From Arabic and Persian forms of Thurayya or Soraya, meaning the Pleiades star cluster.
Suraiya (also spelled Surayya, Thurayya, or Soraya) is among the most poetic names in the Arabic-Islamic naming tradition, derived from the Arabic word for the Pleiades — the spectacular open star cluster in the constellation Taurus that has captivated human imaginations since prehistory. In Arabic astronomical tradition, the Pleiades (al-Thurayya) were associated with rain, abundance, and good fortune; their heliacal rising marked the agricultural calendar across the ancient Near East. To name a daughter Suraiya was to identify her with that shimmering cluster of lights — with the idea that she, too, would rise at the right moment to bring abundance and joy.
The name is carried by women across the sweep of the Islamic world, from Morocco to Iran to Pakistan to Indonesia, testifying to the Arabic language's extraordinary reach as the vehicle of Islamic civilization. One of its most famous modern bearers was Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari (1932–2001), the Iranian empress and second wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose striking beauty and tragic inability to bear an heir made her one of the most written-about women of the mid-twentieth century. In Iran, Soraya's story became the stuff of a particular bittersweet romanticism; her name carried her image for decades afterward.
In literary and poetic traditions across the Arabic-speaking world, the Pleiades are a recurring image of beauty, distance, and the bittersweet nature of longing — stars beautiful precisely because they are unreachable. Suraiya inherits all of this: a name that is at once astronomically grounded and emotionally resonant, rooted in millennia of sky-watching and carrying forward the ancient human impulse to find in the stars a language for the things that matter most.