Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  Furthermore, there was a tradition of tolerance in Islam. Although the Koran denounced idol worshipers, it praised “people of the book,” who were monotheists and possessed written scriptures. The latter explicitly included the Christians and the Jews. Other religions singled out for positive mention in the Koran were Zoroastrians and “Sabians.” A few centuries after Islam’s beginning, the precise identification of this last group was unclear, providing a loophole by which several other Middle Eastern religions escaped persecution—including the Mandaeans, who were identified as Sabians by the great eleventh-century Muslim anthropologist Biruni in one of his 142 books. Incidentally, Biruni, described by George Sarton as “one of the greatest scientists in world history” for his open-mindedness, is a good example of the tolerance some Muslim intellectuals displayed toward the religions they discovered in their midst. Another was al-Mas’udi, who was the one who spotted the Babylonians living in the Iraqi Marshes—and who studied peoples as distant and diverse as the Russians and the French. Despite the reservations of religious conservatives, these intellectuals were prepared to learn even from those who did not share their faith, acting on an Arab saying: “Knowledge is the stray camel of the believer: it benefits him regardless from where he takes it.” Although this spirit of tolerance waned in subsequent centuries, and the Mandaeans were frequently harassed and sometimes persecuted, it was only rarely that the Muslim authorities put great effort into converting their subjects forcibly; and the Mandaeans had the Marshes to protect them, right up into the twentieth century.

  The Babylonians had been living in the Iraqi Marshes; so had the Mandaeans. Might they be connected? I had loved reading about Babylon when I was a child, and it was exciting to think the Mandaeans were the last frail remnant of Babylonian civilization. When I was telephoned by the high priest of the Mandaeans and asked for a meeting, therefore, it was like being summoned to meet one of the Knights of the Round Table, or discovering that in a small village in a remote part of the English countryside a community still worshiped Odin and had invited me to tea. So I said yes: I would see the high priest. This was the spring of 2006.

  There was only one place in the Green Zone to which the average Baghdadi might easily gain access. In its heyday the al-Rashid Hotel, an eighteen-story concrete building from the 1970s, had a hundred eavesdroppers sitting in its basement, connected to a network of cameras and microphones that recorded everything done and said in its every room. After the 2003 war the cameras and microphones apparently were stripped out, and the mosaic of George H. W. Bush that had been the hotel’s official doormat was covered over. The hotel remained a strange place. The waiters at the café, in fake bow ties and waistcoats, stood slightly too close to the tables for slightly longer than was necessary, listening intently. This was where I met the high priest, who was known as Sheikh Sattar (sheikh is an honorary Arabic title, used widely in Middle East religions and tribes to indicate respect). He was sitting at a table with two men who turned out to be his brother and secretary.

  “Ours is the oldest religion in the world,” said Sheikh Sattar. “It dates back to Adam.” He traced its history back to Babylon, though he said it might have some connection to the Jews of Jerusalem. The Mandaeans believed in Adam, he said, who was the first man, and they accepted some other prophets who featured in the Hebrew Bible, such as Seth and Noah. Above all, they revered John the Baptist. But they rejected Abraham and had their own holy books that were quite separate from the Bible or the Koran. The sheikh handed me one of these books, which had been published in Arabic with a white cover.

  The book was called the Ginza Rabba; the title means “Great Treasure.” I leafed through the pages, right to left, and realized that it could also be turned upside down and read back to front, revealing another text back-to-back with the first. Both versions were laid out like the Koran, divided neatly into verses and chapters. At the start of each chapter, where the Koran has the phrase “In the name of God, the merciful, the beneficent!” the Ginza Rabba declared, “In the name of the Great Life!” On each page was what seemed to be a cross, crowned with a myrtle branch, over which a white scarf had been draped. This was not a cross, Sheikh Sattar assured me, but the darfesh. It is a symbol of the immersion in the Tigris, the Mandaean “baptism” and one of the religion’s most sacred rites. Its four arms represent the four directions of the world. It is a glimpse on earth of the Mandaean heaven, in which the spirits of the good have eternal bliss. It was placed on earth on the day when Hibil Ziwa, the angel of light, baptized John—who then in turn became John the Baptist and performed miracles recorded in one of the Mandaean holy books, the Drasa da Yehia (Book of John). John the Baptist, the book says, was a far greater miracle worker than Jesus.

  Baptism was a particular focus of the Mandaeans. “We practice baptism not just once in a lifetime, like Christians,” said the sheikh, “but before all big occasions. Before a wedding, for instance, both the bride and groom are baptized.” The baptism is more than just a cleansing process. It is seen as giving energy and spiritual contentment, and as purifying sin and healing the body. Mandaeans preferred to wear white, Sheikh Sattar added, and to live near rivers, because baptisms had to be performed in clean running water. They were also pacifists. “We don’t believe in fighting even if we are attacked,” he insisted. Our conversation was in Arabic, but I learned that the Mandaeans had their own language, which today is used only for names and rituals. The name Mandaean came from this language’s word for wisdom, manda. They believed in one God, manda da hiya, the Great Life. They called heaven the Light-World, malka da nhura.

  The group had not come just to tell me about their religion. They had a request for me. “My family are gold merchants,” the secretary told me, and so they were attacked not just for their religion but also for their money. All the male members of his family, he added, had been killed. “Please,” the high priest said, “there are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq. And we all want to leave. We want your country to give us all asylum.” Britain did not grant them asylum as a community, which is what they were hoping for, but I knew that it would not be hard for them to apply as individuals, in Britain or elsewhere, and that one by one they would leave Iraq. I had encountered the link to the ancient culture of Iraq that I had been looking for, and it was vanishing almost before my eyes.

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  As I would see, the Mandaeans do preserve Babylonian customs, but their religion is not the same as that of the ancient Babylonians: they do not worship the Babylonian sun god Bel or the fertility goddess Atargatis, for instance. Their earliest surviving religious texts date back to the late second or early third century ad, according to historian Jorunn Buckley. That dates them to a time of unprecedented intellectual ferment in the Middle East, when new cults and philosophies swept through the Middle East, bringing new deities, ideas, and legends to replace the traditional ones. Why did this intellectual revolution happen at that particular time? It was mainly because of politics and empire. East and West had been brought together more closely than ever before, thanks to the expansion of huge empires such as those of Persia, Alexander, and Rome. Persia had India on its eastern border and Greece on its west; Rome touched Persia on the east and Britain on the west. So cultures that previously had been isolated from each other could meet. Even in an earlier era, stories of Indian asceticism had reached the early Greek philosophers and inspired the practices of the Cynics, who believed that the only path to true happiness lay in abandoning all possessions and living in complete poverty. In later centuries (especially after sea travel was easier) this kind of contact became even more common. Urbanization, too, threw different religions into a melting pot. It was no longer enough for a people to hold on to the gods they had had for a thousand years: new gods were wanted, and new philosophies to justify their worship.

  What resulted was an era of fervent religious belief and radical intellectual debate that makes the modern world, whose five la
rgest religions are now all more than a thousand years old, look static by comparison. Hinduism and Buddhism entered the Persian Empire. Middle Eastern faiths reached Rome, such as the clannish cult of the god Mithras and the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis (the latter notorious because its initiation rites allegedly involved ritual sex). A man called Elagabalus from the Syrian city of Homs became emperor in the third century, supplanted the old cult of Jupiter with worship of a Levantine sun god, and installed a black meteorite from his hometown as focus of the Rome’s largest temple. In the other direction, the cult of the Greek philosophers spread across the Middle East. Another religion that moved from west to east was Judaism. Perhaps some Jews had remained by the waters of Babylon after their exile there in the sixth century bc; certainly there was an established Jewish community in Iraq in the early first century ad, when the king of the northern province of Adiabene, his wife, and his mother were all separately converted to Judaism. In ad 70 the Jews of Iraq were joined by others fleeing eastward from the Roman armies that had sacked Jerusalem and demolished its Temple. Babylonia (the region where Babylon had once stood, and which kept its name: the city itself was ruined by this time) became the heartland of the Jewish religion. Estimates of the Jewish population of Iraq go as high as two million by the year ad 500—perhaps something like 40 percent of its population.

  The oldest surviving Mandaean scriptures were written in a language very close to that used by the Jewish scholars who compiled the Babylonian Talmud, one of the most important collections of Jewish law, which was assembled between the third and fifth centuries ad. The Mandaean books show an interest in Judaism and a close knowledge of its practices, but a lot of hostility too. The Mandaeans have adopted John the Baptist but dislike Abraham. They utterly reject circumcision—a practice that marked out the Jews from the Babylonians even during the Jewish exile in Babylon. The Mandaeans take Sunday, not Saturday, as the Sabbath. The legend of Miriai is about a Jewish woman who leaves her community in order to marry a Mandaean man. Jews and Mandaeans knew each other but were rivals.

  Mandaeanism was not alone in being heavily influenced by Judaism: several versions of Christianity were, too. Some tried to keep Jewish law while following Jesus, while others were more hostile. For example, a breakaway Christian group called the Marcionites, founded in what is now northern Turkey in about ad 144, accepted that the events described in the Hebrew Bible (adopted by Christians as the Old Testament) were true, but were appalled by some of them. Why would God, for instance, forbid Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden? Why would he ask Abraham to kill his own son? So they believed that the God described there was in fact an inferior deity, unworthy of worship. The material world this inferior deity had created was something to escape from. That included the human body and its urges: elite Marcionites were unmarried and had no children. The Marcionites’ scriptures included only the Gospel of Luke and the Epistles of Paul, and even those were changed somewhat. The name of Abraham, for example, was removed almost everywhere it appeared, because Abraham not only was willing to kill his son but also slept with his maid and allowed Pharaoh to sleep with his own wife.

  It was in such an environment—where Jews were numerous, Christian groups proliferated, and the old religions were giving way to new ideologies—that a man called Patik prepared to offer a sacrifice to one of the old gods at a temple in a city south of where Baghdad stands today. It would have been a bloody affair, the slaughter of a goat or a sheep perhaps, after which he might receive a portion of the flesh to eat. But he suddenly heard a supernatural voice telling him never to eat meat again. Nor to have sex. Nor to drink alcohol. The year was around ad 215.

  Asceticism was a common theme of the new religions of the Middle East. This may have been in part a reflection of Indian influence or a reaction to the self-indulgence of the older religions (Syria, where pagan temples once housed sacred prostitutes, was also the country where a Christian saint lived on top of a pillar for thirty years without once coming down). There was a philosophy behind the self-denial as well. Society was technologically advanced: in the second century ad Ptolemy drew a map of the world that would be used for more than a thousand years, and Galen wrote a medical textbook that would be used until the nineteenth century. Yet cesspits had to be cleaned out by hand, diseases such as typhoid were common, and wounds might easily develop gangrene. The body’s weakness and foulness were in strange contrast to the intellect’s amazing achievements. Since at this time it was not generally understood that the intellect had any connection with the brain (Galen realized that it did, but Aristotle had thought the brain existed just to release heat from the body), it was easy to suppose that the mind, or soul, could survive without the messiness of the body.

  Religions that instructed their followers to punish or subordinate the body so that the mind could be made free are often called “Gnostic,” and there were several such at this time. Patik discovered that a number of austere communities had recently been established in the Iraqi Marshes. The Mandaeans were one of these, but their rules perhaps were not strict enough for Patik. (Although the Mandaeans may have been vegetarian at some point in their history, they never favored celibacy.) A nearby community fitted better with the instructions that the voice had given him. Not only did they never eat meat, have sex, or drink alcohol, but they also avoided art and music. Otherwise they tried to strictly follow both Jewish law and the Christian gospels. Each family seems to have had a plot of land where they grew vegetables and fruit to eat. Later writers called them the Mughtasila, which in Arabic means “the washers,” because of their practice of baptism in the rivers of the marshes. It was the Mughtasila that Patik and his already pregnant wife joined, and shortly afterward their only child was born. They named him Mani.

  As Mani grew up, he went through a period of rebellion. It did not involve sex or alcohol. Instead, he chafed at the restrictions on art. He was a talented artist and longed to express his ideas visually as well as with musical hymns. The Mandaeans, living nearby in the marshes, were an inspiration: although they rejected Jesus, whom Mani admired, he appreciated their music and borrowed one of their hymns. In other ways, however, he found his own community’s rules too lax. Giving up meat was not enough, he said. To kill and eat vegetables was cruel to plants, and he could even hear the fig tree weep for the fruit that was cut from its branches. The springs of fresh water complained, he said, when the Mughtasila bathed in them, because they were polluting the water. (His own followers in later years apparently would wash themselves using their own urine instead.) Eventually Mani claimed to have received a new revelation—an account of a cosmic battle between light and darkness.

  A modern representation of Mani, a third-century founder of a religion that competed with early Christianity and whose division of the universe between good and evil gave rise to the term “Manichean.” He was preceded and influenced by the Mandaeans.

  According to St. Augustine, who followed Mani’s teachings for a time before becoming a Christian, Mani taught that the universe contained “two antagonistic masses, both of which were infinite”—one good, the other evil. “Evil was some . . . kind of substance, a shapeless, hideous mass . . . a kind of evil mind filtering through the substance they called earth.” Evil was the source of all darkness in the universe, including eclipses of the sun and moon and the alternation of day and night. To Mani, day following night, and night following day, were signs of a constant battle between light and darkness. To this day, we speak of a “Manichean worldview” to mean one that divides the world into the forces of good and the forces of evil. (Mani chai was what Mani’s followers cried in Aramaic: it means “Mani is alive.” So his followers came to be called Manichees or Manicheans.)

  For religiously enlightened Manichees, the highest calling was to free the spirit from the bonds of matter. For the truly committed—the “elders,” as they were called (the same word, sheikh in Arabic, is applied to Manda
ean priests)—this meant never having children, eating only fruit, and atoning for plucking that fruit. Wasting water was a sin. Killing animals was unthinkable. Strict Manichees would not kill a fly. “Let [the country] . . . with smoking blood change into one where the people eat vegetables,” as a Manichee prayer declared. The religion also offered a chance of salvation, however, to people who wanted to follow Mani without observing all his rules: after all, someone had to commit the sin of plucking the fruit for the elders to eat. The elders absolved their followers of this sin by digesting their food according to a strict ritual, which was meant to liberate the fragments of light trapped inside the food. This structure of elders and followers meant that the religion had people of exemplary austerity who were capable of interceding with God on behalf of the whole community, leaving their followers free to live as they chose, provided that they maintained and respected the elders. As we will see, this structure is still used by some Middle Eastern faiths today.

  In around the year 240 Mani left the marshes and the community where he had been brought up and traveled east to the capital of the Parthian Empire. He was a distinctive figure in his multicolored coat, striped trousers, and high boots. Helped by his family’s aristocratic connections and the general laissez-faire attitude of the Parthians toward religion, he almost succeeded in converting the emperor to his cause—and was executed for his efforts. But his religion continued to spread. As his followers went east from Iran, they relied on Buddhist iconography to explain their message. Mani was presented as “the Buddha of Light.” A Manichee kingdom was established among the central Asian Uyghurs. In later centuries, Manichees became numerous in China, where they were best known for their refusal to eat meat. “Vegetarian demon worshipers” was the way the authorities described them in an edict in 1141. Official persecution winnowed their numbers, but they may have survived in southern China until the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, it appears that Mani is still worshiped in one place in China today, though accidentally: at a temple in eastern China, a statue of a Buddha with a beard and straight hair dates back to the time when the temple was built by Manichees—and was probably originally a statue of Mani.