Just dipped into Muslim theologian al-Ghazali (11th c.), On the 99 Beautiful Names of God. Haven't read the whole book & don't know much; only spent about 40 minutes in it. But wow.
I was looking for Islamic parallels to the Christian doctrine of divine blessedness. I figured the 64th name (al-Qayyūm, the self-existent) would be close, but Ghazali expounds that name more along the lines of simplicity (a la Dolezal, really).
The 65th name (Al-Wajid, the Resourceful) is closer. Ghazali renders this as "one who lacks nothing; the very opposite of one in need." God "does not lack anything necessary to him;" he is "absolutely resourceful."
But Ghazali had already said much of this under the 4th name, Al-Malik, the King. "The one who in His essence & attributes has no need of any existing thing, while every existing thing needs Him... independent of everything, and this is what it is to be king absolutely."
There's a lot of wisdom in treating God's blessedness under the more fundamental category of God's kingship. Al-Ghazali is following Quranic logic here (the 99 names are gathered from the Quran), but the main reason I'm reading him is for comparative insights.
Finally, the opening lines of al-Ghazali's book are fantastic. God "clips the wings of intellects well short of the glow of His glory," and "makes the way of knowing Him pass through the inability to know Him."
He also says that "the tongues of the eloquent fall short of praising the beauty of His presence unless they use the means by which He praises Himself." And thus opens a treatise on what al-Ghazali treats as the revealed names of God.
(I could say a dozen things here about the right method for doing comparative theology in dialogue w/Muslim intellectual traditions, but basically: seek parallels w/out harmonizing, be alert for differences, remember the divergent sources, attend to tone, gamble on coherence.)
