The two Ahmeds I know both pronounce the name differently.
Ahmad Chebanni, a businessman in Michigan, pronounces his name “uh-MOD”
And Ishmael Ahmed, director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, pronounces it with the unvoiced pharyngeal sound Johanna mentioned.
I didn’t articulate this in my previous post, but this surprises me - if I remember the way he spoke, I guess George H. W. Bush had the name right all along.
My guess: even though he’s ethnically Arab (the last name is Arabic), he has chosen Americanized pronunciation. Many people do that when moving to another country, they keep their original names but pronounce them according to the phonetics of the new linguistic environment. This has become so taken for granted that when radio journalist María Hinojosa pronounces her name accurately in Spanish (while speaking English), she gets complaints from English-only listeners. It seems a little startling to the ear to have it adjusted to American English phonemes, when the speaker suddenly breaks into Spanish and then back to English. But you know what? It’s the Northeasterners who mainly complain about this, because they’re not used to hearing Spanglish in everyday life. Someone from the Southwest might not even notice anything unusual in Ms. Hinojosa’s diction.
The Americanized pronunciation you described, uh-MOD, has always been used for jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. I think it’s an assimilation with the vowel pattern in Jamāl (pronounced juh-MAHL). Possibly Mr. Chebanni was listening to the radio, heard a DJ spin a side by uh-MOD Jamal, and made a mental note to himself: “So that’s how they pronounce it in America. I will be American.”
I think I’m gonna go out and buy an Isuzu “Hunger”.
hombre = man
hambre = hunger
You obviously never heard ads for the Isuzu Hombre, then.
Nope, but now I get what you’re saying. Heh.
Just as I read the title of this thread, someone in the office mentioned sending in a form to Occ Med. It was definitely “Ahk-med”. ::twilight zone theme::
Once I had to say the Arabic name Yahyá over the phone to an American. I should have just said, “I’ll spell it for you: Y-A-…” But I pronounced it the Arabic way, including the vowelless pharyngeal /H/. 
I might as well have been speaking Martian. I could easily visualize her perplexed face as she struggled to repeat back, “Yock-Yock?”
I’ve had the same experience saying names like Ali or Uthman to American speakers. They would no more be able to repeat what I just said than if I had been speaking humpbackwhalish or mockingbirdian.