The significance of a name is not just for identification as it also has religious connotation, this informs China banning Islamic baby names among it’s mainly Muslim Uyghur minority population to curtail influence of Islam.
Chinese government attributed strongly flavoured Islamic names as the cause of restiveness in some part of the country. Children in the northwestern region of Xinjiang with the banned names could be denied access to health care and education under a household registration system.
Officials in the western region of Xinjiang, where roughly half of China’s 23 million Muslims live, released a list of banned baby names.
“You’re not allowed to give names with a strong religious flavor, such as Jihad or names like that,” one Xinjiang official told Radio Free Asia. “The most important thing here is the connotations of the name … (it mustn’t have) connotations of holy war or of splittism (Xinjiang independence).”
Islam, Quran, Mecca, Jihad, Imam, Saddam, Hajj, and Medina were some of the dozens of baby names banned under ruling Chinese Communist Party’s “Naming Rules For Ethnic Minorities,” an official told Radio Free Asia last week.
Human Rights Watch, called the restriction “absurb.” “Violent incidents and ethnic tensions in Xinjiang have been on the rise in recent years, but the government’s farcically repressive policies and punishments are hardly solutions.”
Xinjiang authorities also had imposed a rule outlawing the wearing of “abnormal” long beards or veils in public places, a violation of domestic and international protections on the rights to freedom of belief and expression according to Human Rights Watch.
