A little bit of explanation: <name>abad could be loosely translated as "a place founded by <name>". Abad is a popular suffix which makes place names from people's names. Ali, Mohammad, Hasan and Hoseyn are the most popular male first names in Iran. To put it in perspective, out of a population of ~76 million people (so ~38 million men), there are ~2.3 million people named Ali. It is not a new phenomenon, people have been playing it safe with their children's names for centuries. As a result, a lot of founders of towns and villages were named Ali or Mohammad. Having so many Aliabads and Mohammadabads is only a natural result.

An English equivalent might be Jamestown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown

Not sure I trust some of those entries. These two, for example example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasanabad,_Kerman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasanabad,_Golbaf

Are very close together and one has population 95, the other an unspecified population.

Could it be possible they're the same place, just not well documented?

It's not _that_ safe though. Try calling an ambulance during a stress situation.

So naively translated, 'abad' more or less means 'living place', so village or town. The other parts of the names are related to key Muslim figures and have meanings like 'elevated' or 'good' (I'm not sure if they had those meanings or took on those meanings).

Other countries like to get in on the 'nice place' namings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._pl...

(Several dozen post offices are located in a Greenville)

And Ali is the founder of Shia Islam, so basically this is kind of like naming your town/parish St. Mary or something.