Muhammad is surging in popularity as a boy’s name across the West, with the number of babies named after the founder of Islam increasing rapidly since the turn of the millennium.
An investigation by the Daily Mail audited official baby names in 11 European countries over the last 25 years and found massive rises in the number of boys called Muhammad, with Austria showing an increase of 732% since 2000 – the largest on the continent.
The authors of the study grouped five similar spellings in order to obtain their results, but with 35 different ways to spell the name noted that it was likely that their analysis “underrepresented the true figure”.
They found that one in 200 boys born in Austria is now named Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohammad, Mohamed or Mohamad. This compares to around one in 1,670 newborns with the same name 25 years ago.
In second place on the list was Ireland with a 372% rise in newborns named Muhammad, followed by Poland, Italy and France, with rises of 217%, 184% and 127% respectively.
The UK recorded similar results, with figures showing that 3% of all boys born in England and Wales last year were called Muhammad. Separate studies suggest this number is now closer to one in 10 (9%) in certain areas of the UK.
This has led the single spelling of Muhammad to overtake names like Oliver or Noah to become the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales for the second year in a row, with combined spellings topping the list for more than a decade.
Many countries, such as Germany which took about one million Syrian refugees and has similar percentage of Muslims to the UK, were not included in the analysis due to lack of publicly accessible data.
Regarding the recent popularity of the name, Alp Mehmet of Migrationwatch UK said that it was “not a surprise given the pace at which the Muslim population has grown”, with the country’s Islamic population more than doubling over the last 20 years.
“According to the census it went from just over 1.5 million in 2001 to just under 4 million in 2021. It is still growing. So, expect Muhammad to stay at the top of the pile for years to come,” Mr Mehmet said.
The trend is similar outside of Europe. In the United States, 2019 statistics show that Muhammad broke into the top ten boy’s names in the country for the first time ever, with the name rising over 600 places in popularity since the year 2000.
In Australia, data from the McCrindle group shows that the prevalence of Muhammad has skyrocketed over the last decade and a half.
Between 2010 and 2024, Muhammad experienced the fourth-highest increase in popularity, jumping 174 positions from outside the top 200 to now be among the top-40 most popular boy’s names in the country.
This follows a longer-term local trend, with Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph reporting in 2013 that “Muhammad is now officially one of the most popular baby names in Australia”.
This is especially so in New South Wales, with the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages revealing that year that Muhammad had been “sitting in the top quarter of NSW baby boy names for the last three years”.
In Victoria, 2025 figures show that Muhammad is now among the top 20 most popular boy’s names in the state.
The rise of the name Muhammad occurs amid an explosive growth in Islamic populations across the West.
A 2017 report from the Pew Research Centre noted that there were over 25 million Muslims in Europe in 2016, or around 5% of the population, with a “medium-migration” scenario pushing the Islamic population in Europe to 57 million by 2050.
This would make countries such as Sweden more than one-fifth Muslim by mid-century. The UK and France, meanwhile, would be more than 16% and 17% Islamic, with each country home to over 12 million Muslims by 2050.
In Australia, historian Geoffrey Blainey has written that because the Muslim “birthrate is very high, the Muslim proportion of the population will continue to grow”, with the Muslim population in Australia possibly reaching “10 per cent of the population sometime this century”.
Header image: Muslim men pray in the street in Lakemba, Sydney (Facebook).
