The most popular name for baby boys in England and Wales today is Muhammad, and upon hearing this news, many people will shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” A hundred years ago, the most popular name for baby boys in England and Wales was John. Three quarters of a century before that, in 1850, it was William. More recently, fifty years ago, it was Paul. Now it’s Muhammad, and many will see no greater significance in that than in any of the earlier changes. Fashions in names, like fashions in everything else, come and go. Some will even charge that to think there is more to this than to earlier changes is “Islamophobic” and “bigoted.” And yet there is much more involved here than just that.
Fox News reported Thursday that “a spokesperson for the office spoke to Middle East news outlet The National, noting that the popularity of the name is clearly due to religious significance and the increasing Muslim population in the two countries – which has more than doubled since 2001. As the outlet reported, ONS ‘has previously said the name's dominance was due to a number of factors, including the increasing size of the Muslim community, which rose from 1.5 million in 2001, to 2.7 million people in 2011 and to 3.9 million in 2021.’" ONS is Britain’s Office for National Statistics.
Now, many will still insist that there is nothing amiss here. There are always movements of peoples and demographic changes. There are also, in the lives of nations, sometimes large-scale changes of religion. England and Wales were Roman Catholic half a millennium ago, until a king decided that he wanted a divorce, and now Roman Catholics comprise around eight percent of the population of those lands. So if the UK now has a large and rapidly growing Muslim population, it’s just another one of those shifts in its overall character, but the nation itself will go one as it always has. There will always be an England.
Well, maybe it will. But within another fifty years, the most popular baby name is most likely still to be Muhammad, and the transformation of British society will have been profound, to the extent that by then it will be obvious to everyone that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Britain underwent a massive societal change, although very few people noticed it was happening at the time, and most of those were rewarded for their noticing with stigmatization as “racists,” “bigots,” and “Islamophobes.”
The fact is, however, that the transition from “Noah,” the previous most popular name for baby boys, to “Muhammad” is not at all like the shift from “John” to “Paul.” The rapid growth of the Muslim population will have implications for Britain in virtually every aspect of society. This is because of the nature of Islam itself, as one contemporary Muslim scholar, Khurshid Ahmad of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, explains:
Islam is not a religion in the common and distorted sense, for it does not confine its scope to one's private life. It is a complete way of life and is present in every field of human existence. Islam provides guidance for all aspects of life - individual and social, material and moral, economic and political, legal and cultural, and national and international. The Qur'an enjoins man to embrace Islam without any reservation and to follow Allah's guidance in all areas of life.
Everything in Britain will be touched by this, for one of the key aspects of Allah’s guidance for the social and political realms is that there must not be equality of rights between Muslims and non-Muslims. The Qur’an directs Muslims to “fight against those do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (9:29).
“People of the book” is the Qur’an’s term primarily for Jews and Christians. This passage is a declaration of perpetual war against both groups, until they submit to the hegemony of Islamic law, pay the stipulated tax (jizya) and accept a constellation of humiliating and discriminatory regulations that ensure their second-class status in society.
This is what Britain has brought upon itself, for while many Muslims in Britain will ignore these directives, many others will not. As they watched with multiculti joy as Muhammad became the most popular name for babies in England and Wales, British leftists didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that they were signing the death warrant for their peaceful, free society that guaranteed equal justice under the law.
