Arabic name

Name structure

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• Md. Dinar Ibn Raihan
• Mohd. Umair Tanvir
• Md. Osman

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Common naming practices

Arab Muslim

Arab Christian

• Arabic versions of Christian names.
• Names of Greek, Armenian, and Aramaic or Neo-Aramaic origin.
• Use of European names, especially French, Greek and, to a lesser extent, Spanish ones. This has been a relatively recent centuries-long convention for Christian Arabs, especially in the Levant. For example: Émile Eddé, George Habash, Charles Helou, Camille Chamoun.
• Names in honor of Jesus Christ:
• Abd al-Ilāh is a Christian equivalent to the common Muslim name Abdullah.

  Dynastic or family name

Example

Common mistakes by foreigners

• Separating "the X of Y" word combinations :
• * With "Abdul": Arabic names may be written "Abdul ", but "Abdul" means "servant 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.
• * 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 ʻalāʾ from Allah: Some Muslim names include the Arabic word ʻalāʾ. 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 Allāh, the l is written twice and pronounced twice as long, as /l/ or /ll/. In Arabic pronunciation, ʻalāʾ and Allāh 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 ʻAlāʾ al-dīn is sometimes misspelled as Allāh al-dīn. There is another name ʻAlaʾ-Allah, which uses both distinctly.
• Taking bin or ibn for a middle name: As stated above, these words indicate the order of the family chain. Westerners often confuse them with middle names, especially when they're 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 Ahmed or Mr. 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 ʻalāʾ, for if not, by the rules of Arabic grammar, this name means "the Allah who belongs to Muhammad", which 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 Arabo-Iranian or Arabo-Indian mixed-language compound names are not uncommon in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan. There is, for example, the Pakistani/Indian name Allah-Ditta which joins the Arabic Allah with the Punjabi Ditta "given".

  Arab family naming convention

• Saleh is his personal name, and the one that his family and friends would call him by.
• ibn translates as "son of", so Tariq is Saleh's father's name.
• ibn Khalid means that Tariq is the son of Khalid, making Khalid the grandfather of Saleh.
• al-Fulan would be Saleh's family name.

Arabic names and their Biblical equivalent

• The popular romanization of the Arabized and Hebrew names are written first, then the standardized romanization are written in oblique. Notice that Arabized names may have variants.
• If a literal Arabic translation of a name exists, it will be placed after the final standardized romanization.
• If an Arabic correlation is ambiguous, will be placed following the name in question.
• : * Yassou' is the Arab Christian name, while ʿĪsā is the Muslim version of the name, as used in the Qur'an. There is debate as to which is the better rendition of the Aramaic Yeshua, because both names are of late origin.
• : ** Youhanna is the Arab Christian name of John, while Yahya is the Muslim version of the name, as used in the Qur'an. They have completely different triconsonantal roots: H-N-N vs H-Y-Y. Specifically, Youhanna may be the Biblical John the Baptist or the apostle. Yahya refers specifically to John the Baptist.
• El, the Hebrew word for strength/might or deity, is usually represented as īl'' in Arabic, although it carries no meaning in classical and modern Arabic. The only exception is its usage in the archaic Iraqi dialect.

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