Kafir (Arabic: كافر kāfir, plural كفّار kuffār) is an Arabic term used in an Islamic doctrinal sense, usually translated as "unbeliever," "disbeliever," or "infidel." The term refers to a person who rejects God in Islam or who hides, denies, or covers the "Islamic version of truth." The practise of declaring another Muslim as a kafir is takfir.
By the 15th century, the word ****** was used by Muslims in Africa to refer to the non-Muslim African natives. Many of those kufari were enslaved and sold by their Muslims captors to European and Asian merchants, mainly from Portugal, who by that time had established trading outposts along the coast of West Africa. These European traders adopted that Arabic word and its derivatives.[44]
Some of the earliest records of European usage of the word can be found in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation by Hakluyt, Richard, 1552-1616.[45] In volume 4, Hakluyt writes: "calling them Cafars and Gawars, which is, infidels or disbelievers.[46] Volume 9 refers to the slaves (slaves called Cafari) and inhabitants of Ethiopia (and they use to go in small shippes, and trade with the Cafars) by two different but similar names. The word is also used in reference to the coast of Africa as land of Cafraria.[47]
The word eventually changed into many forms — cafre (in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Greek), caffar, ******, ******, kafir, etc. (in English, Dutch, and Afrikaans). Those words were then used to name many things related to Africa, such as the ****** Wars,[48] Kaffraria, ****** lime, ****** corn, and so on; see ****** (disambiguation).
