Beijing: Authorities in Western China have barred parents from naming their children many Muslim Names in order to make the area more secular.
Some of the banned names are “Imam, Hajj, Turknaz, Azhar, Wahab, Saddam, Arafat, Medina and Cairo along with “Muhammad, Jihad and Islam” among the list of 29 names to be strictly banned in the heavily Muslim religion.
If a parent chooses one of the barred names, the child will be denied government benefits, Fox News reports.
The naming restrictions are part of a government’s effort to secularize Xinjiang, which is home to roughly 10 million Uighurs, Turkic people who mostly follow Sunni Islam.
Apart from prohibition of Islamic Names, the Xinjiang government strongly discourages Islamic veils and some of the officials have expressed their opinions on bans of mosques with domes, as reported in dailypost.