Mustafa
Through Arabic and Turkish, the name carries the sense of "chosen". In Poland it stays rare, held by around 1,250 men and given to almost no boys now: most Poles have never met one.
Mustafa Pronunciation
Mustafa is pronounced moos-TAH-fah (/musˈtafa/).
What Mustafa means
Where Mustafa comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Mustafa reaches Polish ears from Arabic, built on a root that means to select or set apart. The short meaning is simple: chosen. In its fuller form, al-Mustafa, it served as an epithet for the Prophet Muhammad, the Chosen One, and that association carried the name outward from Arabia into Persia and the Balkans.
Turkish history gave it weight of a different kind. Four Ottoman sultans bore the name Mustafa between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and later Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the modern Turkish republic. So the name sits where Arabic and Turkish tradition meet, familiar in both.
In Poland it stays rare. A boy called Mustafa on a class register in Białystok marks a family with roots in a Muslim community, whether Tatar, Turkish, or Arab. The Polish Tatars, settled here for six centuries, have long used names of this kind.
No diminutive comes standard with it in Polish. What the name offers instead is its plain meaning, wybraniec, the one who was chosen.
How many people are named Mustafa
1 in 17050 men in Poland is named Mustafa. 1,252 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #868 among male names.
Mustafa's popularity over time
Fewer than 2 boys were given the name in 2025. It has been climbing since 2025.
Where Mustafa is most popular
Mustafa is most popular in Masovian, 510% above the national average (6 boys born 2019–2025).
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Masovian6 boys born+510%
Mustafa as a middle name
Mustafa is a first name for 1,252 men in Poland and a middle name for another 160, an 89/11 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 553rd, between Hermann (160) and Kenneth (159).
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#551 Ernst160
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#552 Hermann160
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#553 Mustafa160
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#554 Kenneth159
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#555 Samir158