I moved it to the World Coins forum for you. It's probably more appropriate there.
Muslims don't, as a rule, have a problem with Mohammed's name appearing on coins - it has appeared on Islamic coins, together with the name of Allah, from the very foundation of the Islamic coin series. What they have sometimes had a problem with is unbelievers handling coins with holy inscriptions on them.
The coinage of Hyderabad is particularly noteworthy for featuring the number "92" on their coins. Hyderabad was a state where a small Muslim ruling class ruled over a population that was by far majority Hindu. I suspect the use of "92" by this state in particular was motivated by a reluctance to see the Prophet's name mishandled and abused by the vast numbers of unbelievers who were likely to be handling the coinage. This was the same motivation that saw Mughal emperor Akbar remove the Islamic statement of faith from his coinage.
Abjad numerology - the practice of converting all the letters in a name, word or phrase into numbers, adding up all the numbers and then simply saying the number - is a common and popular aspect of Islam in South Asia, much to the annoyance of the local imams who would much rather their people use the actual words of the Quran, rather than numbers calculated from it. Islamic "temple tokens" featuring the number 786, calculated from the letters in the Bismallah, have been
seen here on the forum numerous times.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 05/19/2014 05:25 am
