The borrowing of fakir into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an impo

The borrowing of fakir into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.