The subject of this chapter is a small ethno-religious community, a single thread running through the rich tapestry of the Gulf region, from which it has roughly been plucked. I As elaborated in its sacred texts, the core of this community's faith is a doctrine known as Nāṣirutā or ‘Nazorenism’, the adherents of which are called ‘Nazorenes’ (nāṣorāyi), who include among their number John the Baptist and his followers in Jerusalem. Within this group of people, these texts further distinguish between a priesthood, tarmidutā, and a laity, mandāyutā. The latter word, which comes from their word for knowledge (mandā), furnishes us with a useful term for the entire complex of beliefs, culture, faith and practices associated with this doctrine, namely ‘Mandaism’. Thus its followers are often called Mandaans, although we could just as easily refer to them as ‘Nazorenes’ or even ‘Gnostics’, using the Greek word for knowledge (gnōsis) in place of an Aramaic one. To their non- Mandaan neighbours, they are most commonly known as Ṣubba or Sabians, employing a term lifted from the religious vocabulary of the Qur’ān.

Before they were ethnically cleansed, the bulk of their community was to be found in and around the marshy regions at the head of the Gulf, in what is today southern Iraq and south-western Iran. They also spread widely throughout the Gulf system and the Indian Ocean, sometimes even becoming ministers and elite officials to Muslim rulers such as Sayyid Said bin Sultan of Zanzibar and Muscat. But they have always maintained that they had emigrated to the Gulf from somewhere else. Stefana Drower, their premier ethnographer throughout the twentieth century, collected oral traditions situating this territory ‘to the west’ of the then current distribution of the Mandaans, in and around a legendary ‘Mountain of the Mandaans’, also known as Jabal Maddā’ī, ‘for Arabs call the Jebel Mandai [sic] the Jebel Maddai [sic]’ (Drower 1937: 316).

Although these oral traditions have not received as much attention as the written sources concerning the origins of the Mandaans, it bears noting that oral traditions can sometimes manifest a surprising antiquity. The Africanist Jan Vansina relates (1985: 17–18) an account collected in 1954 from a caravan guide in southern Libya: