ghazi

plural ghazis · plural ghazies

1. A Muslim warrior who fights in war against non-Muslims, especially one who has won renown as a martial champion; often used as a title.

   On a particularly joyous day of the festivities, below Our Sultan’s loge overlooking the Hippodrome, a division of impoverished frontier ghazis appeared in tattered clothes.

   2001, Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, tr. Erdağ M Göknar

   3 more examples

   I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

   1887, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, London; New York, N.Y.: Ward, Lock & Co., part I (Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., […]), chapter I (Mr. Sherlock Holmes), page 1

   Then suddenly, an hour before first light, wave after wave of screaming tribesmen, led by suicide-bent Muslim fanatics known as ghazis, began to hurl themselves against the British positions.

   1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, page 351

   The 14th century also witnessed Ottoman campaigns against fellow Turks and Muslims[…]In accordance with their portrayal of the early Ottomans as ghazi-warriors, 15th-century Ottoman chroniclers often ignored these conflicts (along with the Ottomans' alliances with Christians), claiming that the Ottomans acquired the territories of the neighboring Turkic principalities through peaceful means (purchase and/or marriage).

   2010, Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 232

plural Ghazis

1. A surname from Arabic.