The Five Tāghūts
Question: What does the word tāghūt mean, and is every tāghūt a disbeliever?
Answer: In the language, tāghūt is derived from ṭughyān, which signifies transgression—overstepping the proper bounds, such as crossing from truth into falsehood or from faith into disbelief, and the like.
There are many tawaghīt, and every tāghūt is, without doubt, a disbeliever. Yet, although they are numerous, their chiefs are five, as Imām Ibn al-Qayyim and others have noted.
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The first is Iblīs—may Allah curse him—for he is the head of the tawaghīt. He calls to deviation, disbelief, and atheism, and he summons people to the Fire; thus he is the chief of the tawaghīt.
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The second is anyone who is worshipped besides Allah while being pleased with it. Whoever accepts that people worship him instead of Allah becomes a tāghūt, as Allah the Exalted says: “...turning some of them into apes and pigs, and worshippers of the tāghūt” (al-Māʾidah 60). Therefore, the one who is worshipped apart from Allah and is content with that is a tāghūt; but if he is not pleased with it, he is not.
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The third is whoever claims any share of knowledge of the unseen (ghayb). Anyone who pretends to know the unseen is a tāghūt, for none knows the unseen except Allah Almighty: “Say, ‘None in the heavens or on earth knows the unseen except Allah’” (al-Naml 65). Whoever alleges that he possesses knowledge of the unseen sets himself up as a partner with Allah in that knowledge and is therefore a tāghūt.
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The fourth is whoever summons people to worship himself. Anyone who invites people to worship him and wishes to be taken as a deity—even if he does not explicitly call himself a god—yet urges people to draw near to him with acts of worship, claiming that he heals their illnesses, fulfills their needs that only Allah can meet, and that he can harm them in matters that only Allah—