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'''Shaikh Zekaryas'''(1845-1912), also known as Niwaiye Kristos, was a prominent Muslim prophet and shaikh in the Ethiopian Empire who led a number of Ethiopian Muslims into the [[Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church]] in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
==Early Life==
==Conversion to Orthodoxy==
I 1910, on the great feast of Pascha, Shaikh Zekaryas was baptized in Debre Tabor with the name Niwaiye Kristos ('Property of Christ'). Some 3,000 of his disciples and followers were baptized at the same time. Not long after this the imperial government provided Niwaiye Kristos with a small estate, a pension, and bodyguards to protect him from Muslims who felt that he had condemned himself to death through his apostasy from Islam.
As a result of Niwaiye Kristos' baptism many of his followers also joined the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, becoming known as 'Adis Kristiyanoch' ('New Christians'). Their numbers are estimated to have been between 7,000 and 10,000. Although Evangelical Protestant missionaries in Ethiopia hoped that the Adis Kristiyanoch would become a reform movement within the Church of Ethiopia, they instead largely disappeared into the wider mass of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, being virtually unknown as a distinct group less than 25 years after Niwaiye Kristos' baptism.