Ok, this has been bugging the hell out of me. Lately, I’ve noticed that when talking about the President of Iraq, he is commonly refered to solely by his first name. Many Dopers are doing it…even the news is doing it. What is inspiring everyone to talk about him on a first name basis? I never hear anybody call our presidents by Bill or George…and nobody ever called Hitler by Adolf…so why call him Saddam instead of Hussein?
(unless I’m misinformed and in Iraq the names are reversed so that Hussein actually IS his given name and Saddam is his family name…but even then, most Americans probably wouldn’t even know that which wouldn’t explain this first-name-basis thing)
oh, and sorry if I misspelled his name, or one of the words in this sentence beginning with m or s
What, so if the President of the United States was named “Joe Smith” and the new Prime Minister of Great Britain was named “Mortimer Smith,” the US government and media would run around claling him “Mortimer”?
“Husayn” is the most accurate transliteration direct from the Arabic script. The Library of Congress uses this system, and it is the same system used internationally by professional Arabic scholars.
Not everyone uses the same naming customs. I think you might find that in Arabic tradition, family names go first. So calling Saddam Hussein “Hussein” would be chummy and familiar, like calling George Bush “George”.
Think of Tokugawa Iyeasu: he is known to history as ‘Tokugawa’. He founded the Tokugawa Shogunate, not the ‘Iyeasu Shogunate’. That’s because his family name was Tokugawa, and Iyeasu was his personal name.
I always found it interesting that, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, people still feel the need to pronounce his name like it’s spelled “Sodom”. Might that have something to do with us not liking him? “Hell, he’s an asshole anyway, why should I learn to pronounce his name correctly?” That and the biblical reference.