> Basically only religious persons names their kids Mohammed, those who quit the religion will not put the burden of that name on their kids.

That might hold true for first names (even though I am not entirely sure), but when it comes to last names, it is a complete crapshoot.

I changed my last name when I was 14 (entirely for unrelated reasons), but the old one I had contained a form of "Mohammed" in it. Without giving it away, I will just say that some popular MMA fighters these days have different forms of the same last name as mine used to be.

My mom's side of the family is religious, but they are eastern orthodox christian. My dad's side (from which I inherited my old last name) is entirely atheist, but it just so happened that at some point in time about 4-5 generations ago, there were ancestors on his side who were religious muslims.

And given that in my old country the last names of children are always automatically taken from the father (barring rare exceptions), it ended up propagating 4-5 generations down with no actually religious people in the loop at all. What makes it even more bizarre to people irl who know this is that my dad has that "blond hair blue eyes" look.

Let's assume that's true (that some "religious" names are more religious than others). All that really tells you is that such a such person was given the name by a religious parent, or from a culture where religiosity is the norm. It doesn't tell you about that person's own religiosity, whether they had to struggle with it growing up, how much of it they wanted to keep when they started school or work in the West, how their views might have changed after several years/decades of that, how much they hated their parents for naming them Mohammed...

Or how well they work with people from different religious backgrounds because they know what it's like to be discriminated against at a glance, or how they avoid religious political and religious discussions at work because it triggers WASP-y types when all they really want to do is escape oppression in their home country and feed their family without bothering anyone, or maybe, you know, they're just reasonable enough to understand that religions are deeply personal and subjective things that no two large groups of people will ever entirely agree on anywhere, and so choose to show tolerance even where there are disagreements.

For sure there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Muslims out there... just the same way there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Christians out there. And maybe some sects of Islam haven't had the same humanist interventions that modern western Protestants have seen, the same way there are conservative Jewish or Buddhist sects just the same as there are gay-loving, trans-affirming Catholic sects. The point is, you can't really know all of that just by looking at someone's given name. They didn't earn it, they didn't choose it, they may or may not have lived up their parents' expectations of it.

It's one thing if you look at their CV and see they went to a theology school and all their previous employers were religious institutions. It's another thing to just assume ahead of time that this person is different -- and not only different, but inherently incompatible (even unredeemable) -- just because of their name. Give people a chance, man...

This is plain old favoritism and should be countered not celebrated, condoned or dealt with in a business as usual manner.