513 - 010 - Mandaeism - Discerning Islam

Read Time:7 Minute, 13 Second

Mandaeism

There are between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans worldwide and in the Middle East they are found in Iraq and Iran.

They reject Jesus and Muhammad and view Christianity and Islam negatively, but revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh and Noah. Mandaeans are an ethnoreligious community, which doesn’t allow conversion.

Mandaeism or Mandaeanism is a gnostic religion with a strongly dualistic worldview. Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enos, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist, but reject Abraham, Moses and Jesus. The Aramaic manda means “knowledge,” as does Greek gnosis.

Mandaeans migrated from the Southern Levant to Mesopotamia in the first centuries AD, and are of pre-Arab and pre-Islamic origin. They are Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. They may well be related to the Nabateans who were pagan, Aramaic-speaking indigenous pre-Arab and pre-Islamic inhabitants of southern Iraq.

Mandaeans appear to have settled in northern Mesopotamia, but the religion has been practiced primarily around the lower Karun, Euphrates and Tigris and the rivers that surround the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan Province in Iran. There are thought to be between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans worldwide. Until the 2003 Iraq war, almost all of them lived in Iraq. Many Mandaean Iraqis have since fled their country (as have many other Iraqis) because of the turmoil created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation by U.S. armed forces, and the related rise in sectarian violence by Muslim extremists. By 2007, the population of Mandaeans in Iraq had fallen to approximately 5,000.

The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private—reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders. An Anglican vicar, Rev. Peter Owen-Jones, included a short segment on a Mandaean group in Sydney, Australia, in his BBC series, Around the World in 80 Faiths.

History

The evidence about Mandaean history has been almost entirely confined to some of the Mandaean religious literature. While the majority view, and the Mandean opinion, was that Manaeism formed in pre-Christian times.

Arab sources of early Qur’anic times (7th century) make some references to Sabians. They are counted among the Ahl al-Kitāb (People of the Book), and several hadith feature them. Some scholars hold that these Sabians are those currently referred to as Mandaeans, while others contend that the etymology of the root word ‘Sabi’un’ points to origins either in the Syriac or Mandaic word ‘Sabian,’ and suggest that the Mandaean religion originated with Sabeans who came under the influence of early Hellenic Sabian missionaries, but preferred their own priesthood. The Sabians believed they “belong to the prophet Noah;” similarly, the Mandaeans claim direct descent from Noah.

Early in the 9th century, a group in the northern Mesopotamian city of Harran declared themselves Sabians when facing persecution; an Assyrian Christian writer said that the true ‘Sabians’ or Sabba lived in the marshes of lower Iraq.

The Mandaeans may have originated in a schism where they renounced the Torah, while the mainstream held on to it. If so, this must have happened around the mid-late 1^ST millennium AD. Al-Biruni (writing at the beginning of the 11^th century) said that the ‘real Sabians’ were “the remnants of the Jewish tribes who remained in Babylonia when the other tribes left it for Jerusalem in the days of Cyrus and Artaxerxes. These remaining tribes adopted a system mixed-up of Magism and Judaism.”

Around 1290, a learned Dominican Catholic from Tuscany, Ricoldo da Montecroce, or Ricoldo Pennini, was in Mesopotamia where he met the Mandaeans. He described them as follows:

A very strange and singular people, in terms of their rituals,lives in the desert near Baghdad; they are called Sabaeans. Many of them came to me and begged me insistently to go and visit them. They are a very simple people and they claim to possess a secret law of God, which they preserve in beautiful books. Their writing is a sort of middle way between Syriac and Arabic. They detest Abraham because of circumcision and they venerate John the Baptist above all. They live only near a few rivers in the desert. They wash day and night so as not to be condemned by God.

Some Portuguese Jesuits had met some “Saint John Christians” or Mandaeans around the Strait of Hormuz in 1559, when the Portuguese fleet fought with the Ottoman Turkish army in Bahrain. These Mandaean seemed to be willing to obey the Catholic Church. They learned and used the seven Catholic sacraments and the related ceremonies in their lives.

Beliefs

Mandaeism, as the religion of the Mandaean people, is based more on a common heritage than on any set of religious creeds and doctrines. A basic guide to Mandaean theology does not exist. The corpus of Mandaean literature, though quite large, covers topics such as eschatology, the knowledge of God and the afterlife — in an unsystematic manner. Moreover, it is known only to the priesthood and a few laypeople.

Fundamental Tenets

Mandaeans believe in marriage and procreation, and in the importance of leading an ethical and moral lifestyle in this world. They also place a high priority upon family life. Consequently, Mandaeans do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Mandaeans will, however, abstain from strong drink and red meat. While they agree with other gnostic sects that the world is a prison governed by the planetary archons, they do not view it as a cruel and inhospitable one.

Scriptures

The Mandaeans have a large corpus of religious scriptures, the most important of which is the Ginza Rba or Ginza, a collection of history, theology, and prayers.

Other important books include the Qolastā, the “Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans,” the Dīvān, which contains a description of the ‘regions’ the soul ascends through, and the Asfar Malwāshē, the “Book of the Zodiacal Constellations.” Finally, there are some pre-Muslim artifacts which contain Mandaean writings and inscriptions, such as some Aramaic incantation bowls.

The language in which the Mandaean religious literature was originally composed is known as Mandaic, and is a member of the Aramaic family of dialects. Many Mandaean lay people do not speak this language, though some members of the Mandaean community resident in Iran and Iraq continue to speak Neo-Mandaic, a modern version of this language.

Cosmology

As noted above Mandaean theology is not systematic. There is no one single authoritative account of the creation of the cosmos, but rather a series of several accounts. Some scholars maintain that comparison of these different accounts may reveal the diverse religious influences upon which the Mandaeans have drawn and the ways in which the Mandaean religion has evolved over time.

Chief Prophets

Mandaeans recognize several prophets. Yahya ibn Zakariyya, known by Christians as John the Baptist, is accorded a special status, higher than his role in Christianity and Islam. Mandaeans do not consider John to be the founder of their religion but revere him as one of their greatest teachers, tracing their beliefs back to Adam.

Mandaeans maintain that Jesus was a mšiha kdaba “false messiah” who perverted the teachings entrusted to him by John.

Likewise, the Mandaeans believe that Abraham and Moses were false prophets, but recognize other prophetic figures from the Abrahamic religions, such as Adam, his sons Hibil (Abel) and Šitil (Seth), and his grandson Anuš (Enosh), as well as Nuh (Noah), his son Sam (Shem) and his son Ram (Aram). The latter three they consider to be their direct ancestors.