A number of papers seem to have got themselves into a sufficient pickle over whether or not Muhammad is the most popular name in this country that Hacked Off has decided it’s a good opportunity to take a pop at the press. The Muhammad story cropped up this week because of a survey from a fun-sounding website called BabyCentre which claimed the name was top of the league when actually their data only covered 56,000 women who gave birth ‘in 2014’ (even though 2014 isn’t over yet). The Office for National Statistics has Muhammad in at 15th, and so Hacked Off is accusing the papers of ‘churnalism’.
But the reality is a bit more complicated. Yes, Muhammad is 15th on the ONS list for England and Wales, with 3,499 baby boys given than name in 2013. But that doesn’t take account of the 2,887 Mohammeds and the 1,059 Mohammads. Those three different spellings of the name add up to 7,445 boys given variations of the name Muhammad.
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