Mandaeism

Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Modern Mandaic: מנדעיותא‎ Mandaʻiūtā; Arabic: مندائية‎‎ Mandāʼīyah) 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.

According to most scholars, Mandaeaism originated sometime in the first three centuries AD, with the Mandaen people migrating from the Southern Levant to Mesopotamia in the first centuries CE. They are Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. There is a theory that they may be related to the Nabateans who were pre-Islamic pagan Arabs whose territory extended into southern Iraq.

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. 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.

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