One tasbeeh is equal to how many?

The four things the word means

The question “one tasbeeh is equal to how many?” gets different answers online because it is really four questions wearing the same words. Before any number is useful, it is worth knowing which one is being asked.

Most people searching this phrase want a number to finish at, and the two senses that are counts agree on it: a hundred. The bead loop is a tool for counting, not a count, and a single SubhanAllah is the thing being counted. The rest of this page takes the hundred first, then the bead loop, which is where the 33 comes from.

When a teacher says “read one tasbeeh”

When a teacher, a book or a sheikh sets a dhikr as “one tasbeeh” or “two tasbeeh”, one tasbeeh means 100 recitations. Asked “What does it mean when the sheikh says ‘1 tasbeeh’ or ‘2 tasbeeh’? Does it mean 1=100?”, Shaykh Abdul Raheem Limbada answered in two words: “Yes, it does.” The same unit runs through daily recitations set by scholars: a fatwa on Askimam by Mufti Ebrahim Desai lists “1 Tasbih (100 beads) of Durood Shareef”, then one tasbih each of the Third Kalima and of istighfar.

The Urdu question “aik tasbeeh kitni hoti hai?” (how much is one tasbeeh?) asks the same thing, and in this sense the answer is the same hundred. If a count was given to you personally and you are not sure which sense was meant, the person who gave it is the one to ask.

The practical difficulty is that the bead loops most people own do not hold a hundred. A 99-bead loop is one short of a tasbeeh in this sense, so a lap of it is not the end of one; a 33-bead loop needs three laps and one bead more.

The extra bead per hundred is the step that gets lost: after three laps of a 99-bead loop the count feels finished at 297 and is three short of three tasbeeh. A counter set to stop at 100 and started again for each tasbeeh does not have the problem, because it counts the unit, not the beads.

The bead loop: 33, 99 or 100

A misbaha — also called a tasbeeh, subha or tasbih — is a loop of beads used to keep count during dhikr. The two common lengths are 33 beads and 99 beads, and some loops are made with 100. Other faiths count other prayers, so their beads differ: a Catholic rosary has 59 and a Hindu or Buddhist mala 108, and how many beads prayer beads have, by religion sets the counts side by side with their sources.

The reason those numbers and not others is simply that they match what is being counted. A 99-bead loop runs the whole hundred in one pass. A 33-bead loop is run three times, which is exactly the shape of the set said after salah, and the separator beads mark where each third ends so you do not have to hold the position in your head.

So a bead loop does not have one fixed answer either. If you are holding a misbaha and wondering what one full trip round it is worth, look at the separators: three sections of 33 is a hundred-set in one lap; a plain 33 is one third of it.

The set after salah, and why it reaches 100

The best-known count is the one recited after each obligatory prayer, and it is the answer people usually want. It is built from three phrases:

• SubhanAllah — “Glory be to Allah” — 33 times. This is the tasbeeh proper, and it is the phrase the whole practice is named after.
• Alhamdulillah — “All praise is for Allah” — 33 times. This is the tahmeed.
• Allahu Akbar — “Allah is the Greatest” — 33 or 34 times. This is the takbeer.

Thirty-three three times is ninety-nine, and the set is completed to one hundred. That completion is the part that varies, and it is the source of nearly all the confusion about whether the last number is 33 or 34.

33-33-34, or 33-33-33 plus one?

Both reach a hundred, and both are found in authentic narrations. They are not rival claims about the same report; they are two different reported practices.

Imam an-Nawawi is reported to have suggested combining them: thirty-four takbeers and the tahleel at the end. The pattern of 33, 33 and 34 is also the one commonly known as the Tasbeeh of Fatimah, recited by many before sleeping as well as after prayer.

Which of these you follow is a question for your own scholar, not for a web page. Communities and schools differ, and the point of setting it out here is only so that seeing two different numbers online does not read as one of them being a mistake. Both arrive at a hundred, which is why a hundred is the number worth remembering.

Counting on the fingers

Counting on the fingers of the right hand is a reported practice and needs no equipment at all. It has one well-known difficulty: the hand gives you a natural thirty-three across the finger joints, and a lost place is very hard to recover, because there is no record of where you were.

That is the honest trade. Fingers are always with you; beads and counters make the position visible. Nothing here argues for one over another, and the choice between finger, bead and device is itself something scholars have discussed. A counter records a number; it does not make dhikr better or worse.

Keeping the count without losing it

Whatever you count with, the same two failures account for nearly every lost tasbeeh.

1. Losing which phrase you are on, not which number. Being unsure whether you are in the second or third thirty-three is far more common than miscounting inside one. Keeping each phrase on its own counter, rather than running one number to a hundred, removes the problem entirely.
2. The interruption. A knock at the door in the middle of the second set. A count held only in your head does not survive it; a count on beads or a counter does.

If you are using a digital counter, set the target so it stops on its own at 33, 34, 99 or 100 rather than watching the number. The point of a target is that it lets you stop looking at the counting and attend to the dhikr, which is the whole reason for keeping count in the first place.

A longer count is the voluntary four-rakat prayer of 300 glorifications, 75 in each rakat; where the sets of 15 and 10 go in it is set out in Salat al-Tasbih: where the 75 tasbih go in each rakat.