An intriguing little snippet from The Times article about the naming of children in 2008
“While Muhammad remains one of the most popular names for newborn boys in Britain - research by The Times last year showed that it was second only to Jack - it was not one of the more than 300 male names that appeared in Times birth announcements last year”
Well it is clearly not the case that British Muslims do not read The Times. Could it be that there is no Muslim tradition of announcing the birth of a baby in this way? Does it mean that few Muslims are members of the particular social group which uses The Times pages as a tribal notice board?
Or could it be that there are proportionately exactly the expected number of births of Muslim boys announced, but no Muhammad (or its spelling variants) for the same sort of reason that The Times contains few Darrens or Kylies – considered a thing not done, the sort of name given to a child only by social inferiors
There is of course no tradition of naming a baby boy Jesus in this country, but that applies to all classes
