Ḥanīf meaning "revert" refers to one who, according to Islamic belief, maintained the pure monotheism of the patriarchAbraham. More specifically, in Islamic thought, they are the people who, during the pre-Islamic period or Jahiliyyah, were seen to have rejected idolatry and retained some or all of the tenets of the religion of Abraham which was "submission to God" in its purest form. The word is found twelve times in the Quran and Islamic tradition tells of a number of individuals who were hanifs. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad himself was a Hanif and one of the descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham.
Etymology and history of the term
The term is from the Arabic root meaning "to incline, to decline" or "to turn or bend sideways" from the Syriac root of the same meaning. It is defined as "true believer, orthodox; one who scorns the false creeds surrounding him/her and profess the true religion" by The Arabic-English Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. According to Francis Edward Peters, in the verse of the Quran it has been translated as "upright person" and outside the Quran as "to incline towards a right state or tendency". According to W. Montgomery Watt, it appears to have been used earlier by Jews and Christians in reference to "pagans" and applied to followers of an old HellenizedSyrian and Arabian religion and used to taunt early Muslims. Michael Cook states "its exact sense is obscure" but the Quran "uses it in contexts suggestive of a pristine monotheism, which it tends to contrast with Judaism and Christianity". In the Quran hanif is associated "strongly with Abraham, but never with Moses or Jesus". Oxford Islamic Studies online defines hanif as "one who is utterly upright in all of his or her affairs, as exemplified by the model of Abraham"; and that prior to the arrival of Islam "the term was used... to designate pious people who accepted monotheism but did not join the Jewish or Christian communities." Others translate Hanīfiyyah as the law of Ibrahim; the verbtaḥannafa as "to turn away from ". Others maintained that hanif followed the "religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, the Muslim" It has been theorized by Watt that the verbal term Islam, arising from the participle form of Muslim, may have only arisen as an identifying descriptor for the religion in the late Medinan period.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "some of Muḥammad’s relatives, contemporaries, and early supporters were called hanifs" — examples including
Waraqah ibn Nawfal, "a cousin of the Prophet’s first wife, Khadījah, and
Umayyah ibn Abī aṣ-Ṣalt, "an early 7th-century Arab poet".
According to the website "In the Name of Allah", the term Hanif is used "twelve times in the Quran", but Abraham/Ibrahim is "the only person to have been explicitly identified with the term." He is mentioned "in reference to" hanif eight times in the Quran. Among those who, per traditional Islamic belief, are thought to be hanif are:
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "there is no evidence that a true hanif cult existed in pre-Islāmic Arabia". However a Greek source from the fifth century CE, "The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen", speaks of how "Abraham had bequeathed a monotheist religion" to Arabs, that the Arabs descended "from Ishmael and Hagar" and followed Jewish practices such as not eating pork. Sozomen was an historian of the Christian Church who is thought to have been a native of Gaza whose native tongue was Arabic and who lived from about 400 – 450 CE. Thus according to Ibn Rawandi, he provides a "reliable source" that Arabs -- at least in northwest Arabia -- were familiar with the idea there were pre-Islamic "Abrahamic monotheists ... whether this was true of Arabs throughout the peninsula it is impossible to say".
