Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Modern Mandaic: Mandaʻiūtā‎ (מנדעיותא); Arabic: مندائية‎ Mandāʼīyah/Mandāʾiyyah; Persian: مندائیان‎ Mandâ'iyân) is a gnostic religion^{[citation needed]} (Aramaic manda means "knowledge", as does Greek gnosis) with a strongly dualistic worldview.

Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem, Aram and especially John the Baptist, but reject Jesus of Nazareth and are hostile to Christianity.^[1][2] They are sometimes identified with mentions in the Quran of the Sabian religion, particularly in an Arabian context, but the Sabian religious community is extinct today.

According to most scholars, Mandaeans migrated from the Southern Levant to Mesopotamia in the first centuries CE and are certainly 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 of Iraq" who were pagan, Aramaic speaking indigenous pre-Arab and pre-Islamic inhabitants of southern Iraq.^[3]

Mandaeans appear to have settled in northern Mesopotamia, but the religion has been practised 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,^[4] and until the 2003 Iraq war, almost all of them lived in Iraq.^[5] Many Mandaean Iraqis have since fled their country (as have many other Iraqis) because of religious persecution by the Muslim majority and turmoil created by the War on Terror.^[6] By 2007, the population of Mandaeans in Iraq had fallen to approximately 5,000.^[5] Most Mandaean Iraqis have sought refuge in Iran with the fellow Mandaeans there. Others have moved to northern Iraq. There has been a much smaller influx into Syria and Jordan, with smaller populations in Sweden, Australia, the United States, and other Western countries.

The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private—reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders, particularly from the Orientalist Julius Heinrich Petermann, Nicolas Siouffi a Yazidi (1880), and Lady Drower. 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.

Origin of Mandaeism[link]

The term Mandaeism comes from Classical Mandaic Mandaiia and appears in Neo-Mandaic as Mandeyānā. On the basis of cognates in other Aramaic dialects, Semiticists such as Mark Lidzbarski and Rudolf Macuch have translated the term manda, from which Mandaiia derives, as "knowledge" (cf. Aramaic מַנְדַּע mandaʻ in Dan. 2:21, 4:31, 33, 5:12; cpr. Hebrew: מַדַּע‎ maddaʻ without the nasal insert). This etymology suggests that the Mandaeans may well be the only sect surviving from late Antiquity to identify themselves explicitly as Gnostics.

Other scholars^[who?] derive the term mandaiia from Mandā d-Heyyi (Mandaic manda ḏ-hiia "Knowledge of Life", reference to the chief divinity hiia rbia "the Great Life") or from the word (bi)manda, which is the cultic hut in which many Mandaean ceremonies are performed (such as the baptism, which is the central sacrament of Mandaean religious life). This last term is possibly to be derived from Pahlavi m’nd mānd ("house").^{[citation needed]}

Other associated terms[link]

Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the Ṣubba (singular: Ṣubbī). The term Ṣubba is derived from the Aramaic root related to baptism, the neo-Mandaic is Ṣabi.^[7] In Islam, the term "Sabians" (Arabic: الصابئون‎ al-Ṣābiʾūn) is used as a blanket term for adherents to a number of religions, including that of the Mandaeans, in reference to the Sabians of the Qur'an (see below). Occasionally, Mandaeans are called Christians of Saint John, based upon preliminary reports made by members of the Discalced Carmelite mission in Basra during the 16th century.

A mandá (Arabic: مندى‎) is a place of worship for followers of Mandaeism. A mandá must be built beside a river in order to perform maṣbattah (baptism) because water is an essential element in the Mandaeic faith. Modern mandás sometimes have a bath inside a building instead.

Mandaean history[link]

The evidence about Mandaean history has been almost entirely confined to some of the Mandaen religious literature. Suggestions that Mandaeism had a pre-Christian origin are rejected by most scholars.^[8]

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 to "belong to the prophet Noah";^[9] similarly, the Mandaeans claim direct ancestry 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^{[who?][when?]} said that the true 'Sabians' or Sabba lived in the marshes of Lower Iraq. The earliest account we have about the Mandaeans is that of the Assyrian writer Theodore Bar Konai (in the Scholion, A.D. 792). In the Fihrist ("Book of Nations") of Arabic scholar Al-Nadim (an c.987), the Mogtasilah (Mughtasila..., "self-ablutionists") are counted among the followers of El-Hasaih. Called a "sect" of "Sabians", they are located in southern Mesopotamia.^[10] No verbatim reference to Mandaeans, which were a distinct group by then, seems to have been made by Al-Nadim; Mogtasilah was not that group's endonym, and the few details on rituals and habit are similar to Mandaeans ones. Mogtasilah may thus have been Al-Nadim's term for the Mandaeans, but they may just as well have been a related group which does not exist anymore today.

In any case, Elchasai's religious community seems to have prospered but ultimately splintered; early on, the prophet Mani renounced Judaism and departed with his followers. Likewise, the Mandaeans may have originated in a schism where they renounced the Torah, while the mainstream Sampsaeans^{[citation needed]} held on to it (as Elchasai's followers did); this must have happened around the mid-late 1st millennium AD. Al-Biruni (writing at the beginning of the 11th century AD) 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."^[11] It is not clear what group he referred to exactly, for by then the Elchasaite sects may have been at their most diverse. Some disappeared subsequently, the Sampsaeans for example are not well attested in later sources. The Ginza Rba, one of the chief holy scriptures of the Mandaeans, appears to originate around the time of Elchasai or somewhat thereafter (see below); unfortunately, none of the Manichaean scriptures has survived in its entirety, and as it seems the remaining fragments have not been compared to the Ginza Rba.

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, …”