Recently, I came across a list of the 20 most popular names of boys born in 1924 in England and Wales. I was surprised that the most common names 50 years ago when I was there for higher studies where all missing. There was no John, David, William, Mathew, Henry, Peter, Paul, Luke, Mark, Thomas etc.
To
my surprise the top name was Muhammad. How come that 50 years after I have left
that country my name has become so popular. Let me clarify here that in many
parts of the world, the name Muhammad is a prefix to indicate that one is a
Muslim, rather than a first name. Mohammed Musa Khan is commonly known as Musa,
and the people in the multireligious community know that he is a Muslim.
So,
I decided to check the latest and previous records of male infant names in England
and Wales for the last 100 years. In 2024 there were a total of 594,677 live child
births of which nearly half or 298,000 were male i.e. boys. Of these 5,721 were
named Muhammad, 1,760 were Mohammad and 986 were Mohammed. Even the traditional biblical
names were duplicated with their Arabic equivalents such as Ibrahim for
Abraham, Yusuf for Joseph, Musa for Moses etc. Jesus did not figure even in the
top 100.
Notes:
1. More than 50%
of the births were to parents outside of a marriage or civil partnership.
2.
There is no
data for transgender births. They are registered as either male or female.
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