← Back to traditionsWhat is Arabic numerology?
Arabic numerology is the practice of reading words through the numerical value of their letters. Each of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet carries a number, from 1 for alif to 1000 for ghayn; adding the letters of a word gives its value, and that value is then interpreted. The method is called hisab al-jummal (reckoning by summation) and the wider discipline ilm al-huruf, the science of letters. It is not a modern invention: Arabic grammarians were describing letter values in the 8th century, astronomers used them to write numbers in their tables, and poets used them to date events in verse. This page gives you the complete abjad table with both regional value systems, a step-by-step method to calculate a name, the real values of a few divine names, and an honest account of what the historical sources say, including the scholars who warned against it.
- Every Arabic letter has a number: the 28 letters run 1 to 9, then 10 to 90, then 100 to 1000.
- The value of a word is the sum of its letters: Allah (الله) = 1 + 30 + 30 + 5 = 66.
- Two systems coexist: the Eastern (mashriqi) abjad and the Maghribi one, which swap six letters.
- Historical uses were practical first (dating, numbering), mystical second (Sufism, talismans).
The complete abjad table: 28 letters, two value systems
The table below lists the 28 letters in abjad order, the ancient Semitic order that gives the system its name (alif, ba, jim, dal). The Eastern values are the ones used in Egypt, the Levant, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and South Asia; the Maghribi values are the ones used historically in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and al-Andalus. The two systems agree on 22 letters and differ on six, all in the hundreds: sin, sad, shin, dad, za and ghayn. The last column gives the element attributed to each letter in the system popularised by al-Buni, where the letters cycle through fire, air, water and earth in abjad order.
Why two systems matter
The same word can have two values. The basmala, “bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim”, adds up to 786 in the Eastern system, the figure printed on countless letters and shop signs in South Asia; in the Maghribi system it adds up to 1026, because sin counts 300 instead of 60. Any source that gives you a value without saying which system it uses is giving you half the information. Everything on this page uses the Eastern system unless stated otherwise.
Three spelling conventions that change the result
The ta marbuta (ة), the feminine ending, is counted as 5 (like ha) by most practitioners but as 400 (like ta) by some. Hamza is usually counted as 1, and the alif maqsura (ى) as 10, like ya. Short vowels and the shadda are never counted: the value belongs to the written consonants. Fatima (فاطمة) is therefore 135 with ta marbuta at 5 and 530 with it at 400. State your conventions before you compare two names.
Abjad values of the Arabic alphabet (Eastern and Maghribi systems)
| Letter | Eastern value | Maghribi value | Element (al-Buni) |
|---|
| ا alif | 1 | 1 | Fire |
| ب ba | 2 | 2 | Air |
| ج jim | 3 | 3 | Water |
| د dal | 4 | 4 | Earth |
| ه ha | 5 | 5 | Fire |
| و waw | 6 | 6 | Air |
| ز zay | 7 | 7 | Water |
| ح ha (pharyngeal) | 8 | 8 | Earth |
| ط ta (emphatic) | 9 | 9 | Fire |
| ي ya | 10 | 10 | Air |
| ك kaf | 20 | 20 | Water |
| ل lam | 30 | 30 | Earth |
| م mim | 40 | 40 | Fire |
| ن nun | 50 | 50 | Air |
| س sin | 60 | 300 | Water |
| ع ayn | 70 | 70 | Earth |
| ف fa | 80 | 80 | Fire |
| ص sad | 90 | 60 | Air |
| ق qaf | 100 | 100 | Water |
| ر ra | 200 | 200 | Earth |
| ش shin | 300 | 1000 | Fire |
| ت ta | 400 | 400 | Air |
| ث tha | 500 | 500 | Water |
| خ kha | 600 | 600 | Earth |
| ذ dhal | 700 | 700 | Fire |
| ض dad | 800 | 90 | Air |
| ظ za (emphatic) | 900 | 800 | Water |
| غ ghayn | 1000 | 900 | Earth |
How to calculate a name, step by step
Write the word in Arabic script, without vowel marks. Look up each letter in the table and add the values: that sum is the jummal, the full value. Then, if you want a single digit, reduce the sum by adding its digits until one remains. The Arabic tradition also knows a second reading, the small reckoning (jummal saghir), in which each letter keeps only the first digit of its value: kaf counts 2 instead of 20, qaf 1 instead of 100. The three results, full value, reduced value and small reckoning, do not always agree, and classical authors chose the one that served their purpose. Here is the method on three words whose values you can check against the table.
What the value was used for
Four uses dominate the sources. Dating: a poet composes a line whose letters add up to the year of a birth, a victory or a death, a device called tarikh or chronogram, common in Persian and Ottoman poetry from the 14th century onward. Numbering: astronomers such as Habash al-Hasib, working in Baghdad in the 9th century, wrote the numbers of their tables with abjad letters before Indian digits took over. Devotion: a divine name is recited as many times as its value. Comparison: two names, two words or a name and a date are matched by their values, the practice closest to what Western numerology does with birth dates.
Worked examples (Eastern system)
Allah (الله): alif 1 + lam 30 + lam 30 + ha 5 = 66, reduced to 6 + 6 = 12, then 1 + 2 = 3. Muhammad (محمد): mim 40 + ha 8 + mim 40 + dal 4 = 92, reduced to 9 + 2 = 11, then 2. Karim (كريم): kaf 20 + ra 200 + ya 10 + mim 40 = 270, reduced to 9. In the small reckoning, Karim gives 2 + 2 + 1 + 4 = 9 as well, a coincidence the tradition would have found significant; Muhammad gives 4 + 8 + 4 + 4 = 20, then 2, which agrees with the reduced value.
Where the science of letters comes from
The science of letters grew in three layers. The first is linguistic and practical: the grammarian al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, who died around 786, already mentions hisab al-jummal in his dictionary, the Kitab al-Ayn, and the order alif, ba, jim, dal is the old Phoenician and Aramaic order, which means the values predate Islam. The second layer is philosophical: in the 10th century the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa) of Basra devoted the opening epistles of their encyclopedia to number as the first principle of creation, in a frankly Pythagorean spirit, and the corpus attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan built a science of the balance that assigned degrees to letters. The third layer is mystical: Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) mapped the 28 letters onto the 28 lunar mansions and the degrees of being in his Meccan Revelations, and the works attributed to al-Buni, who died in 1225, turned the letters into a toolkit of talismans, magic squares and invocations.
The critics inside the tradition
The science of letters was never unanimously accepted. Ibn Khaldun, in the Muqaddima (1377), describes the practice in detail, including the za’irja, a mechanical device for generating answers from letters, and classes its magical uses among the forbidden sciences. Most jurists distinguished the lawful uses, numbering, dating, study of the Quranic letters, from talismanic ones. The Hurufi movement founded by Fazlallah Astarabadi in the 14th century, which read the human face itself as a text of 28 and 32 letters, was condemned and its founder executed in 1394. Anyone presenting Arabic numerology as a uniformly accepted Islamic science is simplifying history.
The mysterious letters of the Quran
Twenty-nine surahs open with isolated letters, the huruf al-muqatta’at: alif-lam-mim, kaf-ha-ya-ayn-sad, and others. Their meaning has never been settled. Classical exegetes proposed abbreviations, divine names or a challenge to the eloquence of the Arabs; letter mystics saw them as the keys of the whole text. The honest position of most scholars, then and now, is that their meaning is known to God. They are the main reason the science of letters took root in Quranic commentary rather than staying a game of poets.
The 99 names of God and their values
The asma al-husna, the most beautiful names of God, are the words most often submitted to abjad calculation. Each name has a value, and devotional manuals recommend reciting a name as many times as its value or using that number in a prayer or a square. Many websites copy each other’s figures without checking them. The values below are computed letter by letter from the Eastern table, with the definite article, which is how the names appear in the classical lists.
Abjad values of selected divine names (Eastern system, with the article)
| Name | Arabic | Full value | Reduced |
|---|
| Allah | الله | 66 | 3 |
| Ar-Rahman, the Merciful | الرحمن | 329 | 5 |
| Ar-Rahim, the Compassionate | الرحيم | 289 | 1 |
| As-Salam, the Peace | السلام | 162 | 9 |
| Al-Hayy, the Living | الحي | 49 | 4 |
| Al-Hakim, the Wise | الحكيم | 109 | 1 |
| An-Nur, the Light | النور | 287 | 8 |
| Al-Qadir, the Able | القادر | 336 | 3 |
- Check any value yourself: write the name, look up each letter, add. Most errors online come from dropping the article or a letter.
- The basmala gives 786 in the Eastern system, which is why 786 stands for it on letterheads and shop signs from Pakistan to Indonesia.
- Quran 74:30 says “over it are nineteen”; the number 19 has fascinated letter mystics ever since, with no agreed interpretation.
Magic squares: the wafq and the buduh
A wafq is a magic square, a grid of numbers whose rows, columns and diagonals give the same total. The Islamic world inherited the 3 × 3 square from older traditions and developed squares of order 4 to 10 and beyond, both as mathematics and as talismans. The most common is the buduh: the 3 × 3 square whose rows, columns and diagonals all add up to 15, with the even numbers 2, 4, 6 and 8 in the corners. Written with letters, those corners read ba, dal, waw, ha, hence the name. The buduh was engraved on rings, written on paper for travellers and expectant mothers, and inscribed on bowls; it is the single most widespread numerological object of the Muslim world.
The buduh square
First row 4, 9, 2; second row 3, 5, 7; third row 8, 1, 6. Each row, column and diagonal totals 15, and the central 5 is the sum of each pair of opposite numbers divided by two. Mathematicians such as Thabit ibn Qurra in the 9th century and later authors studied the general construction of such squares; the mystical texts attributed to al-Buni filled them with divine names instead of numbers.
Geometry, calligraphy and the beauty of number
Numbers in Islamic art are not symbolic decoration added afterwards: they are the construction method. Star patterns are built on 6, 8, 10 and 12 points by compass and ruler, and calligraphers proportioned letters on a grid of rhombic dots whose unit was the alif. The claim, often repeated, that the Alhambra displays all 17 plane symmetry groups is disputed among mathematicians, who count between 13 and 17 depending on how colour is treated; the palace remains the richest surviving catalogue of such patterns either way. What is certain is that the same culture that calculated the value of names also calculated the geometry of its walls, and saw both as ways of making unity visible in multiplicity.
Modern uses and debates
The abjad has not disappeared. Arabic, Persian and Urdu books still number their introductions with abjad letters, as Western books use Roman numerals. The Baha’i faith, born in 19th-century Iran, built its calendar on the value of the word vahid, unity, which is 19: nineteen months of nineteen days, and gives the name Baha the value 9. In the 1970s the Egyptian-American biochemist Rashad Khalifa claimed that the Quran was mathematically structured on the number 19; his method was rejected by almost all scholars once his counts were checked, but it keeps resurfacing online. Today most people who search for Arabic numerology want one of two things: the value of a name, which this page lets you compute by hand, or a personality reading in the Western style, which the Arabic tradition never developed and which the sources do not support.
How to use this tradition honestly today
Treat the abjad as what it is: a historical code that links the Arabic script to numbers, with real uses in dating, devotion and art. You can calculate the value of your name and compare it with the meanings of the numbers 1 to 9 as this site describes them, provided you remember that the match is a modern bridge, not an ancient rule. Do not buy talismans sold on the strength of a number, and do not expect a value to predict anything. The scholars who practised this science held it as a way of contemplating the order of creation, not as a tool for forecasting.
- Abjad letters still number the prefaces of Arabic and Persian books.
- The Baha’i calendar of 19 × 19 days comes from the abjad value of vahid, unity.
- Reading personality from a name’s value is a Western extension, absent from the classical sources.