I dont get it when a female takes her husband’s family name after they are married.. wouldnt that make him her fahter? wouldnt that make her children her siblings?
Why would you change the name that you have been born with? the name of your father and his father? do they suddenly become disgracing after you get married? you should be proud of the name of the person who raised you well and couldnt wait to to see the day that you get married in that beautiful white dress.. and how do you thank him? you dont use his name anymore..
Also why do they call the parents after the name of their first son and not first child? I know a man who was called abu Zeina for 13 years and then after his son was born people changed it to abu Zaid.. sometimes he does not reply saying he is not used to it he forgets that people are calling him..
maybe its tradition, but what was the person who did it first thinking?
I think in the West, the idea used to be more clear that a newlywed couple ‘left’ their families to start a new one. The first loyalty became one another, not their parents.
One still stays close to their parents and loves them, cares for them, stays connected. I was honored to take my husband’s name. Most women keep their maiden name as a middle name, so it is not any less revered, much less disgraced. It’s just a different cultural expression of marriage.
I find it difficult when a husband has greater allegiance to his mother than his wife.
You can totally understand it if you consider the historical context. This thing is not a purely Arab thing since we also see it in Europe and other regions around the world.
So perviously when people used to be divided into tribes and clans, the tribe’s survival depended on the survival and well being of all of its members. Thus they would defend one another. If somebody married a woman from another tribe, then she would acquire his family name (tribe name) to be identified with his tribe so that she would be one of them, defended by the tribesmen ..etc. It didn’t happen the other way around because men where dominant in those times. This was probably because men were required to hunt for food and provide protection against wild animals and/or rivaling tribes. So that is why i think the changing of the family name is inherited from that very old tradition. I’ve seen a program where scientists speculate that things of that sort were happening very early on in the human development.
As for calling people after their sons not daughters, this is also understandable within that context. Sons add to the male population of a tribe which makes it stronger and presumably more prosperous if they can have more people to hunt and defend. Thus calling somebody by their son’s name was deemed better than calling by a daughter’s name back then.
I think there are many such primal things we inherited from the early days of human development. For example, why have leaders been traditionally men not women ? and why were they usually big, bulky, macho men rather than skinny intellectual people like we have now ? I think that is because a tribe with a macho bulky man looks scarier to attack and seems more powerful than otherwise, and thus this would ward off potential rivals.
By the way, when i speak of tribes i don’t mean Arab tribes .. i mean a collection of humans that live together, hunt together, and defend each other. And i am talking about it in terms of very early humans .. so not the 2000 years ago Arab tribes.
I think this makes sense, don’t you ?
hehe .. i just realized the comment is longer than the original post
.. but it is an interesting subject 
Kinzi: God bless you and your husband, I wish you all the luck
I totally understand what you mean by the mother allegiance, I dont have enough experience but I think that if a man is smart enough he wouldnt make sides, a mother is a mother and I think that if the man was not good to his mother (whether she is good or bad) he can never be good to his wife, and yet his wife should be the main female in his life and should be accepted as that by eveyone..
Za3tar: WOW.. thanks for all the great information, its nice to know.. but still we have changed so much since our direct grandprents, even parents, how come we are holding on to these two traditions? and maybe there are a lot of other things that we have inherited and never stop to think about
P.S: you can write as much as you want, this is what my blog is for, and I thank you for taking the time to exlain
Princess, May God bless you with a husband like mine, who has a mother who adores you
Wow.. you brought up a lot of great points. For my mom, she never changed her last name, and I don’t think any female should. Also, the name after he first son, I think it is an Arabic tradition. I am not 100% sure. Maybe time to dig up the history!
Kinzi: allah iykhaleekom laba3ad