The Hanifs were pre-Islamic Arab monotheists who had independently arrived at a belief in one God without accepting Judaism or Christianity. The Quran identifies Abraham himself as the original Hanif — ‘a pure monotheist’ (hanifan musliman) — and the Hanifs are understood as maintaining a remnant of the original Abrahamic faith in a degenerate form. Historical Hanifs known from pre-Islamic Arabic sources include: Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl (who refused to worship idols, eat meat slaughtered to them, or bury infant daughters, and searched for the ‘religion of Abraham’); Waraqa ibn Nawfal (Khadijah’s Christian-leaning cousin, who recognized Muhammad’s first revelation as prophetic); Umayyah ibn Abi al-Salt (a poet who believed in resurrection and divine judgment). The Hanifs demonstrate that there was indigenous monotheistic spiritual seeking in Arabia before Muhammad, which Islamic tradition presents as the immediate context into which the Quran was revealed.