What ʿilm al-ḥurūf is
ʿIlm al-ḥurūf — the science of letters — treats the Arabic alphabet as a structure of reality rather than a notation for sounds. Since Arabic letters already carry numeric values through the abjad, letter-speculation and number-speculation are the same activity in this tradition, which is not true of most others covered here.
verified
The abjad itself is verified and ordinary: it is the inherited Semitic letter-numeral system, cognate with Hebrew and Greek practice, and was used for dating, foliation and chronograms across the Islamic world for centuries. Nothing esoteric is required for the letter-number correspondence to exist.
Two orders circulate, and they differ in six letters. Any published abjad total that does not say which order it used is under-specified — both are available in the calculator, with the differing letters marked.
Letters as cosmology
verified
Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) develops an elaborate doctrine in which the letters correspond to divine names, cosmic degrees and the “breath of the Merciful” (nafas al-Raḥmān) by which creation is uttered. That he holds this doctrine, and its general shape, is well attested in his works.
It is worth being precise about what this claims. Ibn ʿArabī is not asserting that a hidden numeric message is buried in the Quran awaiting decryption. He is asserting that the letters are the structure of manifestation. Those are different claims with different evidential requirements, and conflating them is the commonest error in popular treatments of Sufi numerology.
exploratory
Systematic correspondences between particular letters, particular cosmic degrees and particular numbers vary between authors and between works by the same author. They are theological constructions, not a stable system that could be independently checked. Presented here as doctrine, not as finding.
The Ḥurūfīs
verified
Fażlallāh Astarābādī (executed 1394) founded a movement that made letter-speculation central, reading the human face as a configuration of letters and assigning decisive significance to the counts 28 (the Arabic alphabet) and 32 (the Persian alphabet with its four additional letters). The movement, its founder and its suppression are historically documented.
The Ḥurūfīs matter to a site like this one for a structural reason. They are a case where letter-numerology became a total system with political consequences — and where the arithmetic was never the contested part. What was contested was the authority claimed on the basis of it. The same pattern recurs with Code 19 six centuries later.
Jafr and the limits of attestation
disputed
Jafr — divination by letter and number, traditionally traced to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765) — is well attested as a practice. The attribution of its foundational texts to al-Ṣādiq himself is not accepted by critical scholarship, and the works circulating under early names are generally later compilations.
disputed
The Shams al-Maʿārif, the best-known Arabic manual of letter-magic and magic squares, is attributed to Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. c. 1225). The text as it circulates exists in several recensions of differing length, and much of the material is regarded as pseudepigraphic — the work of later authors in what scholarship calls the corpus Bunianum, attributed to al-Būnī for authority. Claims about “al-Būnī’s system” should be read as claims about the received text.
This is a general problem in esoteric literature and not unique to Islam: attribution to an early authority is itself a genre convention. It is why the site grades the text and the attribution separately wherever it can.
The divine names
verified
The tradition of ninety-nine names of God rests on a well-known hadith and is universally received in Islam. That the tradition specifies ninety-nine is not in question.
disputed
The specific list of ninety-nine varies between the canonical enumerations, and the Quran itself does not give a list. Numerological arguments that depend on a particular set of ninety-nine names therefore depend on a choice of list, and should say which.
The observation that Allāh totals 66 in abjad, and related computations, are arithmetically correct and easy to verify. What they demonstrate is a property of the letter-value system, which was designed to assign values to letters. See the assessment of claims for why totals of this kind carry so little evidential weight on their own.
Quranic Numerics
The abjad applied to the Quranic text, including the muqattaʿat and Code 19.
Numeral Systems
The abjad beside Hebrew, Greek and Sanskrit encodings.
Alphanumeric Calculator
Compute abjad totals in both the mashriqi and maghribi orders.
Sefer Yetzirah
The nearest Jewish parallel — letters as the structure of creation.
Cite this page
Formatted references for this page. The evidence grade is part of the claim — when quoting a graded statement, carry the grade with it.