What is the method for enumerating the beautiful names of Allah?

The questioner : In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and may peace and blessings be upon the noblest of the prophets and messengers.
Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He) said: , and He (peace and blessings be upon him) said: . The question: Your Excellencies, we want you to clarify for us how the enumeration of the beautiful names of Allah is done so that we may attain this great reward? May Allah reward you with good.

The Shaykh : First: The wording of the hadith is: , and not: "ninety-nine names." Second: The enumeration here does not mean memorizing the names listed in some books of the Sunnah, such as "Sunan al-Tirmidhi," until they reach ninety-nine names; because this narration that counts the beautiful names is not authentic. Rather, the hadith is authentic in a general sense, without specifying or listing the beautiful names.
The hadith, as you just heard: . Enumeration is not an easy matter as some people imagine, which is memorizing them from a treatise or a narration in which these names were collected. Rather, enumeration is exerting effort to track the names of Allah (Mighty and Majestic) in the Book and in the authentic Sunnah. This is a process that may differ from one person to another. Then, one may be granted success in attaining these names because they are precisely defined, as it came in some wordings of this hadith: . So, this enumeration with such precision may lead a person to gather these names from the Quran and the authentic hadith, or he may not be granted success. Whoever is granted success and enumerates them will enter Paradise, and whoever is not granted success will have the reward of striving to acquire these names. The matter here is exactly like the matter in some legal rulings where a jurist seeks to know the correct ruling; if he hits the mark, he has two rewards, and if he errs, he has one reward.
Also, as it appears to me in explaining that hadith, whoever enumerates those ninety-nine names, that is a good omen for him of entering Paradise. It is not a material matter such that it can be said, "So-and-so has enumerated the names, so he is among the people of Paradise." This is something that cannot be reached with this clarity and this explicitness. Rather, the Muslim should strive to pick up these names from the Noble Quran, and this is easy because the Noble Quran is preserved. Then from the Sunnah, and this is the most difficult thing, as you know, because the Sunnah is broad in scope on one hand, and it contains what is authentic and what is not authentic on the other hand. So, the one who wants to perform the enumeration of the beautiful names must first have a near-complete grasp of the books of the Sunnah, and then he must have knowledge of distinguishing the authentic from the weak.
Few have undertaken this matter, and that is due to the difficulty I referred to.
What I know is that Imam al-Khattabi explained the beautiful names, but I do not know if he enumerated them collectively as we mentioned, or if he relied on the famous narration from al-Tirmidhi. However, al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani performed the enumeration of these names in the way I referred to earlier. Then, some of the contemporaries—and he passed away to the mercy of Allah—in the journal "Anصار al-Sunnah al-Muhammadiyyah" in Cairo—his name is something like Droush or something like that.

The questioner : ... .

The Shaykh : Yes, Abu al-Wafa Muhammad Droush. He was one of the distinguished supporters of the Sunnah in Cairo, and he had published successive studies and articles in the journal "al-Ansar" in which he enumerated these beautiful names.
This is what comes to my mind as an answer to that question.
Please proceed.