حنيف
Ḥanīf
An upright monotheist who is neither Jew nor Christian: the Quran’s word for Abraham’s faith (3:67).
What it means
“Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was a ḥanīf, a Muslim, and he was not of the polytheists” (3:67). In Arabia before Islam, the ḥunafāʾ were monotheists who rejected the idols without belonging to a religious group, among them Zayd ibn Amr and Waraqa ibn Nawfal. Some scholars derive the word from a Syriac word meaning “pagan”, and others from the Arabic ḥanafa, “to incline”.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 30, listed as ḤANĪF. The definition is restated here.