‘Muhammad’ is once again the most popular name for baby boys, as it has been for over ten years
Many will 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 there 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, everyone will take for granted 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 who did notice it 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. Soon those implications will be obvious and unmistakable.
Muhammad — most popular baby name for boys in the UK
Islam Channel, July 9, 2026 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
For the third year in a row, Muhammad is the most popular name for baby boys born in 2025 in England and Wales.
In 2025, 5,957 boys were named ‘Muhammad’, while ‘Noah’ was the second most popular, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). ‘Leo’ moved up two spots to third place, passing ‘Oliver’ and ‘Arthur’.
This spelling of the Prophet’s name (PBUH) has been among the top 10 most popular names for baby boys in England and Wales since 2016.
Although ‘Muhammad’ by itself did not lead the rankings before 2023, when you add other spellings of the name, it has been at the top of the charts for more than ten years.
Two other spellings of the name are also in the top 100 for 2024 — ‘Mohammed’ (20) and ‘Mohammad’ (55)….
The ONS counts each spelling of a name separately and has said that combining similar spellings would make things confusing, since it would require making a ‘subjective decision’ about names.
“So to make a fair comparison either all names should be treated separately or all names on the list should be combined with names that have a similar spelling,” it said in a blog in 2016….
So, you could add together all the various spellings for the name Noah, like the French NOE, or NO-ahh, or the Canadian way NO-eh.
I wonder what the most popular name in British prisons is?
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