العظيم
al-ʿAẓīm
Topic
A divine name meaning the Great, the Mighty and the Glorious.
What it means
Al-ʿAẓīm is a name of God, and means the Great, the Magnificent, the One whose greatness is beyond measure. Faruqi glosses it as the Great, the High, the Glorious and the Mighty. It is among the names most often used in worship, since the Muslim says subḥāna rabbiya al-ʿaẓīm, “glory to my Lord, the Great”, when bowing in the prayer. The Quran uses the name often. The Throne Verse ends by describing God as the High (al-ʿAlī) and the Great (al-ʿAẓīm) (2:255), and believers are told to glorify the name of their Lord, the Great (56:74). The name calls on people to hold God above every thing they might wrongly treat as great.
Often misunderstood as
That the name describes mere size, when it speaks of a majesty that has no equal.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 39, listed as AL ʿAẒĪM. The definition is restated here.