Muslim and Islamic baby names, and how they are chosen

Muslim naming is not the same as Arabic naming

There are roughly two billion Muslims, and fewer than a fifth of them are Arabs. A page about Islamic names that lists only Arabic names has described a minority of the world's Muslim children. Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Hausa, Somali, Swahili and Bosnian all have their own Muslim naming traditions, some of which use Arabic names in local forms and some of which use entirely local words. Turkish Mehmet and Bosnian Muhamed are the same name as Muhammad; Indonesian Nurul and Malay Siti are not Arabic names at all in their current use.

When a Muslim baby is named

The most widely followed practice is naming on the seventh day, alongside the aqiqah, the sacrifice made in thanks for the birth. The hadith collection Sunan Abi Dawud records the instruction that a child is named on the seventh day, the head shaved and the aqiqah performed. In practice families vary: some name at birth, some wait the full seven days, and the aqiqah is sometimes delayed for practical reasons. None of that changes the naming itself.

The names the tradition recommends

Sahih Muslim records the Prophet saying that the names most beloved to God are Abdullah and Abd al-Rahman. Both are "servant" names, and that is the key to the single most misunderstood convention in Islamic naming.

The Abd convention

God has ninety-nine names in Islamic tradition — al-Rahman, the Most Merciful; al-Karim, the Generous; al-Aziz, the Mighty. These are not given to children on their own, because they belong to God. They are given with the prefix Abd, meaning servant: Abd al-Rahman, Abd al-Karim, Abd al-Aziz. Shortening Abd al-Rahman to Rahman in everyday use is common; naming a child Rahman outright is not the same thing, and many families would avoid it. This is a structural rule rather than a preference, and it is why so many Muslim men's names begin Abd.

Prophets, companions and family

What the 2025 ONS figures actually say

Muhammad was the most popular boys' name in England and Wales in 2025 with 5,957 babies, on the figures released on 9 July 2026. That is 46 per cent ahead of second-placed Noah. It is also an undercount of the sound, because ONS ranks exact spellings and does not merge them: Mohammed appears separately at 20th with 1,712, and Mohammad separately at 55th. ONS has explained its reasoning publicly — deciding which spellings to combine would take the statistics into subjective judgement — and the effect is that the published table ranks spellings rather than names. In Scotland the picture differs again: National Records of Scotland recorded Noah as the most popular boys' name for 2025.

Names beyond Arabic

Turkish gives Emine, Fatma, Zeynep, Mehmet, Mustafa and Emir, several of them Turkish forms of Arabic originals. Persian gives Firdaus, Roshan, Parvin and Yasmin. Urdu naming in Pakistan and the British Pakistani community uses Ayesha, Hafsa, Bilal and Usman. Malay and Indonesian naming often prefixes Nur or Siti for girls and Muhammad for boys, with a second, distinguishing name after it. Bosnian gives Amina, Emir, Adnan and Lejla. Swahili gives Rehema, Amani and Baraka, all built on Arabic loanwords inside a Bantu language.

How a Muslim name is put together

A full name in the Arabic tradition is not simply a first name and a surname. Classically it has several parts: the ism, the given name; the kunya, a teknonym such as Abu Bakr, "father of Bakr"; the nasab, the line of descent using ibn or bint, son or daughter of; and the nisba, an adjective from a place, tribe or trade. Many of the surnames now used across the Muslim world began as one of these parts and hardened into a family name when modern states began registering births.

This matters for parents in Britain in one practical way. A child registered with a grandfather's name as a middle name is following the nasab pattern, not choosing a middle name in the English sense, and forms that ask for a "family name" may not fit what the family actually uses. Registrars are used to this; it is worth knowing before you are standing at the desk.

Names a family may be advised against

Islamic tradition includes guidance on names to avoid as well as names to prefer, and this is the part of the subject most baby-name sites skip. The classical guidance covers names with unpleasant or arrogant meanings, and the hadith literature records the Prophet changing the names of individuals whose names carried a bad sense. Names that claim divine attributes without the Abd prefix fall into this category for many scholars, as do titles such as "king of kings". Practice differs between schools and between families, and this is a question for an imam or a knowledgeable relative rather than for a website. What a website can usefully do is tell you the question exists.

Pronunciation, and why we do not respell

Arabic has consonants that English does not, including two distinct h sounds and an ayn, and no English respelling captures them without misleading you. We do not print pronunciation guides for Arabic names for that reason. The Quranic Arabic Corpus gives the standard scholarly transliteration alongside the Arabic script for every word in the Quran, which is the right place to check a form, and the most reliable guide is a speaker in the family or at the local mosque.