The Sabians (Arabic: صابئة‎) of Middle Eastern tradition were a monotheistic Abrahamic religious group mentioned three times in the Quran: "the Jews, the Sabians, and the Christians." In the Hadith they are nothing but converts to Islam, while their identity in later Islamic literature became a matter of discussion and investigation.

The Qur'an briefly announces the Sabians in three places and the Hadith provide further details as to who they were as people of the book:

According to Muslim authors, Sabians followed the fourth book of Abrahamic tradition, the Zaboor, which was given to the Prophet King David of Ancient Israel according to the Qur'an. The "Zaboor" is identified by many modern scholars as the Biblical book of Psalms. Most of what is known of them comes from Ibn Wahshiyya's The Nabatean Agriculture, and the translation of this by Maimonides.

Other classical Arabic sources include the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, (c. 987), who mentions the Mogtasilah ("Mughtasila," or "self-ablutionists"), a "sect" of "Sabians" in southern Mesopotamia who counted El-Hasaih as their founder and the vast majority^[who?] of academics agree that they are probably the enigmatic "Sobiai" to whom Elchasai preached in Parthia. According to Daniel Chwolsohn (1856) they appear to have gravitated around the original pro-Jewish Hanputa of Elchasai out of which the miso-Judaic prophet Mani seceded and are identified therefore as the pro-Torah Sampsaeans but also less accurately with the anti-Torah Mandaeans. They were said by Khalil Ibn Ahmad (d.786) to believe that they "belonged" to the prophet Noah.

Zakir Abdul Karim Naik (Urdu: ذاکر عبدالکریم نائیک; born 18 October 1965) is an Indian public speaker on the subject of Islam and comparative religion. He is the founder and president of the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF), a non-profit organisation that owns the Peace TV channel based in Dubai, UAE. He is sometimes referred to as a televangelist. Before becoming a public speaker, he trained as a doctor. He has written two booklets on Islam and comparative religion. He is regarded as an exponent of the Salafi ideology; he places a strong emphasis on individual scholarship and the rejection of "blind Taqlid", which has led him to repudiate the relevance of sectarian or Madh'hab designations, all the while reaffirming their importance.

Zakir Abdul Karim Naik was born on 18 October 1965 in Mumbai, India. He attended St. Peter's High School in Mumbai. Later he enrolled at Kishinchand Chellaram College, before studying medicine at Topiwala National Medical College and Nair Hospital and later the University of Mumbai, where he obtained a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS). His wife, Farhat Naik, works for the women's section of the IRF.