However Arabic newspapers will occasionally place names in brackets, or quotation marks, to avoid confusion.
It indicates the person's heritage by the word ibn (ابن "son of", colloquially bin) or ibnat ("daughter of", also بنت bint, abbreviated bte.).
In later Islamic periods the nasab was an important tool in determining a child's father by means of describing paternity in a social (i.e. to whom was the mother legally married during the conception of the child), not a biological sense, because the father's biological identity can be grounds for speculation.
[2] Several nasab names can follow in a chain to trace a person's ancestry backwards in time, as was important in the tribal society of medieval Arabs, both for purposes of identification and for socio-political interactions.
Today, however, ibn or bint is no longer used (unless it is the official naming style in a country, region, etc.
An example is the name of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, which uses the definite article al-.
Harun is the Arabic version of the name Aaron and al-Rasheed means "the Rightly-Guided".
In ancient Arab societies, use of a laqab was common, but today is restricted to the surname, or family name, of birth.
It is a component of an Arabic name, a type of epithet, in theory referring to the bearer's first-born son or daughter.
Converts to Islam may often continue using the native non-Arabic non-Islamic names that are without any polytheistic connotation, or association.
Some common Christian names are: Some people, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, when descendant of a famous ancestor, start their last name with Āl "family, clan" (آل), like the House of Saud ﺁل سعود Āl Suʻūd or Al ash-Sheikh ("family of the sheikh").
If a reliably-sourced version of the Arabic spelling includes آل (as a separate graphic word), then this is not a case of the definite article, so Al (capitalised and followed by a space, not a hyphen) should be used.
Dynasty membership alone does not necessarily imply that the dynastic آل is used – e.g. Bashar al-Assad.
محمد بن سلمان بن أمین الفارسي Muḥammad ibn Salmān ibn Amīn al-Fārisī "Muḥammad, son of Salmān, son of Amīn, the Persian" This person would simply be referred to as "Muḥammad" or by his kunya, which relates him to his first-born son, e.g. Abū Karīm "father of Karīm".
To signify respect or to specify which Muḥammad one is speaking about, the name could be lengthened to the extent necessary or desired.
Non-Arabic speakers often make these mistakes: Conventionally, in Arab culture, as in many parts of the world, a person's ancestry and family name are very important.