What's in a Name?

Names are necessary evils. May be in ancient times, it didn’t make much of a difference because they lived in homogenous societies. But in heterogeneous societies it does. Names are the best and easiest way to segregate and discriminate in the name of caste, religion, region etc. I have faced many instances when name became important to the other person, either to praise me or humiliate me and most of the times hurting without an intention to hurt.

The segregation in the name of religion is possible because unfortunately one particular language is seen as the official language of a religion. Though over the years, religions became universal, it failed to do away with the language of the carriers of the message. By fault Europe has become the mother land of Christianity though Jesus was born in Asia. So in India, you will often see English names for Christians. The same way Islam couldn’t segregate itself from Arabic. A person might not understand a single word of Arabic but can recite the holy Quran by heart. I never understood this phenomenon. The knowledge imbibed in the great book still eludes him and he has to depend on those narrow minded Mullahs to tell him what to do.

Coming back to names, Muslims mostly keep Arabic or Persian names. Persians were the first great civilization to accept Islam. The Muslims who first established on the throne of Delhi were close to this language. Hence Persian was the courtly language. Urdu was borne out of the mixture of Persian and Hindi. Never mind that Urdu isn’t seen as an Indian language by most Indians. It’s more irritating when people think it is the mother tongue of all Muslims in the world.

Whenever anyone converts to Islam, he changes his name as well as if changing the faith wasn’t enough to make him a good Muslim. Would Mohammed Ali become lesser Muslim if he would have retained his maiden name! Of course there is exception to everything. Like I knew a person whose name was 'Rose Khan'. Think again if you thought only Punjabis are capable of doing that. This stereotype is further subverted by Arab Christians who refer to God as “Allah” underlying the fact that Allah isn’t the Muslim god, rather it’s a word in Arabic which means The God.

My name is in Arabic. Baharul Islam means Sea of peace which I think is beautiful. That I’m not peace loving is a different matter. Once I had translated my name in Bengali and tried to play mischief on one of my classmates in college. First two years she couldn’t forgive me for this and in last two years she has been making fun of it.

What prompted me to write this post is Varun Gandhi’s reference to Muslim names recently. He thinks Muslims have scary names…’Karimullah, Mazharullah’. I don’t disagree. But what I want to point out is that Varun is his middle name. His first name is Feroze which in the popular milieu sounds like a Muslim name. What do they say – Sheeshe ke ghar mein rehnewalo ko doosro ke ghar mein patthar nahin phenkna chahiye.