Pakistan Naming Convention (PNC)

Wrote something on cricket this week ... dont mind eh!

When Yousuf Youhanna converted to Islam, the name he chose for himself was Mohammad Yousuf. What stuck me was not that he chose to convert to Islam but the fact that his new name's last name was taken from his old name's first name. That struck me as odd.

Thinking about this, I realized that no one abuses the sanctity of first and last names more than people from Islam. I always knew that Islam in itself had a paucity of names. That is why Mohammad is the most common name in the world. It wouldn't surprise me to know if Mohammad was always the most common last name in the world.

So I decided to look at the Pakistan cricket team and tried to see just how widespread this abuse is. Turns out, a lot.

A quick google search gave me the names of the 229 cricketers who have either represented Pakistan in Test Cricket or One-Day cricket.

Out of the 229, as many as 80 cricketers have first names that are also last names of some other Pakistani cricketer. Conversely, as many as 89 players had last names which were first names of some pak cricketer!

All in all, there were 131 cricketers whose either first names matched someone else's last name or last name matched someone else's first name. Thats more than half of them! That means when you come into the Pak side to play circket, there is a more than 50% probability that either your first name is someone else's last name or vice versa!

I know I have used 'first name' and 'last name' more than 10 times in the article so far ... so let's get down to specifics. The crazy in me wanted to form the longest string possible of people whose last names were someone else's first name.

The longest I could go was 13. If any of you can get a longer string, I'd be very interested to look at it.

I started with Asif Masood.
Then I came across Masood Anwar.
That led me to Anwar Khan.
which bought me to Khan Mohammad (LOL!!! I found this name extremely funny ... Khan Mohammed ... can you get anymore generic than that!!)
That brought me to Mohammed Asif
which I found linked to Asif Iqbal
which was similar to Iqbal Qasim
who I hope wasnt related to Qasim Umar
whose last name matched Umar Gul
who I likened to Gul Mohammed
who is kinda like Mohammed Wasim
who is a close match to the cool Wasim Akram
who also shares part of the name with Akram Raza!!

So let's go again
Asif Masood --> Masood Anwar --> Anwar Khan --> Khan Mohammed --> Mohammed Asif --> Asif Iqbal --> Iqbal Qasim --> Qasim Umar --> Umar Gul --> Gul Mohammed --> Mohammed Wasim --> Wasim Akram --> Akram Raza.

Out of the 229 players, 10% of them either had Mohammad as their first name or last name (23). Second most common name is Khan ... But you all knew that already!

Here is what I found surprising ... in all the common names, I couldnt find a single example of 2 players who had their first and last names interchanged. Surprises me for sure. But I am sure that in a small village in Pakistan, there is a cricketing prodigy growing up right now by the name of Mohammed khan! :)

Amen to that!

Listed below are all players whose FIRST names match someone else's LAST name. How many of the below can you find players with matching last names? :) (Might be an exercise only for Saumil & Kelkar)

Shahid Afridi (eg. Haafiz Shahid)
Akhtar Sarfraz
Akram Raza
Ali Naqvi
Anwar Hussain
Anwar Khan
Arif Butt
Ashraf Ali
Asif Iqbal
Farooq Hamid
Fazal Mahmood
Gul Mohammad
Hanif Mohammad
Hasan Raza
Iqbal Qasim
Israr Ali
Javed Miandad
Javed Qadeer
Kabir Khan
Khan Mohammad
Mahmood Hussain
Masood Iqbal
Mohammad Yousuf
Mushtaq Ahmed
Nazar Mohammad
Pervez Mir
Qasim Umar
Rana Naved-ul-Hasan
Rashid Latif
Saeed Anwar
Sajjad Akbar
Sarfraz Nawaz
Sikander Bakht
Sohail Fazal
Umar Gul
Wasim Akram
Wazir Mohammad
Younis Khan
Zahid Ahmed