Araz — The Aras River — Azerbaijani Muslim boy's name.

Araz is the Azeri Turkish name for the Aras River (Persian: ارس Aras; Russian: Аракс), the great river that rises in the Bingöl Mountains of eastern Turkey and flows east along the borders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran before joining the Kura on its way to the Caspian Sea. The river has shaped the geography, agriculture, and poetry of the Caucasus for thousands of years; in Azeri Turkish folk literature, it is the river of separation — the one that divides Northern (Azerbaijani) Azerbaijan from Southern (Iranian) Azerbaijan, and a common metaphor for the love and longing of a divided people.

To name a child Araz in Azerbaijani families is therefore to name him into the geography of a national longing. The name has been popular in the Republic of Azerbaijan since independence in 1991 and is also used in Iranian Azerbaijani families and in the Azeri diaspora in Turkey, Russia, and Germany. The poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh's celebrated long poem Gulustan grieves the loss of Iranian Azerbaijan to the Russian Empire and weaves the river Araz throughout as the name of separation.

Araz is named after a river — and rivers, in the Sufi imagination, are the symbols of the soul that flows toward what calls it. The opening Alif (ا) reaches; the Rāʾ (ر) flows; the Zāy (ز) gives the name a sharp brightness at its close. A bearer of Araz carries both a national geography and the older symbolic resonance of the soul's eastward course.