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The Sabians, sometimes also spelled Sabaeans or Sabeans, are a religious group mentioned three times in the Quran (as الصابئون , in later sources الصابئة ),. where it is implied that they belonged to the 'People of the Book' ().; . Their original identity, which seems to have been forgotten at an early date,; . has been called an "unsolved Quranic problem".. Modern scholars have variously identified them as Mandaeism,This was extensively argued by and (both cited by ). The view has also been adopted by such Mandaean scholars as and (citing Gündüz 1994). Manichaeans, (cited by ). Sabaeans, (cited by ). Elchasaites, (cited by ); (cited by ). Archontics, (cited by ). Hanif (either as a type of Gnostics or as "sectarians"),As Gnostics: and (both cited by ). As "sectarians": (cited by ). or as adherents of the astral religion of Harran. (cited by ); (cited by ). Some scholars believe that it is impossible to establish their original identity with any degree of certainty.; ; ; .
At least from the ninth century on, the Quranic epithet 'Sabian' was claimed by various religious groups who sought recognition by the Muslim authorities as a People of the Book deserving of legal protection ().; ; . Among those are the Sabians of Harran, adherents of a poorly understood ancient Semitic religion centered in the upper Mesopotamian city of Harran, who were described by Syriac Christian Christian Heresiography as .. These Harranian Sabians practiced an old Semitic form of polytheism,. combined with a significant amount of Hellenistic elements.. Most of the historical figures known in the ninth–eleventh centuries as were probably either members of this Harranian religion or descendants of such members, most notably the Harranian astronomers and mathematicians Thabit ibn Qurra (died 901) and al-Battani (died 929).A genealogical table of Thabit ibn Qurra's family is given by . On some of his descendants, see .
From the early tenth century on, the term 'Sabian' was applied to purported 'pagans' of all kinds, such as to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, or to Buddhists.. Ibn Wahshiyya (died ) used the term for a type of Mesopotamian paganism that preserved elements of ancient Assyro-Babylonian religion..
Today in Iraq and Iran, the name 'Sabian' is normally applied to the Mandaeans, a modern ethno-religious group who follow the teachings of their prophet John the Baptist (Yahya ibn Zakariya). These Mandaean Sabians, whose most important religious ceremony is baptism, are monotheistic, and their holy book is known as the Ginza Rabba. Mandaean Sabian prophets include Adam, Seth, Noah, Shem and John the Baptist with Adam being the founder of the religion and John being the greatest and Last prophet.
The interpretation as 'converts' was cited by various medieval Arabic lexicographers and philologists,. and is supported by a tradition preserved by Ibn Hisham (died 834, editor of the earliest surviving biography of Muhammad) relating that the term was applied to Muhammad and the early Muslims by some of their enemies (perhaps by the Jews),. That these enemies may have been the Jews is suggested by . who regarded them as having 'turned' away from the proper religion and towards heresy. As such, the term may have been reappropriated by early Muslims, first as a self-designation and then to refer to other people from a Jewish Christian background who 'turned' to the new revelations offered by Muhammad. In the context of the Quranic passages in which the term occurs, it may thus refer to all people who leave their faiths, finding fault in them, but who have yet to come to Islam. In this sense, the term would be similar in meaning to the term Hanif..
Understanding the term as a reference to 'dippers' or 'baptizers' fits best with those interpretations that identify the Quranic Sabians with baptist sects like the Elchasaites or the Mandaeans. However, this etymology has also been used to explain Ibn Hisham's story about Muhammad and his followers being called 'Sabians', which would then be a reference to the ritual washing performed by Muslims before prayer, a practice resembling those of various baptist sects.Ibn Hisham's story was thus explained by Julius Wellhausen, as cited by .
Other etymologies have also been proposed. According to Judah Segal, the term referred to , a Syriac language name for Nisibis, a city in Upper Mesopotamia., referring to . It has also been related to Hebrew ṣābā, "[Heavenly host]]", implying star worshippers. "Sabaism", in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005).
According to , "surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve."
According to , "surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabians and the Christians whoever believes in Allah and the last day and does good – they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve."
According to , "surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabians and the Christians and the Magians and those who associate (others with Allah) – surely Allah will decide between them on the day of resurrection; surely Allah is a witness over all things."
The two first verses have generally been interpreted to mean that the Sabians belonged to the People of the Book (, cf. 5:68),. 5:68, the verse preceding 5:69 quoted above, reads "Say: O followers of the Book ! You follow no good till you keep up the Taurat and the Injeel and that which is revealed to you from your Lord; and surely that which has been revealed to you from your Lord shall make many of them increase in inordinacy and unbelief; grieve not therefore for the unbelieving people.". just like the Jews, the Christians and, according to a few interpretations, the Zoroastrians (the 'Magians', ). However, neither of the three verses give any indication of who the Sabians might have been or what they may have believed. According to François de Blois, the fact that they are classified in the Quran among Abrahamic monotheists renders it unlikely that they were either the polytheists of Harran or the Mandaeans, the latter of whom defined themselves in opposition to the Abrahamic prophetic tradition.
At the beginning of the Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia, the leader of the Mandaeans, Anush bar Danqa, appeared before Muslim authorities showing them a copy of the Ginza Rabba, the Mandaean holy book, and proclaiming the chief Mandaean prophet to be John the Baptist, who is also mentioned in the Quran by the name Yahya ibn Zakariya. Consequently, the Muslim caliphates provided them acknowledgement as the Quranic Sabians and People of the Book.
Other classical Arabic sources include the Fihrist of ibn al-Nadim (c. 987), who mentions the Mogtasilah ("Mughtasila", or "self-ablutionists"), a sect of Sabians in southern Mesopotamia who are identified with the Mandaeans or Elcesaites.
Al-Biruni (writing at the beginning of the eleventh century CE) 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. According to E. S. Drower (1937) these remaining tribes ... adopted a system mixed up of Magism and Judaism.'
According to Abu Yusuf Absha al-Qadi, Caliph al-Ma'mun of Baghdad in 830 CE stood with his army at the gates of Harran and questioned the Harranians about what protected religion they belonged to. As they were neither Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Magian, the caliph told them they were non-believers. He said they would have to become Muslims, or adherents of one of the other religions recognized by the Quran by the time he returned from his campaign against the Byzantines or he would kill them.. The Harranians consulted with a lawyer, who suggested that they find their answer in the Quran II.59, which said that Sabians were tolerated. It was unknown what the sacred text intended by "Sabian" and so they took the name..
The pagan people of Harran identified themselves with the Sabians in order to fall under the protection of Islam.. The Harranians may have identified themselves as Sabians in order to retain their religious beliefs. Multiple medieval sources state that the Harranian Sabians acknowledged Hermes Trismegistus as their prophet.. Validation of Hermes as a prophet comes from his identification with Idris (i.e., Enoch) in Quran 19:57 and 21:85.. This has often led modern scholars to think of the Harranian Sabians as Hermeticists, though there is in fact no further evidence for this.
Furthermore, this account of the Harranian Sabians does not fit with the existence of earlier records making reference to Sabians in Harran. Usamah ibn Ayd, writing before 770 CE (his year of death), already referred to a city of Sabians in the region where Harran lies.. The jurist Abu Hanifa, who died in 767 CE, is recorded to have discussed the legal status of Harranian Sabians with two of his disciples..
The Sabians are also mentioned in the literature of the Baháʼí Faith. These references are generally brief, describing two groups of Sabians: Those "who worship idols in the name of the stars, who believed their religion derived from Seth and Idris" Harranian, and others "who believed in the son of Zechariah (John the Baptist) and didn't accept the advent of Jesus the son of Mary" Mandaeans. 'Abdu'l-Bahá briefly describes Seth as one of the "sons of Adam". Bahá'u'lláh identifies Idris with Hermes Trismegistus in a tablet. He does not, however, specifically name Idris as the prophet of the Sabians. Sometimes referred to as Sabeans, this religious group has been mentioned in the Baha’i Faith among the many early religions of the previous dispensations. In Baha’i writing, `Abdu’l-Bahá’ attributes the Sabeans are with possibly being the source of some foundations to the science of logic.
The Syriac Christian Nicolas Siouffi, and later French Vice-Consul at Mosul, claimed to have identified 4,000 Sabians in the Mandaean population. Siouffi's work was well received by the Theosophist G.R.S. Mead, but scholars criticized the estimates and study.
A.H. Layard mentions in his travel diary meeting a "travelling silversmith" who was "Sabaean or Christian of St. John". He estimated around 300~400 families to live in Shushtar and Basra at the time. He also mentioned Sabians (spelled by Layard as Sabaeans) to be under oppression from Turkish and Persian authorities.
Gavin Maxwell while travelling with explorer Wilfred Thesiger in the southern marshes of Iraq records in his diary that the Sabians were "People of the Book". The marsh Arabs called them "Subbi". They had their own script and religious practices. He estimated their number as "perhaps ten thousand". They dressed in the manner of the Sunnis. They lived only near moving (rather than stagnant) marsh water. In the mid-1950s they were considered the skilled craftsmen in the area who others turned to for metalwork. The work they were principally known for outside Iraq being silverwork.
J. Hämeen-Anttila (2002, 2006) notes that in the marsh areas of Southern Iraq, there was a continuous tradition of Mandaean religion, and that there was another pagan, or ‘Sabian’, centre in the tenth-century Islamic world centred around Harran. These pagan Sabians are mentioned in the Nabataean corpus of Ibn Wahshiyya."First, the books of the Nabatean corpus themselves claim to be translations from "ancient Syriac" (e.g. Filaha 1:5) made by Ibn Wahshiyya and transmitted to a student of his, Ibn az-Zayyat. The real authors of, e.g., Filaha, according to ..."
Etymology
The etymology of the Arabic word is disputed. According to one interpretation, it is the active participle of the Arabic Arabic root -- ʾ ('to turn to'), meaning 'converts'.; . finds this "the most convincing etymology yet", referring also to and . Another widely cited hypothesis, first proposed by Daniel Chwolsohn in 1856,, as cited by . is that it is derived from an Aramaic language root meaning 'to dip' or 'to baptize'.This etymology is still upheld by some scholars, e.g., by .
Sabians of the Quran
In the Quran
The Quran briefly mentions the Sabians in three places: in Al-Baqara (2:62), in (5:69), and in Al-Hajj (22:17).
In later sources
Islamic
In some Sunni , they are described as converts to Islam.E.g. Sahih Bukhari Book No. 7, Hadith No. 340; Book No. 59, Hadith No. 628; Book No. 89, Hadith No. 299 etc.
Other
The Jewish scholar Maimonides (1135 or 1138–1204) translated the book The Nabataean Agriculture, which he considered an accurate record of the beliefs of the Sabians. According to Maimonides, the Sabians believed in idolatrous practices "and other superstitions mentioned in the Nabatean Agriculture". He provided considerable detail about the pagan Sabians in his Guide for the Perplexed..
ʻAbdu'l-Bahá (1990). 087743008X, Baháʼí Publishing Trust. 087743008X
Modern scholars
differentiates between the pagan "pseudo-Sabians" of Harran with the real Sabians which he identifies as the marsh Arabs of Iraq. The Caliph Mamun asked the pagan Harranians to choose a recognized religion, become Muslim, or die. They subsequently identified themselves with the Sabians. Chwolson also connected the Elcesaites with the Manicheans and with the Essenes.; cf. .
Pagan Sabians
Among the various religious groups which in the 9th and 10th centuries came to be identified with the Sabians mentioned in the Quran, at least two groups were pagan religion. Moreover, both appear to have engaged in some kind of star worship.
Sabians of Harran
By far the most famous of these two are the Sabians of Harran, adherents of a Hellenization Semitic polytheistic religion that had managed to survive during the early Islamic period in the Upper Mesopotamian city of Harran. They were described by Syriac Christian Christian Heresiography as star worshippers. Most of the scholars and courtiers working for the Abbasid and Buyid dynasties in Baghdad during the ninth–eleventh centuries who were known as 'Sabians' were either members of this Harranian religion or descendants of such members, most notably the Harranian astronomers and mathematicians Thabit ibn Qurra (died 901) and al-Battani (died 929).. A genealogical table of Thabit ibn Qurra's family is given by . On some of his descendants, see . There has been some speculation on whether these Sabian families in Baghdad, on whom most of our information about the Harranian Sabians indirectly depends, may have practiced a different, more philosophically inspired variant of the original Harranian religion. (as cited by ). However, apart from the fact that it contains traces of Babylonian and Hellenistic religion, and that an important place was taken by planets (to whom ritual were made), little is known about Harranian Sabianism.. They have been variously described by scholars as (neo)-Platonists, Hermeticists, or Gnostics, but there is no firm evidence for any of these identifications..
Lower Mesopotamian Sabians
Apart from the Sabians of Harran, there were also various religious groups living in the Mesopotamian Marshes who were called the 'Sabians of the Marshes' (Arabic: ).. On the Mesopotamian Marshes in the early Islamic period, see pp. 60–69. Though this name has often been understood as a reference to the Mandaeans, there was in fact at least one other religious group living in the marshlands of Southern Iraq.. According to Van Bladel there were two other groups, the third one being Elchasaites, whom other scholars see as Mandaeans. This group still practiced a polytheistic Babylonian religion or similar, in which Mesopotamian gods had already been venerated in the form of planets and stars since antiquity.. According to Ibn al-Nadim, our only source for this specific group counted among the 'Sabians of the Marshes', they "follow the doctrines of the ancient Aramaeans and venerate the stars".Translation by . However, there is also a large corpus of texts by Ibn Wahshiyya (died c. 930), most famously his Nabataean Agriculture, which describes at length the customs and beliefs — many of them going back to Mespotamian models — of Iraqi Sabians living in the Sawad..
Contemporary Sabians
Today in Iraq and Iran, the Sabians are those that claim to follow the teachings of John the Baptist. They are Mandaeans Sabians. They have been vulnerable to violence since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and numbered fewer than 5,000 in Iraq in 2007. Before the invasion, the highest concentrations of Mandaeans were in Amarah, Nasiriyah and Basra. Besides these southern regions and Ahvaz in Iran, large numbers of Mandaeans were found in Baghdad, giving them easy access to the Tigris River. Today, they primarily live around Baghdad, where the high priest resides who conducts services and baptisms. Some have moved from Baghdad to Iraqi Kurdistan where it is safer.
See also
Notes
Sources
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(2026). 9780061125867, HarperOne. ISBN 9780061125867
(1990). 9780874803426, University of Utah Press. ISBN 9780874803426
(1996). 9783447037457, Harrassowitz. ISBN 9783447037457 reprinted
(2026). 9789042914582, Peeters. ISBN 9789042914582
(1987). 9783110109245, de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110109245
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