Mandaeans of Khuzestan

Mandaeans call themselves Mandaiia, from manda, ‘knowledge’, and are known in Iran and Iraq as Sabe’in, the Sabians, a name that appears in the Qur’an. Theirs is one of the last surviving Gnostic religions, with a cosmology of a world of light, Alma d-Nhura, and a world of darkness, and of souls that must find their way back to the light. They honour John the Baptist, Yahia Yuhana, as a great teacher, though they do not regard him as the founder of their faith. Their language of worship is Mandaic, a form of Aramaic with its own script.

Mandaeans have lived for centuries in the marshes and river towns of southern Mesopotamia and Khuzestan: Ahvaz, Shushtar, Dezful, Abadan and Khorramshahr in Iran, Baghdad, Amarah and Basra in Iraq. Their scriptures include the Ginza Rabba, the ‘Great Treasure’, and the Drasha d-Yahia, the Book of John. Their great twentieth-century chronicler, the English scholar E. S. Drower, published The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran in 1937.

Living water

The centre of Mandaean practice is masbuta, baptism, repeated many times through life and not only once. It must take place in flowing water, which Mandaeans call yardna, ‘Jordan’, whatever river it is. Dressed in white robes, the rasta, believers step into the Karun or a channel beside it, and a priest immerses them three times, signs their foreheads with water, gives them water to drink and places on their heads a wreath of myrtle. Priests, tarmida and the senior ganzibra, keep the rites and the books.

Mandaeans do not seek converts: a Mandaean is born to Mandaean parents, and marriage within the community is central to its survival. Food, too, is a matter of purity, and meals for the souls of the dead, prepared by priests and shared by the family, link the living to those who have gone ahead into the world of light. Classical Mandaic is the language of the books, but a spoken form, Neo-Mandaic, survives among a few families in Ahvaz and Khorramshahr, one of the last living Aramaic tongues of Iran.

The year turns around feasts. Dehwa Rabba marks the new year. Parwanaya, also called Panja, five days outside the ordinary calendar, is a time of baptism and of remembering the dead. Mandaeans in Khuzestan were long known as goldsmiths and silversmiths, and the craft of the Mandaean jeweller in Ahvaz is still respected.

A scattered people

Mandaeans are not named among the recognised minorities in Iran’s constitution. Minority Rights Group and the UN have reported discrimination in education and employment, and pressures that have driven many to emigrate. In Iraq, the violence after 2003 forced most of the community to flee. Large Mandaean communities now live in Australia, Sweden and the United States, where they look for a clean river for baptism, and in Ahvaz the white robes still go down to the Karun each Sunday.