Mandaean

The Mandaeans are a closed Gnostic ethnoreligious community of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, centered on southern Iraq. Their tradition in Haran Gawaita traces them to Nasoraean migrants who left Judea for Mesopotamia in the first centuries of the Christian era. They venerate John the Baptist and practise repeated baptism in running water; their scriptures are written in Mandaic, an Eastern Aramaic language with its own script.

Under Abbasid rule they claimed the name of the Sabians, protected in the Quran, to secure dhimmi status; the vizier Ibn Muqla called them Sabians in the early tenth century. The Dominican friar Riccoldo da Monte di Croce met them in Mesopotamia around 1290.

Carmelite missionaries in Basra in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called them Christians of Saint John. Arabic displaced Mandaic as everyday speech, though the classical language survived in liturgy.