Next year, “Muhammad” will be the most popular baby boy’s name in England. The radical elements of the Muslim world have been welcomed into European societies that subordinated their sense of self-preservation to an empty-headed commitment to value-judgment free diversity. No need to blow the front door off when it is unlocked.
Not so much. Mohammed comes in at number 22 and Muhammed comes in at number 44. Looking at past years, Mohammed hasn’t cracked number 20 ever. IOW, Dan’s making shit up.
But it goes a bit further. The variants on Mohammed both standout compared to the girl’s list where there are no clearly Islamic or Arab based names on the list of the top 50 meaning there’s something else going on–namely, Muslim parents of all ethnic backgrounds use the name Mohammed far more frequently than any other name. And so the number 22 and number 44 placing of the names don’t mean that there are that many new Muslim babies as much as a very high percentage of the boys are named one or the other.
Hmmm…name-calling is easy, fact-checking not so much
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1890354.ece
Muhammad is No 2 in boy’s namesHelen Nugent and Nadia Menuhin
Explore The Times Book of Names and discover what your name says about you
Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year, a study by The Times has found. The name, if all 14 different spellings are included, was shared by 5,991 newborn boys last year, beating Thomas into third place, followed by Joshua and Oliver.
Scholars said that the name’s rise up the league table was driven partly by the growing number of young Muslims having families, coupled with the desire to name their child in honour of the Prophet.
Muhammad Anwar, Professor of Ethnic Relations at Warwick University, said: “Muslim parents like to have something that shows a link with their religion or with the Prophet.”
Although the official names register places the spelling Mohammed at No 23, an analysis of the top 3,000 names provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts Muhammad at No 2 once the 14 spellings are taken into account. If its popularity continues – it rose by 12 per cent last year – the name will take the top spot by the end of this year. It first entered the Top 30 in 2000.
The spelling Muhammad, like all transliterations, comes from replacing the Arabic script with what is deemed its closest Latin equivalent. There are many versions in Britain, depending on where the family are from and variations in pronounciation.
Muhammad, which means “one who is praiseworthy”, is often given to boys as an honorary prefix and is followed by the name by which they are commonly known. It is regularly cited as the most common name in the world, though there is no concrete evidence.
Mufti Abdul Barkatullah, a former imam at the Finchley mosque in northwest London, said: “Parents who name their son Muhammad believe that the name has an effect on their personality and future characteristics. They are saying that this boy will be of good character.
“Some people may not really understand the history of the Prophet Muhammad and the name but they still want the association so they can be recognised as one of his followers.
“In Arab countries, the name Muhammad is said when you don’t know the name of someone. On the sub-continent, it is different: Muhammad can be used either before or after another name.
“When you get to the UK, it is essentially about translating the sound of the Arabic into English. A nonArab Muslim would have the name ending in -ed while an Arab Muslim would adopt the -ad ending.”
Overall, Muslims account for 3 per cent of the British population, about 1.5 million people. However, the Muslim birthrate is roughly three times higher than the nonMuslim one.
Statistics from the ONS show that Muslim households are larger than those headed by someone of another religion. In 2001, the average size of a Muslim household was 3.8 people while a third contained more than five people.
According to data from CACI Information Solutions, men who are named Muhammad are 5½ times more likely to go on holiday in Asia and twice as likely to live in Yorkshire than most other people.
Additionally, a man named Muhammad is most likely to be aged between 25 and 34 and to have an average salary of £25,000.
The leading name for girls born to Muslim parents in 2006 was Aisha, in 110th place. Its meaning is “wife of the Prophet” or “life”.
How do you spell that?
The different spellings of Muhammad in 2006 and the number of occurrences
Mohammed 2,833
Muhammad 1,422
Mohammad 920
Muhammed 358
Mohamed 354
Mohamad 29
Mahammed 18
Mohammod 13
Mahamed 12
Muhammod 9
Muhamad 7
Mohmmed 6
Mohamud 5
Mohammud 5
— Scholars and imams differ on why there are so many variants of the name
— Some say it is the result of phonetic translations by Muslims who moved here from abroad. Others say that it is merely down to the personal choice of the parents
The most popular names for baby boys in 2006
1 Jack 6,928, 2 Muhammad (all spellings) 5,991, 3 Thomas 5,921, 4 Joshua 5,808, 5 Oliver 5,208, 6 Harry 5,006, 7 James 4,783, 8 William 4,327, 9 Samuel 4,320, 10 Daniel 4,303, 11 Charlie 4,178, 12 Benjamin 3,778, 13 Joseph 3,755, 14 Callum 3,517, 15 George 3,386, 16 Jake 3,353, 17 Alfie 3,194, 18 Luke 3,108,19 Matthew 3,043, 20 Ethan 3,020
Source: Office for National Statistics/ The Times
OK, I’ll bite.
So, more Mohammad, Mohammed, Mohamed and others are being born in the UK than Jack and Oliver. This automatically means…
“The radical elements of the Muslim world have been welcomed into European societies that subordinated their sense of self-preservation to an empty-headed commitment to value-judgment free diversity.”
Really? 5,000 Mohammeds, and each one a conquering Islamic overlord, ready to order conversion or death to all of western Europe…because of the comments of a flighty Dutch Bishop.
That is some power of racis…er…extrapolation you’re showing there.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the knee jerk jingoism that says “adhere to our ways, or be considered a terrorist” (hey, that kind of sounds like “convert or die,” no?) has caused a surge in cultural and religious fervor among immigrants who might otherwise have gone on about their business and named their kids something else. Like Jack. Or Oliver.
Speaking of names, I looked up Daniel. It means, “God is my judge.” I didn’t see where it meant, “and I am the judge of everyone else.”
===The leading name for girls born to Muslim parents in 2006 was Aisha, in 110th place. Its meaning is “wife of the Prophet” or “life”.
Meaning it isn’t so much a takeover by Muslims, but that the mode isn’t on the bell curve, but around one name. I read that somewhere–oh yeah, above. The point, and one you don’t really seem to get at all is that Muhammed is far and away the single most common name for Muslims and the name distribution is far different than for common English names. The traditional English have a large number of relatively popular names, the Muslims in Britain tend to use one name for the boys. The degree to which one then observes that the most popular Islamic based name for girls being down around 110 most frequently used girls names suggests you are rather dense to understanding distributions and their meaning. A mode alone for name doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the relative population. This is very elementary.
Beyond that, only extreme ignorance of Islam would lead one to conclude that all Islam is of the radical Islamist form. It is not. The most basic problem is that you seem to throw Sunnis and Shiites into the same categories of Islam and their radical forms as the same thing when in fact, they violent forms hate each other more than they hate us.
Ignorance is what got us into the current war against a secular Arab leader and his secularist, nationalist Party. Now, it’s a war against those same secularist, nationalist, Shiite nationalists, Shiite religious extremist, and Sunni religious extremists. In Iraq we aren’t fighting one war. We are fighting up to seven depending upon how you divide it up. Trying to make it all one thing is exactly how you get stuck in a quagmire and is a great way to set up the nation for more classic fuck-ups.
In short, the article doesn’t say what you think it means Dan. Learn something about the world. It’s enlightening.
You’re imposing conclusions on me that I did not make (and in an ignorant, banally santimonious way, of course.)
I did not use the Muhammad name in England as a causal link but rather, implicitly, to point to the transformation going in Europe.
You should try offering something than your knee-jerk liberal ideology in the face of numbers that don’t lie. You look at the population demographics of western Europe (Spain, France, Netherlands, England) and tell me what they portend.
Add the riots in Paris, the assassination of Theo van Gough, the deaths stemming from protests over Danish cartoonists and tell me these examples/symptoms do not point to a problem deserving contemplation and reflection.
What I actually implied as opposed to the conclusions you have drawn and imposed upon me is that Europe has become Eurabia because of a combination of low birthrates (i.e. below replacement rate) and moral relativism that makes no value distinction between those who advocate freedom and those who advocate tyranny (even through violence).
Unfortunately for us, radical Islamists don’t embrace your myopic “everything is equivalent” dogma, and their willing to use force to enforce what they believe.
While I’m out “learning something about the world”, do me a favor and pick up a history book. Knowledge, as opposed to simply what you “feel”, can be quite illuminating too.
===I did not use the Muhammad name in England as a causal link but rather, implicitly, to point to the transformation going in Europe.
And you aren’t getting that the use of Muhammed doesn’t point to that either. Look at the girls’ names and see the difference. You haven’t demonstrated a takeover of England by Muslims, you have demonstrated a culture that uses one particular name for boys meaning the diversity of names if far less while the dominant cultural group uses a variety of names.
==You should try offering something than your knee-jerk liberal ideology in the face of numbers that don’t lie. You look at the population demographics of western Europe (Spain, France, Netherlands, England) and tell me what they portend.
You are using numbers to lie. You don’t have the background in quantitative analysis to understand this perhaps, but that’s what you are doing. It’s not knee jerk liberal ideology, it’s understanding statistics and the misuse of them by morons.
Anecdotes aren’t data. They are anecdotes. Further extrapolating birth rates as a constant is silly given that economic advancement leads to lower birth rates. Hence, Muslim birthrates in the United States after the first generation drop significantly–as they do in Europe. Hence, using a starting point as an ongoing trend is a really stupid thing to do for anyone who understands population studies.
Ignorance is not bliss and understanding the religion you are trashing doesn’t mean I put everyone on the same moral level–it means I know that Muslims occupy many different moral levels as so people in other faiths. Those attitudes are shaped by the particular culture they live in and their level of education amongst a whole host of other factors. Assuming that 1.5 billion people all have the same beliefs is silly and ridiculous.