TASMIYAH AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAM: A THEORETICAL APPRAISAL OF MUSLIM YOUTHS' ATTITUDE TOWARD NAMING, WITH INSIGHTS FROM LAGOS STATE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Naming (Tasmiyah) in Islam is far more than administrative record-keeping: Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) treats it as a matter of al-Mu’āmalāt (interpersonal/social transactions) permissible by default, yet capable of sliding into makrūh (disliked) or ḥarām (forbidden) territory where a name betrays the tenets of the faith. Qur'anic injunction and prophetic tradition alike frame the naming of a child as among the earliest rights owed to that child by its parents, and as a marker of spiritual identity that persists into the Hereafter. Yet a growing number of Muslim youths today treat their given Islamic names with indifference, favouring Westernised nicknames and pseudonyms that obscure the spiritual and moral weight those names were chosen to carry. Using Muslim undergraduates at Lagos State University as an illustrative point of reference rather than a formal survey population, this article offers a theoretical appraisal of that shift, tracing its historical, religious, and socio-cultural underpinnings through classical Islamic scholarship, comparative naming practices, and the sociology of contemporary youth culture. It examines how globalisation, social media, and internalised identity struggles have accelerated the trend, and distinguishes it from the religiously sanctioned practices of Kunya (an honorific by-name) and Laqab (a descriptive epithet), which Islam permits precisely because they reinforce, rather than sever, a person's tie to religious identity. The article concludes that names in Islam function as vessels of meaning, virtue, and legacy, and that reclaiming their sanctity is essential to preserving Muslim identity in the modern world; it closes with recommendations for re-educating Muslim youth on the theological and cultural weight their names carry.