Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Yes, Muhammad is the No1 baby name in this country. So what?

A number of papers seem to have got themselves into a sufficient pickle over whether or not Muhammad is the most popular name in this country that Hacked Off has decided it’s a good opportunity to take a pop at the press. The Muhammad story cropped up this week because of a survey from a fun-sounding website called BabyCentre which claimed the name was top of the league when actually their data only covered 56,000 women who gave birth ‘in 2014’ (even though 2014 isn’t over yet). The Office for National Statistics has Muhammad in at 15th, and so Hacked Off is accusing the papers of ‘churnalism’.

But the reality is a bit more complicated. Yes, Muhammad is 15th on the ONS list for England and Wales, with 3,499 baby boys given than name in 2013. But that doesn’t take account of the 2,887 Mohammeds and the 1,059 Mohammads. Those three different spellings of the name add up to 7,445 boys given variations of the name Muhammad. That’s 496 more little babies than the most popular name with one spelling, Oliver, though one might similarly count Oliver (6,949) and Ollie (800) together. This isn’t new – Mohammed’s rise was a story first broken by Fraser six years ago and reported on Coffee House.

One of the reasons the BabyCentre’s survey got such pickup is that people are always interested in whether William or Harry or Oliver is the most popular name, and partly because it does suggest our country has changed in some way. Yes, Muslim mothers tend to have more children. But they’re also less likely to call those children ‘Conan’ or ‘Sansa’ (as in Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones – four of whom were registered 2012). Muslims tend to choose from a smaller number of Koranic names, which is why these names feature relatively high in these name league tables – not just in Britain, but across the Western world.

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Isabel Hardman
Written by
Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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