And no, it isn’t Mohamed/Muhammed/Mohammad; that’s another worrying statistic.
Imagine if in 1945 hundreds of Brits christened their newborn sons Adolf. That might have rattled us as a nation, right?
I feel similarly about the news that, last year, 583 baby boys in the UK were given the name Yahya.
Yes, hundreds of families saw fit to bestow on their little ones the name shared by the one-time leader of Hamas and the architect of the worst mass murder of Jews since Adolf’s days – Yahya Sinwar.
The Top 100 Boys’ Names of 2024 were released this week, and Yahya has really blown up.
It reportedly enjoyed a larger spike in popularity than any other male name. It leapt a staggering 33 places up the rankings, to become the 93rd most popular boy’s name.
First was the Muhammad spelling of the founder of Islam’s name… with 5,721 babies given the name. It was ranked first in five of nine regions in England and came 57th in Wales.
Other spellings of the name also made the list: Mohammed came in 21st place, with 1,760 given the name, and Mohammad in 53rd place, with 986.
As the Jewish Chronicle says, there’s no “definite correlation” between the spike in boys being called Yahya and an outburst of support for Yahya Sinwar. And yet it seems pretty clear something weird is going on. It’s the sudden leap in the popularity of Yahya that freaks me out.
The calendar year in which the most popular names were compiled started less than three months after Hamas’s pogrom of October 7, 2023. It’s a year in which Sinwar would have been in the news a lot, including when he was bumped off by the IDF in October 2024.
It was also a year in which the dimmest of the “pro-Palestine” set will have clogged up social media with gushing praise for Sinwar, calling him a “resistance fighter” and whatnot.
Can it really be a coincidence that as Hamas and its then top dog hit the headlines, the name Yahya rose higher up the rankings than any other boy’s name? Perhaps.
Not one baby boy was called Keir last year. That’s not surprising. It’s an old-fashioned name, and what’s more it is now associated with one of the lamest-duck PMs we’ve ever been saddled with.
And yet you don’t have to be a demographic doomerist to feel unnerved that while no boy was called Keir, 583 were called Yahya.
That where not one kid was named after the Prime Minister, 583 now share the name of one of the wickedest men of our times. It’s an Arabic form of John, apparently, but I’m not getting a John the Baptist vibe, more King Herod reverberations – platters and swords.
Here’s a more heartening story. Last week, Jimmy Pacheco, a Filipino migrant worker who spent 49 days in the clutches of Hamas after being kidnapped on 7 October, welcomed his new baby daughter to the world.
He called her Israela.
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Rhetorical questions are notoriously easy to answer.