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Obama: What’s in a Name?

[jack dorsey / Flickr]

Things aren’t so different, it seems, from Romeo and Juliette’s day, when names meant everything. Barack Obama detractors have used his middle name — Hussein — to imply falsely that he’s a Muslim. More recently, though, Obama’s name has been attracting positive attention.

Not too long ago, Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Middle-East history professor and Obama fan, wrote a paean to his candidate’s name:

It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. […]

Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the Republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names […]

Barack is a Semitic word meaning “to bless” as a verb or “blessing” as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. […]

Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. […]

The other thing to say about grandfathers named Hussein is that very large numbers of African-Americans probably have an ancestor ten or eleven generations ago with that name, in what is now Mali or Senegal or Nigeria. And, since so many thousands of Arab Muslims were made to convert to Catholicism in Spain after 1501, many Latinos have distant ancestors named Hussein, too. In fact, since there was a lot of Arab-Spanish intermarriage, and since there was subsequent Spanish intermarriage with other European Catholics, more European Americans are descended from a Hussein than they realize. The British royal family is quite forthright about the Arab line in their ancestry going back to Andalusia. […]

So, anyway, Obama’s first two names mean “Blessing, the Good.” If we are lucky enough to get him for president, we can only hope that his names are prophetic for us.

To underscore his point, Cole also lists American patriots from John Adams to John Abizaid whose names have Semitic origins.

Across the Atlantic in Guinea Bissau, one family just named their baby boy Obama. (This comes via Sarolta Cump.) The proud father explains why:

People may ask why I’ve named him after Senator Obama, as I’m not a US citizen. The reason is that we share the same planet – the Earth. Everything that happens in America has repercussions throughout the world. I sympathize a great deal with the transparent, realistic, and progressive ideas and convictions of Senator Obama. Obama is the Best! That’s why I am confident, with Senator Obama in the White House, that the world will become more open and produce more smiling children.

Although “Obama” isn’t the Semitic part of Barack Obama’s name, you can imagine Professor Cole cheering.