Bibliotheca Polyglotta

1a true believer, orthodox; b one who scorns the false creeds surrounding him and professes the true religion; 2 adj., true (religion) – WehrCowan1979.

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▪ eC7 Q 2:135, 3:67,95, 4:125, 6:79, 161, 10:105, 16:120, 123, 22:31, 30:30, 98:5.
▪ eC7 (inclined towards [God], inclined away [from false deities] and so considered upright) Q 6:161 dīnan qiyaman millaẗa ʔIbrāhīma ḥanīfan wa‑mā kāna min‑a ’l‑mušrikīna ‘an upright religion, the faith of Abraham, an upright man, he was not one of the polytheists’. »Ḥanīf is also used to describe the ascetic monotheists of Mecca who refused idolatry and its practices. One of their practices, followed by Muḥammad, was taḥannuf: to retreat during Ramadan, and it was one such retreat that he received the first revelation of the Qur’an.«

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▪ DRS 9 (2010) #ḤNP-1 Hbr *ḥānep ‘être impie, sans dieu’, JP ḥᵃnap ‘flatter, dissimuler’; ḥanᵊpā ‘flatteur, fourbe, impie’, Syr ḥanpā ‘païen’.
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▪ Jeffery1938: »The passages in which the word occurs are all late Meccan or Madinan, so the word was apparently a technical term which Muḥammad learned at a relatively late period in his public career. Its exact meaning, however, is somewhat difficult to determine.¹ Of the twelve cases, where the word is used, eight have reference to the faith of Abraham, and in nine of them there is an added phrase explaining that to be a Ḥanīf means not being a polytheist, this explanatory phrase apparently showing that Muḥammad felt he was using a word which needed explanation in order to be rightly understood by his hearers. – The close connection of the word with the millaẗ ʔIbrāhīm is important, for we know that when Muḥammad changed his attitude to the Jews he began to preach a new doctrine about Abraham,² and to claim that while Moses was the Prophet of the Jews and Jesus the Prophet of the Christians, he himself went back to an earlier revelation which was recognized by both Jews and Christians, the millaẗ ʔIbrāhīm, which he was republishing to the Arabs. Now all our ḥanīf passages belong to this second period. Muḥammad is bidden set his face towards religion as a Ḥanīf (10:105, 30:30). He says to his contemporaries, “As for me, my Lord has guided me to a straight path, a right religion, the faith of Abraham, a Ḥanīf” (6:161). “They say—Become a Jew or a Christian. Say—nay rather be of the religion of Abraham, a Ḥanīf” (2:135); “Who hath a better religion than he who resigns himself to God, does what is good, and follows the faith of Abraham as a Ḥanīf” (4:125). He calls on the Arabs to “be Ḥanīfs to God” (22:31), and explains his own position by representing Allah as saying to him—“Then we told thee by revelation to follow the millaẗ ʔIbrāhīm a Ḥanīf” (16:123). The distinction between Ḥanīfism and Judaism and Christianity which is noted in 2:135, is very clearly drawn in 3:67, “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but a resigned Ḥanīf —ḥanīfan musliman,” and this latter phrase taken along with the man ʔaslama waǧhahū li-llāhi of 4:125, was probably connected in Muḥammad’s mind with what he meant by ʔislām, and has given the cue to the use and interpretation of the word in the later days of Islam. – The Lexicons are quite at a loss what to make of the word. They naturally endeavour to derive it from √ḤNF ‘to incline or decline’. ḥanaf is said to be a natural contortedness of the feet,³ and so ḥnf is used of anything that inclines away from the proper standard. As one can also think of inclining from a crooked standard to the straight, so ḥanīf was supposed to be one who turned from the false religions to the true.⁴ It is obvious that these suggestions are of little help in our problem.⁵ – The word occurs not infrequently in the poetry of the early years of Islam.⁶ All these passages are set forth and examined by Horovitz, KU, 56 ff., and many of them by Margoliouth, JRAS, 1903: 480 ff., the result being that it seems generally to mean ‘Muslim’ and in the odd occurrences which may be pre-Islamic to mean ‘heathen’.⁷ In any case in none of these passages is it associated with Abraham, and there is so much uncertainty as to whether any of them can be considered pre-Islamic that they are of very little help towards settling the meaning of the word for us. It is unfortunate also that we are equally unable to glean any information as to the primitive meaning of the word from the well-known stories of the Ḥanīfs who were earlier contemporaries of Muḥammad, for while we may agree with Lyall, JRAS, 1903: 744, that these were all actual historical personages, yet the tradition about them that has come down to us has been so obviously worked over in Islamic times, that so far from their stories helping to explain the Qurʔān, the Qurʔān is necessary to explain them.⁸ – We are driven back then to an examination of the word itself. Bell, Origin, 58, would take it as a genuine Ar word from √ḤNF ‘to decline, turn from’ and thus agrees with the general orthodox theory.⁹ We have already noted the difficulty of this, however, and as a matter of fact some of the Muslim authorities knew that as used in the Qurʔān it was a foreign word, as we learn from Masʿūdī’s Tanbīh where it is given as Syr.¹⁰ –Winckler, Arabisch-Semitisch-Orientalisch, p. 79 (i.e. MVAG, vi, 229), suggested that it was an Eth [Gz] borrowing, and Grimme, Mohammed, 1904, p. 48, wants to link the Ḥanīfs on to some SAr cult. The Eth [Gz] ḥonāfi, however, is quite a late word meaning heathen,¹¹ and can hardly have been the source of the Ar.¹² Nor is there any serious ground for taking the word as a borrowing from Hbr ḥānēp̱̄ ‘profane’, as Deutsch suggested (Literary Remains, 93), and as has been more recently defended by Hirschfeld.¹³ – The probabilities are that it is the Syr ḥanpā, as was pointed out by Nöldeke.¹⁴ This word was commonly used with the meaning of ‘heathen’ and might well have been known to the pre-Islamic Arabs as a term used by the Christians for those who were neither Jews nor of their own faith, and this meaning would suit the possible pre-Islamic passages where we find the word used. Moreover, as Margoliouth has noticed, in using the word of Abraham, Muḥammad would be following a favourite topic of Christian apologists, who argued from Rom. iv, 10-12, that Abraham’s faith was counted for righteousness in his heathen days before there was any Judaism.¹⁵ (See Ahrens, Christliches, 28, and Nielsen in HAA, i, 250.)«
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1. See Lyall, JRAS, 1903: 781. 2. Hurgronje, Het Mekkaansche Feest, Leiden 1880: 29 ff.; Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 48. Torrey’s arguments against this in his Foundation, 88 ff., do not seem to me convincing. 3. Jawharī and Qāmūs, sub voc.; LA, x, 402. 4. LA, x, 403; Rāghib, Mufradāt, 133. 5. Margoliouth, JRAS, 1903, p. 477: “These suggestions are clearly too fanciful to deserve serious consideration.” 6. The name ḤNF in Sab and in the Safaite inscriptions (Ryckmans, Noms propres, i, 96) as well as the tribal name Ḥanīfaẗ ought perhaps to be taken into account. 7. Nöldeke, ZDMG, xli, 721; de Goeje, Bibl. Geogr. Arab, viii, Glossary, p. xviii. Wellhausen, Reste, 239, thought that it meant a Christian ascetic, and in this he is followed by Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 8, but see Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 70. 8. Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 20. On these Ḥanīfs see especially Caetani, Annali, i, 183 ff., and Sprenger, Leben, i, 43-7, 67-92, 110-137. 9. So apparently Macdonald, MW, vi, 308, who takes it to mean ‘heretic’, and see Schulthess in Nöldeke Festschrift, p. 86. 10. Ed. de Goeje in BGA, viii, p. 91: wa-hāḏihī kalimaẗ suryāniyyaẗ ʕurribat. 11. Dillmann, Lex, 605. 12. Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 35. 13. Beiträge, 43 ff. New Researches, 26; cf. also Pautz, Offenbarung, 14. 14. Neue Beiträge, 30. It has been accepted as such by Andrae, Ursprung, 40; Ahrens, Muhammed, 15, and Mingana, Syriac Influence, 97. 15. JRAS, 1903, p. 478. Margoliouth also notes that there may have been further influence from the prophecy that Abraham should be the father of many nations, as this word is sometimes rendered by ḥanpā. From ḥanpā was formed ḥunafāʔ, and then the sing. ḥanīf formed from this.

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► ^BP#3934al‑dīn al‑ḥanīf, n., the True (i.e., Islamic) Religion, also al‑ḥanīfaẗ al‑samḥāʔ

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