Ghulam

Ghulam is an Arabic word meaning servant, assistant, boy, or youth. It is used to describe young servants in paradise. It is also used to refer to slave-soldiers in the Abbasid, Ottoman, Safavid and to a lesser extent, Mughal empires, as described in the article Ghilman, which is the plural form of the word. It is traditionally used as the first element of compounded Muslim male given names, meaning servant of ..., mostly in Persian (where it is pronounced ) and in Urdu. In both Persian and Urdu, the particle al- is not used with ghulam (unlike compounds formed with ʿabd; e.g. Gholammohammad, Gholamhoseyn, Gholamali... and Abd al-Muhammad, Abd al-Husayn, Abd al-Ali...). Since the 20th century, Ghulam has also been used as an independent given name and surname. People with the given name (not in compound) Ghulam Bombaywala, Pakistani-American restaurateur Ghulam Ali Chowdhury (1824–1888), Bengali landlord and philanthropist Ghulam Murshid, Bangladeshi author, scholar and journalist Arbab Ghulam Rahim (born 1957), Pakistani politician Ghulam Raziq (born 1932), Pakistani hurdler People with the surname Nabil Gholam (born 1962), Lebanese architect Ali Gholam (born 1981), Iranian footballer Sara Ghulam (born 1989), Canadian model Jassim Ghulam Al-Hamd (born 1979), Iraqi footballer