Arabic · noun · People & Roles

Zaahid

ज़ाहिद
said ZAA-hid
also written: zahid, zaahid-e-tang-nazar
Meaning

An ascetic, an austere pietist; in ghazal the killjoy foil to the wine-loving rind.

Literally: the ascetic; abstainer

How Iqbal uses it

The zahid is the austere abstainer, the man of cold renunciation — and in the ghazal he is the poet's favourite foil: dry, narrow-eyed, proud of a piety that has no love in it, forever scolding the rind for the very intoxication that makes the rind alive. His sobriety is presented not as virtue but as a failure of the heart. Iqbal sharpens the contrast into a thesis: the zahid's bookish, bloodless faith is a dead thing beside the rind's living, love-fired belief; renunciation without love is just a tidy emptiness.

See it in the verse

Zaahid in Iqbal’s couplets