Abdou — Servant — the West and North African short form of ʿAbd-.

Abdou is the Francophone West and North African form of عبدو, an affectionate short of any name beginning with ʿAbd — ʿAbdullāh, ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. In Wolof Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and the Maghreb, Abdou stands as a complete given name, retaining the theological backbone of ʿabd (servant, the one who is wholly at the disposal of another) without binding the bearer to a particular Name of Allah. The form is so common in Dakar that it functions almost as a default Muslim masculine name, comparable to Mohamed in the same region.

Notable bearers include Abdou Diouf, second president of Senegal (1981–2000) and Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie; the Mauritanian poet Abdou Salam Ould Hamady; and many Senegalese and Malian footballers and intellectuals. Abdou is sometimes paired in compound names — Abdou Karim, Abdou Aziz, Abdou Mounir — preserving the older ʿAbd-construction in spoken West African Arabic.

Abdou wears the lightest form of the heaviest theological identity in Islam: servant. The bearer is named into a lineage of devotion without the specifying clause — left, in some sense, to discover for himself which Name of Allah he is most servant to. The dropping of the second term is itself a form of openness.