Arabic name


Arabic names have historically been based on a long naming system. Many people from Arabic-speaking and also non-Arab Muslim countries have not had given, middle, and family names but rather a chain of names. This system remains in use throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Name structure

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The is the given name, first name, or personal name; e.g. "sami" or "Shamna". Most Arabic names have meaning as ordinary adjectives and nouns, and are often aspirational of character. For example, Muhammad means 'Praiseworthy' and Ali means 'Exalted' or 'High'.
The syntactic context will generally differentiate the name from the noun or adjective. However, Arabic newspapers will occasionally place names in brackets, or quotation marks, to avoid confusion.
In fact, the name Muhammad is so popular throughout parts of Africa, Arabia, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, that it is often represented by the abbreviation "Md.", "Mohd.", "Muhd.", or just "M.". In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, due to its almost ubiquitous use as a first name, a person will often be referred to by their second name:
  • Md. Dinar Ibn Raihan
  • Mohd. Umair Tanvir
  • Md. Osman

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The nasab is a patronymic or matronymic, or a series thereof. It indicates the person's heritage by the word ibn or ibnat. In the 1995 book Name Studies, wrote that, although the nasab was still common contemporarily, ibn and bint were omitted "in almost all Arab countries".
Ibn Khaldun means "son of Khaldun". Khaldun is the father's personal name or, in this particular case, the name of a remote male ancestor.
ʿAmmār ibn Sumayya means "ʿAmmār son of Sumayya". Sumayya is the personal name of ʿAmmār's mother, the same person can also be identified by his father's personal name "ʿAmmār ibn Yasir". In later Islamic periods the nasab was an important tool in determining a child's father by means of describing paternity in a social, not a biological sense, because the father's biological identity can be grounds for speculation. In early Islamic contexts this function is not yet well established. This stems from a legal principle introduced by Islam regarding the legal status of children and changes to waiting periods relating to divorce to establish an undisputed legal father for any child. This function only developing with Islam means that one can find many Companions of the Prophet bearing a maternal nasab, as the naming conventions reflected in their names still stem from pre-Islamic attitudes and beliefs.

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The laqab, pl. alqāb, can be translated to English as agnomen; cognomen; nickname; title, honorific; last name, surname, family name. The laqab could be purely descriptive of a person, express admiration or be insulting and derogatory.
An example is the name of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, which uses the definite article al-. ' is the Arabic version of the name Aaron and ' means "the Rightly-Guided".
The laqab was used as a regnal title by the caliphs. This was most prominent in Abbasid times, for example al-Manṣūr bi’llāh.
Another common form of is that of compounds ending with , , , or . Examples include Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, Shams al-Dīn, Nūr al-Dīn, Izz al-Din, Nāṣir al-Dawla, Niẓām al-Mulk, Sayf al-Islām.
In ancient Arab societies, use of a laqab was common, but today is restricted to the surname, or family name, of birth.

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The nisbah surname could be an everyday name, but is mostly the name of the ancestral tribe, clan, family, profession, town, city, country, or any other term used to show relevance. It follows a family through several generations. A demonym example is الحلبي al-Halabi, meaning that the person is originally from Aleppo or a descendant of people from Aleppo. For a profession example, الخياط al-khayyat meaning "the tailor".
The laqab and nisbah are similar in use, but they could be used simultaneously. For example: Sayf Al-Dīn Al-Halabi.

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A kunya is a teknonym in Arabic names. It is a component of an Arabic name, a type of epithet, in theory referring to the bearer's first-born son or daughter. By extension, it may also have hypothetical or metaphorical references, e.g. in a nom de guerre or a nickname, without literally referring to a son or a daughter. For example, Sabri Khalil al-Banna was known as Abu Nidal, "father of struggle".
Use of a kunya implies a familiar but respectful setting.
A kunya is expressed by the use of abū or umm in a genitive construction, i.e. "father of" or "mother of" as an honorific in place of or alongside given names in the Arab world.
A kunya may also be a nickname expressing the attachment of an individual to a certain thing, as in Abu Bakr, "father of the camel foal", given because of this person's kindness towards camels.

Common naming practices

Arab Muslim

A common name-form among Arab Muslims is the prefix ' combined with the word for God, or with one of the epithets of God. For example,
  • ',
  • '
  • '
As a mark of deference, is usually not conjoined with the prophet's names. Nonetheless, such names are accepted in some areas. Its use is not exclusive to Muslims and throughout all Arab countries, the name Abdul-Massih,, is a common Christian last name.
Converts to Islam may often continue using the native non-Arabic non-Islamic names that are without any polytheistic connotation, or association.

Arab Christian

Generally, Arab Christians have names indistinguishable from Muslims, with the exception of some explicitly Islamic names such as Muhammad, which are not usually borne by Christians. Some common Christian names are:
Some people, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, when descendant of a famous ancestor, start their last name with Āl "family, clan", like the House of Saud ﺁل سعود Āl Suʻūd or Al ash-Sheikh. Āl is distinct from the definite article. If a reliably-sourced version of the Arabic spelling includes آل, then this is a case of the definite article, so should be used. Ahl, which has a similar meaning, is sometimes used and should be used if the Arabic spelling is أهل.
Dynasty membership alone does necessarily imply that the dynastic آل is used – e.g. Bashar al-Assad.
ArabicMeaningTransliterationExample
ال'the'Maytham al-Tammar
آل'family'/'clan of'Bandar bin Abdulaziz Al Saud
أهل'tribe'/'people of'Ahl al-Bayt

Example

محمد بن سلمان بن أمین الفارسي

Muḥammad ibn Salmān ibn Amīn al-Fārisī
"Muḥammad, son of Salmān, son of Amīn, the Persian"
This person would simply be referred to as "Muḥammad" or by his kunya, which relates him to his first-born son, e.g. Abū Karīm "father of Karīm". To signify respect or to specify which Muḥammad one is speaking about, the name could be lengthened to the extent necessary or desired.

Common mistakes

Non-Arabic speakers often make these mistakes:
  • Separating "the X of Y" word combinations :
  • * With "Abdul": Arabic names may be written "Abdul ", but "Abdul" means "servant of the" or "follower of the" and is not, by itself, a name. Thus for example, to address Abdul-Rahman bin Omar al-Ahmad by his given name, one says "Abdul-Rahman", not merely "Abdul". If he introduces himself as "Abdul-Rahman", one does not say "Mr. Rahman" ; instead it would be Mr. al-Ahmad, the latter being the family name. Therefore, it is better to write "Abdul Rahman" as "abdu r-rahmān" and "abdul ghafār" as "abdu l-ghafār".
  • * People not familiar with Arabic sandhi in iḍāfah: Habībullāh = "beloved of God "; here a person may in error report the man's name as "forename Habib, surname Ullah". Likewise, people may confuse a name such as Jalālu-d-dīn as being "Jalal Uddin", or "Mr. Uddin", when "Uddin" is not a surname, but the second half of a two-word name. To add to the confusion, some immigrants to Western countries have adopted Uddin as a surname, although it is grammatically incorrect in Arabic outside the context of the associated "first name". Even Indian Muslims commit the same error. If a person's name is Abd-ul-Rahim, others may call him Mr. Abdul which would sound quite odd to a native speaker of Arabic.
  • Not distinguishing ' from ': Some Arabic names include the Arabic word '. Here, ⟨ʻ⟩ represents the ayin, a voiced pharyngeal fricative, ⟨ʾ⟩ represents the hamza, a glottal stop, and ⟨l⟩ is spelled and pronounced at ordinary length, /l/. In ', the l is written twice and pronounced twice as long, as /l/ or /ll/. In Arabic pronunciation, ' and ' are clearly different. But Europeans, Iranians, and Indians may not pronounce some Arabic sounds as a native Arabic speaker would, and thus tend to pronounce them identically. For example, the name ' is sometimes misspelled as ' by Europeans and Indians. There is another name ', which uses both distinctly. Therefore, the name "علاء" must be written in Latin in the form of "Halāʾ " or "Halaa'e" to differentiate it between "Allāh" the name of God in Arabic, and also the female name آلاء "Ālāʾ " Which means "blessings".
  • Taking ' or ' for a middle name: As stated above, these words indicate the order of the family chain. English-speakers often confuse them with middle names, especially when they are written as "Ben", as it is the case in some countries. For example, Sami Ben Ahmed would be mistakenly addressed as Mr. Ben Ahmed. To correctly address the person, one should use Mr. Sami or Mr. Sami Ben Ahmed.
  • Grammar: As between all languages, there are differences between Arabic grammar and the grammar of other languages. Arabic forms noun compounds in the opposite order from Indo-Iranian languages, for example. During the war in Afghanistan in 2002, a BBC team found in Kabul an internally displaced person whose name they stated as "Allah Muhammad". This may be a misspelling for ', for if not, by the rules of Arabic grammar, this name means "the Allah who belongs to Muhammad", which, assuming the person is an Arabic speaking Muslim would be unacceptable religiously. However, by the rules of Iranian languages and most languages of India, this name does mean "Muhammad who belongs to Allah", being the equivalent of the Arabic "Muhammadullah". Most Afghans speak Iranian languages. Such Perso-Arab or Indo-Arab multilingual compound names are not uncommon in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan. There is, for example, the Punjabi name Allah-Ditta which joins the Arabic Allah with the Punjabi Ditta "given".