Qurʾān, [Sūrah viii. 15]: “O ye who believe! when ye meet the marshalled hosts of the unbelievers, turn not your backs to them.” Hence, battle, combat.
ZĀHID (زاهد). Lit. “Abstinent; continent.” An ascetic person. Zāhid-i-k͟hushk, Persian, “a dissembler, a hypocrite.”
Z̤ĀHIR (ظاهر). “Outward, exterior, manifest.” A word much used in Muslim theology to express that which is manifest, as distinguished from bāt̤in, “interior,” or k͟hafī, “that which is hidden.”
AZ̤-Z̤ĀHIR (الظاهر). “The Evident.” One of the ninety-nine attributes of God.
Qurʾān, [Sūrah lviii. 3]: “He is the First and the Last, the Evident and the Hidden.”
Z̤ĀHIRU ʾL-MAẔHAB (ظاهر المذهب). An expression used by Ḥanafī Muslims for those theological questions which are decided in the four well-known Sunnī books: al-Mabsūt̤, al-Jāmiʿu ʾl-Kabīr, al-Jāmiʿu ʾṣ-Ṣag͟hīr, as-Sairu ʾl-Kabīr.
Z̤ĀHIRU ʾL-MUMKINĀT (ظاهر الممكنات). An expression used by theologians for the proofs of God’s existence, power, and attributes, as exhibited in nature.
ZAID IBN AL-HĀRIS̤ (زيد بن الــحــارث). Muḥammad’s freedman and adopted son. Muḥammad having seen and admired Zaid’s wife Zainab, her husband divorced her. The relations of the ancient Arabs to their adopted children were very strict, and Muḥammad’s marriage with the divorced wife of his adopted son occasioned much scandal amongst his contemporaries. A revelation was consequently produced which revoked the inconvenient restrictions.
[Sūrah xxxiii. 37]: “And when Zaid had settled the necessary matter of her divorce, we did wed her to thee, that it might not be a crime in the faithful to marry the wives of their adopted sons, when they have settled the necessary affair concerning them.”
Zaid was slain at the battle of Mūtah, as he carried the standard of Islām, A.H. 8.