Devotion gave the names a physical culture. The misbaha, the string of ninety nine beads, or thirty three counted three times, exists to count them and the remembrance formulas built from them, and the recitation of the whole list, in the sung styles of every Muslim region, is a devotional genre of its own, performed in gatherings, broadcast in Ramadan, and taught to children as a first theology lesson, each name a one word answer to the question of what God is like.
Calligraphy made the corpus visible. Panels of the ninety nine names adorn mosques and homes across the Muslim world, the names circle domes and fill grilles and gateways, and contemporary architecture has continued the tradition on a monumental scale. Sufism took the names as a map of the path, with masters assigning particular names as dhikr to particular disciples, and Ibn Arabi built much of his metaphysics on the names as the modes through which the unknowable divine essence turns toward creation, every existing thing the trace of some name. Popular practice attaches particular names to particular needs, the Healer recited in sickness, the Provider in want, the Opener at beginnings, a devotional pharmacology of the divine attributes. In all these forms the underlying act is the same, the believer answering the Quran's command to call upon God by the most beautiful names.