Calling someone named Abdul-Rahman Abdul is like calling them The
Abdul is not a name. It means servant of the, and it only makes sense joined to one of God's epithets, as in Abdul-Rahman, servant of the Most Merciful. Shortening it to Abdul, or calling him Mr Rahman, is a classic outsider's mistake. Traditional Arabic names are chains, and each link has a job.
The first link is the ism, the personal name. Most carry an everyday meaning, often an aspirational quality: Muhammad means praiseworthy and Ali means exalted. Because names double as ordinary words, Arabic newspapers sometimes put them in brackets or quotation marks to avoid confusion. Muhammad is so widespread that in parts of South and Southeast Asia it is abbreviated to Md. or Mohd., and people are called by their second name instead.
Next comes the nasab, the lineage, built with ibn, son of, or bint, daughter of. Ibn Khaldun means son of Khaldun, though Khaldun was in fact a distant ancestor. Early Muslims could be named after a mother as well: the companion ʿAmmār is known both as the son of Sumayya and as the son of Yasir. Under later Islamic law the nasab settled a child's legal father, meaning the man married to the mother at conception, rather than the biological one. According to one scholar, most Arab countries now leave out ibn and bint.
A laqab is an epithet that can be admiring, descriptive or rude. The caliph Harun al-Rashid's al-Rashid means the rightly guided, and many titles end in al-Din, of the faith, as in Salah al-Din. A nisbah links a family to a place, tribe or trade over generations: al-Halabi marks roots in Aleppo, and al-Khayyat means the tailor. Arabian dynasties may use Āl, meaning family, as in Āl Suʻūd, the House of Saud.
Then there is the kunya, a respectful but familiar form using abu, father of, or umm, mother of, in theory naming the eldest child. It can also be metaphorical: Abu Bakr, father of the camel foal, reportedly earned his name through kindness to camels. Arab Christians mostly share names with Muslims, apart from explicitly Islamic ones like Muhammad, and Abdul-Massih, servant of Christ, is a common Christian surname.
Source: Arabic name
