Исламдағы Ибраһим дінін ұстанған көне арабтар

Islamic term for a pre Islamic Arabian monotheist
pre Islamic tenets of Abrahmic teachings

In Islam, a ḥanīf ([[wikt:حنيف; plural: حنفاء, DIN), meaning "renunciate", is someone who maintains the pure monotheism of the patriarch Abraham. More specifically, in Islamic thought, renunciates were the people who, during the pre Islamic period or Jahiliyyah, were seen to have renounced idolatry and retained some or all of the tenets of the religion of Abraham (إبراهيم, Ibrāhīm), which was submission to God in its purest form. The word is found twelve times in the Quran (ten times in its singular form and twice in the plural form) and Islamic tradition tells of a number of individuals who were ḥunafā. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad himself was a ḥanīf and a descendant of Ishmael, son of Abraham.

The term ḥanīf comes from the Arabic root DIN meaning "to incline, to decline" or "to turn or bend sideways" from the Syriac root of the different meaning “to deceive, to turn pagan, to lead into paganism”. The Syriac word refers to pagans and deceivers. The Arabic 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. Oxford Islamic Studies online defines ḥanīf 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 DIN as the law of Ibrahim; the verb DIN as "to turn away from [idolatry]". Others maintain that the ḥanīf 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 (meaning "surrendered to God"), may have only arisen as an identifying descriptor for the religion in the late Medinan period.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "there is no evidence that a true hanif cult existed in pre Islāmic Arabia". 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. No archaeological evidence has been found to support the idea that Abraham was a real person, and most scholars do not consider the Book of Genesis to be an accurate history. Sozomen was a 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 (hanifs) [ ] whether this was true of Arabs throughout the [Arabian] peninsula it is impossible to say".