The Significance of Seven in Arab Culture

One of the things we need to understand about Arabic culutre is the significance of the number “seven.” This boils over into our understanding of ahadith.

First, a strong disclaimer: Islam has nothing to do with numerology — that is, the study and assignment of arbitrary numbers to the value of letters of the Arabic alphabet — such as the popular “786” which represents “bismillah.”

Nor should numbers be interpreted symbolically or otherwise, unless there is a very good, strong reason for doing so — such as with number seven.

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Now that that’s out of the way: the number seven appears alone, and in multiples (70, 700, 70k, etc.) in several ahadith.

Let’s take a quick browse. For example, this famous hadith which comes to play in aqeedah mentions the number 73:

Narrated AbuHurayrah:

The Prophet () said: The Jews were split up into seventy-one or seventy-two sects; and the Christians were split up into seventy one or seventy-two sects; and my community will be split up into seventy-three sects. (Sunan Abu Dawud)

Other hadith mention 70,000:

Ibn Mas’ud (May Allah be pleased with him) reported:

Messenger of Allah said, “Hell will be brought on that Day (the Day of Resurrection) with seventy bridles (leashes); and with every bridle will be seventy thousand angels, pulling it.” (Saheeh Muslim)

In these cases, and cases where the number seven is listed (seven itself or a multiple of seven — 70, 700, 7000, 70,000, etc.), the number seven signifies a large quantity — a lot. It does not literally mean 70 or 70k; it can mean a large number.

And Allah knows best. If you search books of hadith for the number seven and its multiples, you will actually find this occur in a lot of ahadith. So keep this in the back of your mind when you read.

References:

• Collector’s Edition: Sahih al-Bukhari. By Yasir Qadhi. 2012.