Re: My column on Aaliyah (and Aliyah and Alia)
in reply to a message by clevelandkentevans
I'm delighted to know the connection between African Americans and Muslim names - thank you! I've never encountered any variant of Aliyah in South Africa, though we don't keep naming statistics so it's hard to know. But we do have a considerable Muslim population, many of them descended from slaves brought here by the Dutch from their colonies, including Indonesia. Mohammed is widely used, of course, and Khadija for women, with various spellings.