Monthly Archives: December 2021

Islam and the Ancient Mystery Schools (Part 7)

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 إِنَّ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَالَّذِينَ هَادُوا وَالصَّابِئُونَ وَالنَّصَارَىٰ مَنْ آمَنَ بِاللَّهِ وَالْيَوْمِ الْآخِرِ وَعَمِلَ صَالِحًا فَلَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ

Indeed, those who believed and those who were Jews or Christians or Sabeans [before Prophet Muḥammad (ﷺ)] – those [among them] who believed in Allah and the Last Day and did righteousness – will have their reward with their Lord, and no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve. (Qur’an: 2:62)
— Saheeh International

If you are like me, you might have glossed over the mention of the Sabians the first few hundred times you read this verse and those like it. Mysteriously sandwiched between two groups of people we feel we know about, the Jews and the Christians, we know less about the Sabians in our times. Not only that, but many Muslim scholars appear to have been perplexed as to their true identity and disagreed about who they are, what they believe, and their status vis-a-vis the Muslim community. Many contemporary scholars have tried, but few have arrived at a viable conclusion. It, thus, remains a mystery… perhaps, a mystery school.

My hunch is that the Mysteries of the Greeks – and later the Freemasons and other New Age groups – are what classical Islamic sources refer to as Ṣābi’ah (Sabianism), a complex and multifarious religious tradition that merged different fields of knowledge into its spiritual worldview. Like the Ancient Mysteries described in esoteric sources of modern times, it was thought to be the primordial religion of mankind going back to Adam. It is most often associated with Hermes (Tehuti/Thoth in Egypt, Enoch, in the Bible and Idrīs in the Qur’an). Over time it suffered from corruption and experienced internal reform and slowly dissipated from public attention. Sabianism was overshadowed by other religious movements in the Near East, occasionally taking on different names and descriptions depending on the language, reformer, or public sentiments of the time.

Tehuti aka Hermes aka Enoch aka Idris.
Original source: Budge, E. A. Wallace. “The Nile: Notes for Travellers in Egypt.” (Harrison and Sons, London: 1902). p. 188.

Christopher Buck, in his article, The Identity of the Sabi’un: An Historical Quest, examines the evidences for the various accounts of early Muslim encounters with so-called Sabians according to the listing of Jacques Waardenburg:

  1. Mazdaeans of Mesopotamia, Iran and Transoxania
  2. Christians of various denominations
    1. Nestorians of Mesopotamia and Iran
    2. Monophysites of greater Syria, Egypt, and Armenia
    3. Orthodox Melkites of greater Syria
    4. Orthodox Latins of North Africa
    5. Arians of Spain
  3. Jews of Mesopotamia and Iran, greater Syria, and Egypt
  4. Samaritans of Palestine
  5. Mandaeans of south Mesopotamia
  6. Harranians of north Mesopotamia
  7. Manichaeans of Mesopotamia and Egypt
  8. Buddhists and Hindus of the Sind
  9. Indigenous religions of east Africa (172-173)

Were the early Muslims so oblivious that they went all over the world calling every unfamiliar religious denomination Sabians or did their understanding differ from ours? In future posts, I will attempt to unravel this mystery, step-by-step until we see that classical Muslim writers referred to the Ancient Mystery Schools as Sabianism.

Buck, Christopher. “The Identity of the Sabi’un: An Historical Quest.” The Muslim World 74, no. 3–4 (1984): 172–86. https://www.bahai-library.com/buck_identity_sabiuns.

Islam and the Ancient Mystery Schools (Part 6)

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In my post, Islam and the Ancient Mystery Schools (Part 5), I stated the theory of the contemporary Iraqi thinker, Fadil al-Rabi’i, that identified the Nasara of the Qur’an as the Hanifs. In this post, I will examine the linguistic evidence for his theory.

Raphael Tuck & Sons, The Holy Land. Nazareth, Fountain of the Virgin, Post Card, 1903, The Newberry Library, https://archive.org/details/nby_LL8170/page/n1/mode/1up.

Al-Rabi’i is from the line of scholarship that does not believe that the prophet ‘Isa/Jesus (peace be upon him) was from Palestine. Therefore, he rejects the claim that the word Nasara is related to the Palestinian town of Nazareth, the purported birthplace of ‘Isa. If this was the case, he argues, then everyone from this area would be called Nasara regardless of their religious affiliation. Jews, pagans, and other religious groups who happened to be from this town will thus be labeled Nasara, but this was never the case.

He subsequently follows up on the problematic etymology of the word initiated by Arabic language scholars such as Ibn Manzur (d. 1311/1312), author of the authoritative Arabic lexicon, Lisan al-“Arab. Al-Rabi’i finds doubt in Ibn Manzur’s treatment of the word. When discussing the words Nazareth and Nasara under the root nasara (ن – ص – ر), Ibn Manzur adds the statement of Ibn Sidah’s that this is a weak opinion and rare for a relative adjective (nisba) to take this form.

In addition, al-Rabi’i identifies the verb, ansara (أنصر), to be uncircumcised, as the origin of the word Nasara. In a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (prayers and peace be upon him), he stated:

You should not let an uncircumcised man lead you, nor one who holds his bladder or one who is habitually delusional.

The word anṣar, as used in this hadith, means uncircumcised. Al-Rabi’i believes that the word Nasara is really derived from this aspect of the word and was thus used for any group that did not practice circumcision. These groups sought to distinguish themselves from the Jews. Although, it was used for Christians and pagans who did not practice circumcision, it remained a term reserved for the Christians who continued not to practice it or did not see it as a religious duty.

Interestingly, some Arab tribes who rejected circumcision, practiced slitting the ears of a she-camel as a symbolic alternative to circumcision. This can be witnessed in the practice of the people of Salih, who were commanded not to abuse the she-camel that God provided to them.[1]

While al-Rabi’i makes some convincing claims, he also complicates our understanding of the Hanifs. According to this information, the Hanifs, if synonymous with Nasara, did not systematically practice circumcision as is commonly thought. Rather, it was left optional, leaving some to continue the practice and others to abandon it altogether. Al-Rabi’i’s theory is significant to unfolding the mystery of the Hanifs, but it is not conclusive. Yet no conversation on pre-Islamic religious history can be complete without an exploration of Sabianism, which I will undertake in a future post.

[1] Fadel al-Rabi’i, Al-Masih al-Arabi: Al-Nasraniyyah Fi al-Jazira al-Arabiyya Wa al-Sira’ al-Bizanti al-Farisi (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2009), 27-31.