An Afghan man has been forced to move out of his home after he received many death threats over after naming his son Donald Trump.
The man identified as Asadullah Poya decided to name his son after the then American presidential candidate after his wife gave birth to their third child in a tiny village in rural Afghanistan.
He had become inspired after reading a Dari translation of Trump’s How To Get Rich book.
Mr Poya said:
‘I thought, “this is a great man”.
So when his baby came into the world in August 2016, and he saw that the boy had unusually blond hair, he named him Donald Trump, hoping it would bring him good fortune. It has not.
Relatives and neighbours were furious that he broke with tradition and gave his son a non-Muslim name. He was forced to move his family to Kabul, and they have received death threats online. Mr Poya’s own parents were furious that he had given their grandchild a non-Muslim name. The imam of the village mosque devoted an entire Friday sermon to the matter, calling the name an insult.
Mr Poya said:
‘Every day the situation got worse. Every day in the house, when I was calling my son Trump, my father got angrier and angrier, until finally my father couldn’t tolerate it anymore.’
It was then that Mr Poya decided to pack up his family, leave his teaching job and the family farm, and move to the Kabul.
Mr Poya and his children, Donald Trump, his older sister Fatima and brother Karim, now live in a simple one-storey house that they share with their landlord. But Donald Trump is not liked in the capital either.
On Thursday, five neighbours approached the landlord and demanded he throw Mr Poya out, calling him an ‘infidel’ for not giving his son a Muslim name.
Others have accused Mr Poya of naming his son Donald Trump in order to improve his chances of gaining asylum in the United States.
Mr Poya insists he does not want to leave the country, and that he never intended his son’s name to be in the news.
He says a local government official in the district where he registered his son’s name posted the identity card on Facebook. This led to dozens of people commenting on the boy’s name. Mr Poya said he and his wife had to block their Facebook pages after they received hundreds of angry comments and threats.
If Donald Trump wants to change his name when he is older, his father says he is free to do so.
‘But now it is my decision, and I have decided it is Trump.’
