings of the Semitic roots of their language, they have to go back to the Arabic dictionaries. This is a well-known fact. They have to go back and look at the triliteral roots of the Arabs and how they explain them.

The Root of "Nafasa" as an Example

So you take a word, for instance, like nafasa. Nafasa is based on a root which is nun and fa, and then the third letter, which is what's known as the lam letter, changes as the root changes to give it different meanings. It's based on the attributes of the letters. So you have nafasa, which is to breathe, and then you have nafatha, which is to blow lightly. And then you have nafaha, which is like nafahat, which are like a wind. So you get the ha sound which is in riyah—riyah. You can hear the wind in it: ha. This is not the ding-dong theory. This is because it's a divine language.

And then you have nakha. It's a strong letter and it becomes kha, to blow with force. So you have nafasa, nafatha, nafaha, and nakha. And you'll find this throughout the Arabic language. It's very sophisticated in the way that Allah has designed it.

The Letters of Allah's Name

Now the words that make up the actual letters of Allah's name, look at these letters: alif, lam, lam, ha—Allah. Allah. It begins with a hamza which is at the deepest articulation of the throat, and this is where the name of Allah is emanating from: the point in which human vocalization is possible. It's coming from the depths of the vocal tract and you say Allah, and it goes back to the ha, which is at the deepest of the—these are called huruf al-halq. The ha and hamza, that's in aqsa al-halq. And so it begins in the aqsa al-halq, in the depths of the throat, and it returns to the depths of the throat. But in the midst of it, you have a letter which is in the jawf, or the lisan: Allah. Allah.

The Soothing Sound of "La"

And this is something incredible, because one of the things in the Greek language, lulan is a Greek word, and it means to soothe or comfort, because it's been recognized throughout history that the "la" sound is a soothing and comforting sound for children. And that's where you get "lullaby," and you get "lala." Like this is something mothers will do to their children: la la la la la la, like this. Why? Because it's a soothing sound. It actually brings a type of sakina to the heart. And so the name of Allah is something that actually brings tranquility to the human being when they say it: Allah.

In the Daoist tradition, they have what they call the universal meditation, which is based on putting the tongue at the roof of the mouth and doing that several times: la la la la la, like that, because they believe that connects all of the meridian channels in the body. They actually do that as a practice.

The Miracle of La Ilaha Illallah

When you say (لا إله إلا الله - la ilaha illallah), it's amazing that Allah has made those sounds anybody can say.

The Weight of Muhammad Rasulullah

One of the fascinating things about la ilaha illallah: look how light it is on the tongue. Anybody can say it: la ilaha illallah. But move to muhammadun rasulullah. Suddenly it becomes weighty. You see, Allah makes it easy to say tawheed, but how to live tawheed? That's the difficult part. How to live muhammadun rasulullah?

Now look at the idgham there. Why does Allah have an idgham? There's no idgham in la ilaha illallah. There's no blurring. Each of the things are articulated without idgham. Idgham is assimilation in tawheed. Now look at muhammadun rasulullah. He's assimilated into rasulullah because that is who he is. He is rasulullah. So his name is actually assimilated into the word itself. The noon of his muhammadun becomes part of the ra: muhammadun rasulullah. And then even when you do it with the muhammadun rasulullah or muhammadan rasulullah, it all has idgham. You have to say that, which is amazing. It is amazing. So this is—Allah has made these secrets in the Arabic language.

The Divine Name Al-Khaliq

Now if you look at the names of Allah, there are secrets in the name. For instance, the word khalaqa. One of the names of Allah is al-Khaliq. Listen to that: kha-la-qa. Those are powerful words. Kha is ali. It's isti'la. It's a harf that has power. And then lam is in the middle. And then qa, harf qalqala. There's haraka on it—qalqala. Khalaqa. What does khalaqa mean? To create.

Now what does it mean when you say a human being—you can't say a human being khalaqa. It's impossible. The word khalaqa, when applied to a human being, means to tell a lie. Khalaqa hu: he invented it, he fabricated it. It's a lie, because human beings cannot create.

"They will not create even a fly, even if they all gathered together to do it (Quran 22:73)"

They can't create even a fly. Allah is Khaliq, and He alone is Khaliq.

The Three Stages of Divine Creation

Allah is now look at this. Allah says:

الْخَالِقُ الْبَارِئُ الْمُصَوِّرُ

Al-Khaliq, al-Bari, al-Musawwir (Quran 59:24)

These three: Khaliq, Bari, Musawwir. What does that mean? Khaliq, Bari, Musawwir—these are stages of divine creation. Khaliq is when Allah's irada, when He decides to create something. And this is not-get out of time because Allah is not in time, but it's—you go into salahi and tanjiziya. This can be explained. Our ulema have explained it, but it's not—this lecture is not that place to explain that.

But you have Khaliq, and then you have Bari. Bari is the one who brings the materials into existence, and that's why we're called bari'a. Creation is called bari'a, and the Messenger of Allah is (خَيْرَ الْبَرِيَّةِ - khayr al-bari'a) - the best of creation (Sahih Muslim 2276). Who created the bari'a? Al-Bari. So this is the bringing into existence the materials, but that's not enough in the creational process.

Then what happens? Musawwir—the Fashioner of those materials. So Allah is fashioning in the womb. He's fashioning the embryo. He creates it from a nutfa, and then look at that:

Nutfatin amshaj - a mixed drop of fluid (Quran 76:2)

The Embryological Miracle of the Quran

Now one of the things that the mufassirun had a difficult time understanding was why Allah uses nutfa and then He uses amshaj, because nutfa is a singular feminine and it would necessitate a singular feminine attribute or a sifa. And yet here amshaj is not—it's a plural because it doesn't have intellect. And this was something they found difficult. But if you look at the mixing of genetic materials in the nutfa, when the male and the female come together and the DNA begin to mix, it is literally amshaj. It's exactly the way Allah is describing it.

And so He brings it together. And then the Messenger of Allah said, "Glory to the One who shaqqal sama' wal basar." Shaqq means to cut. Now if you watch—and we've seen this now in embryology-if you watch when the ears actually begin to emerge, it's a shaqq. It's like a cutting, and you'll see slits begin to cut out in the actual embryo, and the eyes begin to cut. That's in a microscopic—you cannot see that with the human eye. And yet the Messenger of Allah said that Allah is the One who cut the ears and cut the eyes. And this is the beginning of differentiation. This is the Musawwir. He's the one:

Yusawwirukum fil-arham - He fashions you in the wombs (Quran 3:6)

He is fashioning what is in the wombs with perfection, and this is a divine name. So these attributes—Khaliq, Bari, Musawwir—these are differences.

The Metaphor of Light and the Divine Attributes

Now if you look at it, and I'm just using a metaphor—this is a metaphor, so don't confuse this with anything other than a metaphor. If you look at light, light is white. They call it white light. White light does not have a color. Now what happens is when you get a prism, a prism is a medium of glass, and when the light hits the glass, it refracts. It bends. There's a bending of the light. And what happens is suddenly the color spectrum shows up. You see a whole spectrum of colors from violet to red and everything in between.

Now what happens in the creation? You have Allah's light. He is:

Allahu nuru al-samawati wal-ard - Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth (Quran 24:35)

But when the light of Allah hits His creation, the divine attributes refract in creation. So you get all of these different manifestations of Allah's essence that are manifesting in His creation. So you see, for instance, in one instant Allah is Karim. In another instance He is Jabbar. In another instance He is Qahir. In another instance He is Aziz. In another instance He is Mudhil. In another instance He is Mu'izz. And only Allah can know all of them at once. You can only know an attribute because you are seeing a refraction of the divine essence.

Clarification: Not Pantheism or Hulul

And this is not hulul. Don't mistake this with like inner penetration of the divine. No, we are not Hindus. We don't associate creation with Allah, and we believe that there are af'al of Allah that are created. Even though we believe in the essence and the attributes and the actions of Allah are one, we believe that the fi'l of Allah-this is a fi'l of Allah, all of this—but this fi'l is makhluq. It's not Allah, and we don't associate anything with creation with Allah-neither a prophet nor a saint nor anything. And this is something Islam is protected from. So don't misunderstand this. It has nothing to do with pantheism or hulul.

But the world becomes a theater for divine manifestation of these attributes, and this is how we come to know Allah:

لا تفكروا في الله ولكن تفكروا في خلق الله

La tafakkaru fil-lah wa lakin tafakkaru fi khalq Allah - Don't think about Allah's essence, but think about Allah's creation

Don't think about Allah, because like Sayyidna Abu Bakr said:

العجز عن إدراكه إدراك والخوض في كنه الإله إشراكه

Al-ajz an idrakihi idrak wal-khawd fi kunh al-ilah ishrakuhu - The inability to comprehend Him is comprehension, and delving into the essence of the deity is shirk

To think about the essence of Allah is shirk. Allah is knowledge—knowledge of Allah, which is why the essential act of worship in Islam is putting your intellect on the ground and surrendering the capacity of the intellect to know Allah. But we can know Allah through the attributes of the creation.

Rain as Manifestation of Rahma and Adhab

Rain is a manifestation of rahma, but it can also be a manifestation of adhab. Allah can manifest rahma in rain, or it can manifest adhab. You can look, for instance, Imam al-Busiri says in the Burda:

إِذَا الْكَرِيمُ تَجَلَّى بِاسْمِ الْمُنْتَقِمِ

Idha al-Karimu tajalla bismi al-Muntaqim - When the Generous One manifests as the Avenger

Muntaqim is the name of Allah. It's when Allah takes people to account. He takes people to account, but He's still Karim. Only He's manifesting as the Avenger, because sometimes that's what the Karim does. The Karim al-qawm can sometimes do things that people don't usually associate with karam, but it's an attribute that's manifesting, and this is what Allah does.

The Example of Turkey: Divine Manifestation

What happened in Turkey is an example of that. You see, really, what happened in Turkey is an example of that. Allah is Karim:

Kana Allahu bil-mu'minin rahima - Allah is merciful with the believers (Quran 33:43)

He's merciful with the believers. The Messenger of Allah said:

جُعِلَ عَذَابُ أُمَّتِي فِي دُنْيَاهَا

Ju'ila adhab ummati fi dunyaha - The punishment of this ummah has been placed in this world

He places the punishment of this ummah in this world with earthquakes and tribulations and killing and sedition. These are ways in which Allah purifies us, and we believe this. So what happens to people in this type of situation? We have to see who is manifesting. Allah is manifesting Himself to us, and we have to learn to recognize the names of Allah in His creation.

Recognizing Allah's Names in Creation

And when you begin to do this, then you have tawhid, and you begin to see Allah is revealing Himself to you through these divine attributes. And this is one of the secrets of learning the names: that you begin to see if Allah abases you, it is Allah who abased you. Allah is Mudhil. Allah is Mudhil. He is the Abaser.

Yudhillu man yasha - He abases whom He pleases (Quran 3:26)

So we have to recognize that Allah is doing that. The fact that the Muslims now are abased in the earth—I wasn't discarding that—but the fact that Muslims now are abased in the earth is because izzah comes with dhull and hawan to Allah. When we humble ourselves before Allah, Allah gives us izzah.

Calling Upon Allah's Names with Knowledge

And now just because the time is up, I just wanted to say a few things. Be very careful with the names of Allah. In other words, call on Allah and call on His names and do it with sincerity, but when you call on the names, know that the names have attributes. You should know the attributes that you're calling on. You don't want to call on al-Qabid.

One of the shuyukh once told me, because you can think of that—who wants to call on the Qabid? Qabid means the Contractor or the Constrictor. And yet one of the shuyukh from Yemen, a very blessed man who died a few years back (رحمه الله - rahimahu Allah), said to me that he was once in the Haram, and this man was well over sixty, and it was on Jumu'ah. And if you're in the Haram in Mecca on Jumu'ah, he was inside the inner circle, and suddenly he had a very strong urge to go to the bathroom. And he was in the Haram, and he was an old man. And he said:

كنت أخاف عن أفضح نفسي

Kuntu akhafu an afdhah nafsi - I was afraid I was going to disgrace myself

I thought I was going to really denigrate myself, degrade myself, because he thought that he couldn't control his bodily functions. And then Allah inspired him to say:

یا قابض یا قابض یا قابض

Ya Qabid ya Qabid ya Qabid

And he began to call on this name, and it completely got removed from him, and he was able to sit through the Jumu'ah without having any urge. So here's an example of somebody who knows the names and when to use them.

The Name Al-Latif

The name that we should be calling on now is Latif. Ya Latif is the one who gives you every good and protects you from every evil, and this is what the Muslims need:

Allahu latifun bi-ibadihi yarzuqu man yasha wa huwa al-qawiyyu al-aziz - Allah is Latif with His servants. He provides for whom He wills, and He is the Strong, the Mighty (Quran 42:19)