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The Mohammeds are taking over! Or are they?

Some stories just keep coming back, like zombies, or boomerangs, or boomerang-zombies. The "Mohammeds are taking over!" nonsense is getting to be such an annual event now that you can almost sense the weariness with which the ONS compiles its stats on popular baby names. Whatever they do, however they do it, the story - as far as the Mail, Telegraph and others - will be "Mohammeds are taking over (but the PC folk at the ONS want to keep it a secret!)".

Same thing last year, same thing this year - you can see my 2009 article about the Telegraph's efforts here, and you'll notice that not a great deal has changed if you pop over to the Telegraph's tale from this time around. I imagine it's marked out in the newsroom diaries in red pen, because it's an easy enough free hit for a hack in a hurry: a bit of listmaking, a bit of class prejudice against 'chavvy' names and a bit of "Oh my goodness! Those brown folk are reproducing at ungodly speed!" all wrapped up in one easy-to-C&V story.

Primly Stable points out:

The problem is, the Mail has had to fix the facts in order to make the story fit its readers' prejudices. As they admit halfway down the story, Mohammed is actually the 16th most popular name in Britain. But Home Affairs Correspondent Jack Doyle has taken the liberty of including various other spellings of the same name - Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed and so on - and added them all together in order to give the "true picture". The Office for National Statistics didn't feel the need to do this, but who are they to argue with the Mail's methodology?

Of course, Mohammed is the only name to get this treatment from the Mail. Alexs are not bundled in with Alexanders, Alixs and Alecksanders. Charlie and Charles are kept distinct. Thomas and Tom apparently have nothing in common at all.

The paper also fails to mention that naming your firstborn son after the prophet is a standard thing for Muslims, so there is always going to be a bias towards it

There is indeed. What makes that context important is the fact that the Telegraph is (once again) saying that the ONS is 'disguising the truth'. If you're going to say people are disguising the truth, you'd better be pretty sure not to do it yourself, I think. So, as No Sleep Til Brooklands points out, if you're going to add up spellings, then you really ought to do it for all the spellings, not just the scarily Islamic-sounding ones:

As someone who occasionally gets a mild semi-on over statistics, this isn't actually totally unreasonable, allowing for variations like that. However, if you're going to apply statistical massaging like this, you have to be, y'know, fair about it. By 'fair', I mean simply applying the same rules to everyone. So, if you're going to add up all the various spellings of 'Mohammed', then you should do the same for other names in the list.

So, I went to the source at the ONS There I found the full list: 2009 Baby Names Statistics Boys (.xls file - 535kb). Here, we discover that there are 127 Oliviers, 104 Oliwiers, 9 Olis, 9 Oliwers, 4 Olivers' (plural!), 4 Ollivers, and most significantly, 511 Ollies (with an additional 16 Ollis). Even just adding Oliver and Ollie together, we get to 7,875, putting it back above Mohammed into first place again (and it becomes 8,148 if you add all the above variants). And that's before we get onto the more controversial stuff about how 'Jack' is historically a diminutive of the name 'John' (although of course many would argue that the former has now become a name in its own right).

But let's assume Mohammed is the most popular boys' name, and it's right to add up all the spellings. Does that represent a scarily high amount of Muslim births? Tabloid Watch says:

The Mail says that when you add 12 other recognised variations of Mohammed together, the number of boys given that name in 2009 was 7,549 (out of 362,135 boys born).

Yet the ONS figures show that the number of boys given those same 12 names in 2008 was 7,673.

Overall, this accounted for 2.09% of all boys born in 2008, a very slightly higher number than the 2.08% in 2009.

Two per cent. Not quite as scary as all that, then, surely, especially when you put that two per cent into the context of cultural tradition giving a male child the name of the prophet. So did the Mail and Telegraph (and others) put the figures into that context? The Telegraph, to be fair to them, did say this:

Experts said the development reflected the name's overwhelming popularity among British Muslims rather than any "explosion" in the British Muslim population.

The only thing that seems a little odd is the 'explosion' in quotes, because I can't see anyone saying there has been an explosion. Nevertheless, the Telegraph has, to be fair to them, put the figures into some sort of context. It comes after saying that Mohammed is the 'secret' popular name and that the official figures 'disguise the truth', but still: I don't think they're trying to be scaremongering. The Mail has a slight bit of context, too, pointing out that Mohammed has appeared in the popular names list since 1944 - though it's actually been there since 1924 if you look at the data. You'll also see that the variant spellings of Mohammed have been kept separate for decades, and the variant spellings of other names too (Fred and Frederick kept apart in 1904, for example - wonder if the Mail and Telegraph did articles adding them up then?).

As I wrote yesterday, this kind of story carries with it a responsibility. This is the kind of thing that will be used by extremists and racists to paint a picture of Britain as a place where the Muslim birthrate is accelerating, where Mohammeds are taking over from Jacks and Johns, even if that's not the true or full picture. The onus on people reporting these stats, then, is to be fair and accurate, and place the data in context. If you don't, I think you run the risk of being seen as sending out dog-whistles, appealing to racists or trying to imply that somehow there's some kind of Islamification going on when really there isn't. That can be done deliberately or accidentally, of course; though when the same thing happens time after time, year after year, you have to wonder how much of an accident it can be.

This glimpse of the 'worst-rated' comments on the Mail website might give you a clue as to how some people have seen it:

"I'm Muslim" - CLICK TO DISAPPROVE! As I always say, you can't tell whether online comments, red or green arrows or anything like that really represents a readership in its entirety, or just online readers, or just readers of a certain mindset who look out for certain types of stories to try and skew polls, comments and so on to make their points of view appear more popular than they really are. However, all I do know is that it's pretty depressing to see that - and it's pretty depressing to think that the context into which the name Mohammed is popular has to come from online commenters, who are then voted well into the red. Does that represent a failure of journalism to put the facts into context, or a success of cherrypicking certain facts to create a false impression? I'll leave that up to you.

One last thing: it's been pointed out to me there might be a personal reason why the Mail writer took such an interest in the story:

By Jack Doyle - no wonder he was annoyed.

(Thanks to Chris F, wordwidewade, reevery, tabloidwatch, press_not_sorry and others.)

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