Forms: 7 fakier, (fuckeire, foker, -quere), 7–9 faquir, (8 fackire, fa(c)quier, foughar), 9 fakeer, faqueer, 8– fakir. [a. Arab. faqīr lit. ‘poor, poor man’; some of the early forms may be due to the pl. fuqarā.]
1. ‘Properly an indigent person, but specially applied to a Mahommedan religious mendicant, and then loosely, and inaccurately, to Hindu devotees and naked ascetics’ (Yule).
1609. Ro. C., Hist. Disc. Muley Hamet, vii. C iij/2. Fokers, are men of good life, which are onely given to peace.
1638. W. Bruton, Newes from E. Indies, 27. They are called Fuckeires.
1704. Collect. Voy. (Church.), III. 568/1. You shall take care to embark all the Facquiers.
1763. Scrafton, Indostan (1770), 27. The Bramins still exceed the rest in every abuse of power, and seem to think, if they bribe God by bestowing a part of their plunder on cows and Faquirs, their iniquities will be pardoned.
1813. Byron, Giaour, xi.
| But gloom is gather’d o’er the gate, | |
| Nor there the Fakir’s self will wait. |
1861. Dickens, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, i. A Hindoo fakeer’s ground.
1874. Morley, Compromise (1886), 178. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because his way of living happens to be a manifestation of the religious spirit.
2. attrib. and Comb., as fakir-race; fakir-like adj. and adv.
1849. Southey, Common-place Book, Ser. II. 390. Pilgrims went to Montserrate in armour, or carrying bars of iron, and with such other manner of penitence, fakir-like.—Hist. de Montser. 30.
1859. I. Taylor, Logic in Theology, 146. Albeit they were christianized, professedly, yet were they the genuine successors and representatives of a fakir race that might boast a very high antiquity.
1884. The Pall Mall Budget, 22 Aug., 6/2 The fakir-like devotion with which he has fixed his eyes upon the unutterable perfection of that ‘Temple of Virtue,’ the House of Lords.
Hence Fakirism, the system, faith, and practice of the Fakirs.
1856. Kingsley, Hours with the Mystics, Misc. I. 349. Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo Mysticism has failed of practical result—that it has died down into brutal fakeerism.
1883. Goldwin Smith, Evolutionary Ethics and Christianity, in The Contemporary Review, XLIV. Dec., 806. Fakirism is devil-worship, and it spread from the Ganges to the Nile, where it produced Simeon Stylites and the self-torturing monks of the Thebaid.
