Muslim names

and coming to think of it i have met a few karims without knowing that they are supposed to be "abdul karims" actually.
conjectures as to an explanation?

Edited by: mathilda

#10 -- Apparently I haven't made myself clear.

Rashid, Karim, Latif, and the others I listed at #2 are names that can be both personal names as they stand but are also names of God which therefore can be the second half of an "Abdul" personal name. So the names Rashid, Karim, Latif, Muqtadir, Abdur Rashid, Abdul Karim, Abdul Latif, Abdul Muqtadir etc. are all possible personal names.

That's not true with all the names or God. I don't think a human boy can be called Qadir (the destiner, the controller of destiny) although Abdul Qadir is possible. I don't know about the others you include at #7.

Razzaq means "provider".

Abdul Masih, Servant/worshipper of Christ/the Messiah, is a pretty common Christian name. The Shiites use Abd 'Ali and Abdul Hussein.

abdul is short for abdullah or the slave of the almighty, thus the almighty has 99 names and all of them can be preceded with Abdul.

Note that Arabs don't use "abdul" as a short version of any name, though. It's only in non-Arabic-speaking countries that someone named, say, Abdus Salaam might treat Abdus as his first name and Salaam as his second name.

Back in the seventies, the FBI ran a sting operation (code-named Abscam) that caught several congressmen and one senator accepting bribes from a supposed Arab sheikh, who claimed to head a business called Abdul Enterprises. Had the legislators been more linguistically sophisticated, they would have smelled a rat right there.