Through the Screen · Avengers: Infinity War · 5 min
The Infinity Stones
The films imagine someone gathering infinite power. The Names describe the One who never had to gather anything.
Through the Screen · The Infinity Stones
In Marvel's films, six Infinity Stones (Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time and Soul) are separate objects, each with one domain. Thanos gathers them into a gauntlet to act on the universe. The gathering costs him: the Soul Stone demands the sacrifice of someone he loves, and using the Stones nearly destroys him. It is a story about acquisition: infinite power collected, held, fought over and lost.
The 99 Names are not like that, and the difference is the point. They are not six or ninety-nine separate powers that could be gathered. Classical Muslim scholars said God's attributes are “not He, nor other than He”: real, but not parts. Nothing is acquired; nothing is spent.
| Stone | What the films say it does | The Name | The difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | Opens portals across the universe | al-Wāsiʿ | There is nowhere to jump to that is outside His reach and mercy |
| Time | Lets a hero turn time back | al-Awwal | The Time Stone moves inside time; al-Awwal means there was no “before” to move into |
| Reality | Warps the laws of physics | al-Bāriʾ | The Stone warps what exists; al-Bāriʾ is why there is anything to warp |
| Mind | Controls minds | al-Khabīr | The Stone controls minds; al-Khabīr knows them, and leaves them free |
| Soul | Demands the sacrifice of a loved one | al-Wadūd | In the film, love is traded for power; al-Wadūd's love is never the price of anything |
| Power | Destroys planets | al-Qawiyy | Strength that never tires and needs no gem |
In Endgame, putting the world back costs Tony Stark his life. al-Jabbār, the One who mends, mends and nothing is spent. And Thanos needed six stones and a gauntlet, and it nearly destroyed him; the Qur'an says of God: “His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it ‘Be’, and it is” (36:82).
One more detail, from inside the Marvel universe itself: in the series Loki, the Time Variance Authority keeps captured Infinity Stones in a drawer as paperweights. Even in the story, they are not ultimate. Every superpower story is a ladder that stops one rung short. The Names begin where the ladder ends.
