Abu...Um

Maybe you will find this post a little strange for you, but it is worth to read.

When you call someone, you either call him by his first name or using his/her family name with Mr. Mrs. or Miss before it. According to your knowledge of that person.

In Iraq it’s a little different. You call him/her with the first name but after getting married and have a child you call him with his/her son/daughter name but you put the word Abu which means ‘Father of’ like Abu Ali means father of Ali and if he has a daughter you call him Abu Zainab for example. For mothers you put the word Um before the name of the child which means ‘mother of’. It’s done to show more respect than using his/her first name especially for old people. I know many people by their Abu or Um and I don’t know their real names, because they don’t use them any more.

For me I like to be called by my name (which I’m not going to tell you what it is) but in the shops near my house, some neighbors and some friends they use to call me with my daughter’s name, I feel so old when they call me like this, but they will not accept to call me with my first name it’s like insulting or something like that.

If your first child was a daughter and later you have a son , people will start to call you with your son’s name instead of the daughter’s, some parents refused to change that (I agree with them, what’s wrong with a girl!)

If you are old and you don’t have any children for any reason, no problem we have prepared some names that suite some common males names, for examples: if your name is Mohammed, your alias name will be Abu Jasim. and this name comes because our prophet had a boy named Kasim and died when he was young (and later Kasim turned into Jasim). If your name is Khaled, your alias name will be Abu Waleed and this comes from the great Arab army leader Khaled bin Al Waleed. and if your name is Ali your alias name will be Abu Hussien since Imam Ali’s son was Hussien. and so on. If you have uncommon name your alias name will be Abu yaqoob (Jacob). But we don’t have alias names for females, so when a man calls an old female or calls a woman, he calls her either Hijia ( I explained that below),or Ukhti which means my sister ( if she was younger than him) or ‘Sit’ and it’s something similar to Mrs. and sometimes madam and you know what does it mean.

I decided to write this post when I read some comments in Abu Khaleel’s blog and most of the people who wrote the comments they used the name Abu (thinking that this was his first name) with out the full name, it should be written Abu Khaleel as a one name.
It is worth mentioning that Iraqi soldiers were also called Abu Khaleel for some reason.

For an old persons, who we don’t know his/her alias name, or meet for the first time, we call him/her haji/hijia. and this name is usually given to a person after he/she goes to Mecca for pilgrimage.


PS: My next post will be on Depleted Uranium (DU).