fakir

plural fakirs · alternative fakeer · alternative faqir · alternative obsolete faqueer · alternative obsolete faquir

1. IslamA religious mendicant who owns no personal property.
2. Hinduismmore looselyAn ascetic mendicant, especially one who performs feats of endurance or apparent magic.

   The preposterous altruism too![…]Resist not evil. It is an insane immolation of self—as bad intrinsically as fakirs stabbing themselves or anchorites warping their spines in caves scarcely large enough for a fair-sized dog.

   1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XVI, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC

3. derogatorySomeone who takes advantage of the gullible through fakery, especially of a spiritual or religious nature.

   From what I hear of him he's a fakir, and I won't encourage him in his attempts to get into society at my expense.

   2009, Gelett Burgess, The Heart Line: A Drama of San Francisco, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 175

   3 more examples

   He denounces no one until he has all the damaging facts in hand, very frequently backed up with affidavits. He 'Lawsonized' certain stock jobbers and financial fakirs of London before the Boston advertising man was heard of.

   1905, Eclectic Magazine, Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

   "But a stranger who had come up to the group just at this point, when they were pronouncing the soup delicious, laughed aloud. "'What a set of fools you all are!' he cried. 'This tramp is just a fakir. That stone had nothing to do with the soup."

   1927, The Rotarian, page 30

   He was, as the undercover agent concluded, a fabulous raconteur or, as one other person summed him up, "a monumental fakir and liar."

   1994, Michael Barry Miller, Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Intrigue, and the French Between the Wars, Univ of California Press, →ISBN, page 252