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Popularity of Islamic and Persian Names in Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Nader Habibi
Nader Habibi
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Bu Ali Sina University Hamadan, Iran
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Abstract

One of the most important ways that the members of a society express their cultural preferences is through the names they select for their children. Whether it is made by the elder members of the extended family or the parents of the child, there is no doubt that the choice reveals something about the attitudes and values of the selectors through the name's origins and meaning.

In societies that enjoy a multilinguistic heritage, first names can be divided into categories according to their linguistic origins. This phenomenon is most visible in societies with long histories of encounters among various cultures. One such society is Iran, whose pre-Islamic Persian culture combined with the culture that was introduced by Muslim Arabs after they entered Iran on a religious crusade in the 7th century. While the Arab conquest did not cause the Persian language to be replaced by Arabic, its impact was nevertheless permanent in the thousands of Arabic words that entered into Persian along with the Arabic alphabet.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , May 1992 , pp. 253 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Author's note: I would like to thank Azita Eskandari, Parviz Azkaee, the employees of the Civil Status Registration Office in Hamadan, and the staff of the computer center in Bu Ali Sina University for their assistance and cooperation.

1 Richard, W. Bulliet, “Conversion to Islam and the Emergence of a Muslim Society in Iran”, Ne-hernia, Levtzion, ed., Conversion to Islam (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

2 The statistical significance of difference between these estimated ratios is tested using a test of significance between means for normal approximation to binomial distributions. For more explanation, see Marascuilo, A., Statistical Methods for Behavioral Sciences (New York, 1971), pp. 265–67.Google Scholar

3 See Alex, Inkeles and Smith, D. H., Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar