Names For The Children
By Nayyer Ali, MD

My wife and I have two chil-dren, a three-year old daughter, and a two-year old son. Before their birth we went through a difficult process to name them. Coming up with good names for Muslim children raised in America turned out to be harder than we thought.

Shakespeare wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But a name is more than just a sound or a set of letters on a page. For all of us, it becomes our identity from a very early age, even if our parents prefer using nicknames for us. It is the rare person who changes his name, no matter how much he may have preferred something else.

Raising children in America creates some particular problems though. We do want our children to have Muslim names, but we also want them to have a name that does not make life a little harder for them. Many Muslim names use sounds that are not present at all in English, and so it makes its very difficult for Americans to pronounce correctly. As an adult, having an unusual name is mostly a minor inconvenience, but on the schoolyard it can be a source of ridicule and embarrassment. Children can be most inventive when name-calling, and having grown up in a home of four boys, all with a remarkable ability to insult and poke fun at the slightest provocation, I can certainly attest to that. It is only natural for parents to want to spare their children any unnecessary hardship or difficulty.

Among many Asian immigrants, especially from Vietnam and Korea, I have noticed a tendency for them to “adopt” an American name. They don't legally change their name, but they go by a common American name in the workplace. I find that somewhat disagreeable, and I think that certainly adults should be expected to learn a person's real name. Although Muslim immigrants have not gone down this road for the most part, many do have Americanized versions of their actual name. My brother Baber was known as “Bobby” most of his childhood, and often is called Bob, although I insist on calling him Baber, when I'm not calling him something else entirely.

This does however beg the question of what constitutes a “Muslim name”. I don't really know the answer. Clearly, names that appear in the Quran, names of the prophets, and names of the Sahaba would be good Muslim names. But there are a wide variety of names in Muslim countries that don't really fall into any of these obvious groups. And ethnically speaking, there are many names in Turkish, Persian, Urdu, or other non-Arabic languages that Muslims use in those countries that are not clearly derived from the Quran or religious terms. Names that are derived from un-Islamic deities (such as Venus, the goddess of beauty, or Diana) are a definite no-no, but how about all sorts of other names?

This desire to use Quranic names that are easy for Americans has created an interesting situation. In many Muslim schools we see several “Sarahs” and “Adams” running around. Both of those names were on our short list, but we eventually settled on some other choices. There are several Muslim names that are pronounced differently in America, and I suppose one could use the American version (Abraham instead of Ibrahim, Daniel instead of Danyal, Joseph rather than Yusuf), but I have not seen anyone actually do this on the legal name.

Most immigrants from East Asia have been naming their children with American names. This sometimes leads to the unusual situation in which the parent has a hard time correctly pronouncing the child's name. This use of American names is very common among Chinese and Korean immigrants, although many second generation Vietnamese have stayed with Vietnamese names. There are some in the Muslim community who think we should name our children with typical American names, but few, if any, have actually done this. On the other hand, names like Sarah and Adam allows one to have their cake and eat it to.

I still think that our names are part of our identity, and as Muslims we should preserve that. Having said that, it is ultimately the right of parents to decide this question on their own. So what did we name our children? Our girl is Aliza, and our boy is Zackaria Shah, and I only use their legal names when I'm mad at them.