Nope! Dex, where did you get that from? Arabic gematria of the name Allah makes only sixty-six. Only two decimal places.
Allah is spelled in Arabic اللّه alif lam lam ha’.
ا* alif* = 1
ل lam = 30
ّه ha’ = 5
So 1+30+30+5=66. The hundreds place doesn’t enter into it at all. For those who know Hebrew gematria, note that the Arabic version is copied directly from the Hebrew alphabetical order.
My favorite variant is 668: The Neighbor of the Beast.
I wonder if he got that confused with the fact that a Greek variation of Mohammed (I think “Maometis”, in which o is omicron, not omega) does
add up to 666.
According to Wikipedia, you are right: the article implies that the abjadi order, the same as in Aramaic and Hebrew, is the original Arabic alphabetic order, while the regular hija’i order used in dictionaries, based on similarity of letter shapes, was a later development. The abjadi arrangement is in numerical order and is used wherever letters replace numbers, as in gematria, algebra, or list headings. It’s also used to paginate the front matter of books, where we would use lowercase roman numerals.
That Staff Report was published 18 months ago, and was written a few months before that. I don’t remember where/how it came from, only that it was in the list of “fanciful” (not to say “idiotic”) interpretations. Assuming eeryone’s statements above are correct, I’d guess at this point would be that it was tied to Mohammad being 666 in Greek (as per Friar Ted’s comments, but I frankly don’t have the time to monkey with it, and won’t for several more weeks, if it all.
