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Origin 1908 to 1965

Ninety-nine is 9 x 11. In Islam it is the count of the Beautiful Names of God, al-asma al-husna, resting on a hadith recorded in both Bukhari and Muslim: God has ninety-nine names, one hundred less one, and whoever enumerates them enters paradise. The number is unimpeachable; the list is not. The familiar enumeration comes from a report in Tirmidhi that Tirmidhi himself marked as unusual, and most hadith critics regard the list as a later scholarly compilation, so variant lists circulate. Prayer beads, the misbaha, commonly carry ninety-nine beads or thirty-three worked three times. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 9.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Origin Period
The system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Place of Origin
The Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Place of Origin
The United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Attributed Author / Compiler
Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Origin of the Name
Pythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 9 + 9 = 18, then 1 + 8 = 9. Whatever the system says of 99 it therefore says of 9, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Islamic tradition enumerates ninety-nine most beautiful names of God, al-asma al-husna. The Qur'an speaks of the beautiful names without fixing a count; the figure of ninety-nine comes from hadith, and the lists that circulate do not agree in every entry. 3Tradition: Islam
Learn More
The Beautiful Names

The ninety-nine names of God, al-asma al-husna, are among the most widely used devotional forms in Islam. The Quran instructs that God be called by his most beautiful names at 7:180 and 17:110 and states at 59:22-24 a sequence of them, but the Quran nowhere gives a count.

The count comes from hadith, and the core report is as strong as hadith get: it is recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, which makes it muttafaq alayh, agreed upon. God has ninety-nine names, one hundred less one, and whoever ahsaha, enumerates them, or comprehends them, the verb bearing both senses, enters paradise.

The names themselves are attributes: ar-Rahman the Merciful, ar-Rahim the Compassionate, al-Malik the Sovereign, al-Quddus the Holy, and so on through qualities of power, knowledge, justice and mercy. Recitation of them is a standard devotional practice, and the misbaha, the prayer bead string, commonly carries ninety-nine beads, or thirty-three worked three times, which is also the count used in the tasbih after prayer.

The names are also the basis of a great deal of Islamic art and inscription, and of naming practice: Abd followed by one of the names, Abdullah, Abd al-Rahman, Abd al-Aziz, is among the most common naming patterns in the Muslim world, on the principle that a person may be the servant of any of the attributes.

The number is sometimes explained as indicating that the names are innumerable, ninety-nine standing for a great many rather than a closed list, and there is support for that reading in the tradition itself.

The Number Is Sound, the List Is Not

The count of ninety-nine rests on a report in Bukhari and Muslim. The enumerated list does not, and the distinction is well known within Islamic scholarship while being almost universally lost outside it.

The familiar list of ninety-nine specific names comes from a report in Jami at-Tirmidhi, transmitted through al-Walid ibn Muslim. Tirmidhi himself labelled the report gharib, singular, unusual, and noted that the names are not present in the other routes of transmission from Abu Hurayra. The critical assessment that followed, including from Ibn Taymiyya, is that al-Walid took the enumeration from a Syrian teacher and inserted it, and that the list is therefore the work of a scholar rather than the words of the Prophet. Modern gradings commonly mark the enumeration weak.

The consequence is that variant lists exist. Different compilers arrive at different ninety-nines, drawing names from the Quran and from other hadith, and disagreeing over which attributes qualify as names. Ibn Hajar and al-Qurtubi discuss the problem directly. Some scholars hold that the names are not restricted to ninety-nine at all, and that the hadith means only that whoever comprehends ninety-nine of them attains paradise, which would make the list open rather than closed.

None of this is contested between Muslims and outsiders; it is an internal question of hadith criticism with a long literature. It is worth setting out because the ninety-nine names are frequently presented in general reference works as a fixed and revealed list, and the tradition's own scholars are more careful than that. The number is canonical. The particular ninety-nine on any given poster are a compilation.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief), HarperOne, 2015View the Source
Sahih al-Bukhari
Muhammad al-BukhariThe count of the names
Quote, The count of the names
The count of ninety-nine is agreed between Bukhari and Muslim.
View the Source
Sahih Muslim
Muslim ibn al-HajjajThe count of the names
Quote, The count of the names
The count of ninety-nine is agreed between Bukhari and Muslim.
View the Source
Jami at-Tirmidhi
Muhammad al-Tirmidhihadith 3507
Quote, hadith 3507
The enumerated list comes from Tirmidhi, who marked it gharib; most critics grade it weak. The number is sound, the list is not.
View the Source
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