1800 Years of Encounters With Mandaeans 9781463241339

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1800 Years of Encounters with Mandaeans

Gorgias Mandaean Studies

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Mandaean Studies addresses the religion, language, literature, and history of the Mandaean community of the Middle East. This community offers invaluable resources for the study of the region and its other great religious traditions, to which it has been a constant witness since its emergence into history during the early centuries of the Common Era.

1800 Years of Encounters with Mandaeans

Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley

gp 2023

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com 2023 Copyright © by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܚ‬

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2023

ISBN 978-1-4632-4132-2

ISSN 1935-441X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

I dedicate this book to my friend and helper, the šganda Sh. Salem Choheili (b. 1935)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................. ix Intellectual Timeline ................................................................ xi Acknowledgements .................................................................. xv List of Illustrations and Vignettes .............................................xvii Vignettes ................................................................................ xxi PART I ....................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Iran 1973 and 1996 ................................................. 3 1973 ................................................................................. 3 1996 ................................................................................. 6 Chapter 2. Conferences and Priests ......................................... 17 ARAM June 13-15, 1999, Harvard................................... 17 Chapter 3. A Yalufa and Three Elders...................................... 27 The Yalufa ....................................................................... 27 Three Elders .................................................................... 31 Chapter 4. Other Mandaean Contacts ...................................... 41 Chapter 5. Glimpses of a Few Scribes and Their Work............. 51 Introductory Remarks...................................................... 51 Lamea’s Texts .................................................................. 52 Marsh. 691 ...................................................................... 55 Ram Zihrun and Yahia Bihram ........................................ 56 PART II .................................................................................... 59 Preface to Part II ..................................................................... 61 A. How Persecutions of the Mandeans Occur ................... 61 B. To Whom It May Concern ........................................... 63

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Chapter 6. “We Are Between Two Deaths” .............................. 69 Chapter 7. “Don’t Ask the Turkish Smuggler any Questions” ... 83 Afterword ............................................................................... 91 Works Cited ............................................................................ 93 Illustrations ............................................................................ 95 Indices .................................................................................. 107 Index of Persons ............................................................ 107 Index of Places .............................................................. 110

INTRODUCTION The Mandaean religion can be traced back to the 1st century, directly related to John the Baptist. This is not the regular scholarly view, but I have investigated a great deal of original texts and done seventeen years of very specific research. No scholars have objected to my arguments. The Mandaean emigration legend, from Palestine (via Wadi Hauran) to Babylonia, probably contains a core of historicity, but it is hard to assess which part is most valid. In the beginning of the 1st century, a minor king in Babylonia, Ardban III (12-38), seems to have helped the Mandaeans there. Later, they moved toward west- and south-west Iran, where the archaeological evidence supports the development of their alphabet and language, from ca. 180 on. Mandaean mythologies and rituals are enormously rich, and the literature belongs to various categories: prose, poetry, teachings, esoteric commentaries. Larger than any other Gnostic production, Mandaean writings show strong polemical traditions. The people lived close to neighboring religions, and they were not at all isolated (contra the usual, scholarly view). That the Mandaic literature exists in one language, not translated into others (because they were not active missionaries) should never be used as an argument for isolation. In fact, the mono-language has rather acted as a protection. We need to recall that the Mandaeans have lived at important places on the Silk Road network. In Islamic times, the religion moved under the rubric “People of the Book” and have survived until today, because it, mostly successfully, appealed to the two required categories for a protected religion according to Islam’s rules: a prophet recognized by Islam, and a sacred scripture. Mandaeans already had both.

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Orthodoxy in Mandaeism applies to rituals much more than to mythologies. Lady Drower (1879-1972) recognized this, and much of the mythological and legal/philosophical material also has historical roots. But the ritual materials are detailed, esoteric, and minutely interested in correct performance of rituals (baptism, death rituals, and priest initiations are the primary ones). Strong connections exist to Judaism—Mandaeism’s original home—so to speak—and also to Zoroastrian, pagan Babylonian, Hellenistic/ Greek and Orphic traditions. The baptism heritage is not easily comparable to anything we know of—for that, the Mandaean ritual is too complex. Christian forms of baptism are embarrassingly short and simplified in comparison. Years ago, I was giving a talk to a hall full of newly immigrated Mandaeans in the U. S. After my presentation, an older man asked me, “Professor, what shall we say when people ask who we are?” I said, “Well, if they are Christians, they know about John the Baptist, so tell them that you are his people.” The man who had posed the question smiled and gave me the “high five” sign.

INTELLECTUAL TIMELINE In the spring 1970, a history-of-religions professor in Norway made a phone call to a colleague at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, saying that at that moment he had a particular visitor in his office. That person was me. For several years, I had already studied Gnostic traditions, Mandaeism among them. Mandaic texts in translation and scholarship on the religion were becoming familiar to me. Now, the Norwegian professor told the Swedish scholar that I needed to learn the Mandaic language, so, could I go to Uppsala? “Yes! Send her over, for my doctoral students must learn the language sooner or later, and we’ll do it next semester,” the Swede replied. I spent the spring semester at the Semitic Studies Institute at Uppsala University.1 While there, I took the opportunity to knock on the office door of the internationally famous Iranist Geo Widengren, who—having admitted me in—rapidly pointed at the door. “Ja, vi har inte mer att tala um.” I obeyed and left. In his view, I lacked the proper linguistic background for Mandaic studies. The Iranist had a serious disagreement with the wellknown worker in Mandaean studies, Lady E. S. Drower (whom I would meet in England that same spring). Only years later did I learn of the reason for Widengren’s animosity against her. Committed to continue my studies in Mandaeism, I fulfilled my degree requirements for the Norwegian degree of Cand. Philol. This took a total of about five-and-a-half years, my main subject being the history of religions, with psychology and 1

The university was founded in 1428.

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philosophy as supporting disciplines. On a fellowship in The Netherlands, 1973-74, I spent my time researching a specific project: whether the Mandaeans qualified as a “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab). During the fall 1973, the trip to Iran took place (as I describe in PART I, chapter 1). Against the expectations and advice of most sensible people, my resolve to continue studying Mandaean religion intensified. For two academic quarters in 1974 I had a job in the department of religion at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. There, three of my colleagues had their Ph. D.’s from The Divinity School, at the University of Chicago. One of them, whom I dubbed “El Greco,”2 told me sternly that the divinity school would be the only place for me to study for a Ph. D. in Mandaean studies. I had already decided on my focus: the figure of Ruha in Mandaeism. El Greco began to send letters on my behalf to the U. of Chicago’s Dean of the Divinity School. I got accepted—no other institution had shown any interest in me. Subject to visa restrictions, I was informed of the strict plan: two years of course-work and then one year of dissertation writing and completion. Extremely lucky, I had a very fine Ph. D. committee, headed by the historian of religions expert Prof. Jonathan Z. Smith (with Profs. Robert Grant and Arthur Vøøbus). Now, what were my chances of employment? Very slim. No department needed a faculty member with my special interest and capacity. I married an American, and that helped me stay in the U. S. For the next twenty years or so, I worked in nearly twelve institutions of higher learning full- or part-time: as an adjunct. Also, I had periods of unemployment. Editorships, active memberships in national and international professional organizations, writing and giving papers in various places, staying visible in the field of history of religions: all of that mattered. Publishing articles, encyclopedia essays, book reviews, and books kept me busy. I taught ca. thirty-five courses altogether. Here is a little-known fact: during WW2 a Bible course was introduced at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for some semesters—as a part-timer in the Literature Faculty there—I taught Bible at MIT. 2

Many years later, I published an obituary on him.

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My approach to religion courses often focused on theoryand-method issues, a heritage of my education at the U. of Chicago. Investigations of rituals and mythologies were central, and here I must credit my childhood: I grew up on the grounds of a provincial mental hospital in southern Norway, and that background put me in direct contact with people inhabiting a multitude of universes, both mental and bodily. It was indeed fine training for my future life as a historian of religions. In the early 1990s, my activism in human rights began in working for asylum-seeking Mandaeans in various parts of the world. In 1995, I became certified as an Expert Witness, at the U. S. Department of Justice, in the Office for Immigration Review. This certification concerns only Mandaean cases: no other religious minorities. Coordinating work with many international human rights organizations has been most helpful. What a wonderful learning experience: to be able to combine scholarly knowledge with political activism. PART II of this book contains information on my work in this regard. I wrote an entire book on these matters, but no publisher wanted to get involved, and the privately printed book (finished during 2015) can only be obtained through me. Starting in the fall of 2021, I began to send cartons of my academic archives to The Library of Congress (=LoC) in Washington D.C. That this institution would take my archive was of course a great honor. It will take quite a long time for the materials to be examined and catalogued, for, as I was told by the person with whom I have been in direct contact throughout, LoC is battling a considerable backlog. Books I have published: 1986 Female Fault and Fulfillment in Gnosticism, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1993 The Scroll of Exalted Kingship (Diwan Malkuta ‘laita) (A Mandaean Priest Initiation Text), American Oriental Society Translation Series vol. 3, New Haven, CT: The American Oriental Society. 2002 The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People, Oxford: Oxford University Press/Scholars Press

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2005 The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History, Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias (3rd ed. 2010). 2007 Edited work: Folk Tales of Iraq. The first part, by E. S. Drower, was published by Oxford University Press in 1931. (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias). 2012 Editor: Lady E. S. Drower’s Scholarly Correspondence: An Intrepid English Autodidact in Iraq, Leiden: Brill. Let me explain something about the edited Gorgias Press 2007 book: there is a second part to the work. Two Mandaean tales are in it, stories that Drower found among her papers, according to a letter she wrote to Clarendon Press on May 4, 1939. These stories are # 16: “The Appearance of the White Cat” (p. 443-48) and #17: “Allahu maku” (“There is no God”) (p. 449-457). The privately printed 2015 book, John the Baptist’s People in Limbo: Persecuted by Islam, Ignored by Others, records my ca. 20 years of experience in working internationally for Mandaean Human Rights. As noted, this book is only available through me. PART II of my current book here contains a few excerpts from this 2015 work. No names, locations or dates regarding events such as court cases are revealed. That would violate legal rules of confidentiality. Throughout the decades—starting in 1979—I have published between fifty and sixty articles, book reviews and essays, and many encyclopedia entries of different lengths. My Univ. of Chicago Divinity School Ph. D. dissertation (1978) is quite short and was never published, but important parts of its contents appear in other places.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS These are Mandaeans I wish to thank deeply for their assistance and information to me through my years of work in Mandaeism. Some I have known for many years, others for a shorter time. Readers may notice that few women’s names are included, and that is just the fact of the matter, as Mandaean men have served as informants to me, rather than women. Still, I have enjoyed— and continue to appreciate—deep friendships with Mandaean women. Of course, many of those listed here are no longer in this material world, Tibil. Lamea Abbas Amara (d. 2021) and her family, Sinan A. J. Abdullah, Jamshid Adamzadeh, Mamoon Aldulaimi, Asad Askari, Majid Arabi (al-Khamisi), Sh. Salwan al-Khamisi Wisam Breegi Sh. Salem Choheili, yalufa; Sh. Salah Choheili and his brother Sh. Najah Choheili; the šganda Sh. Salem Choheili; Reema Choheili Sobi Sh. Taleb Dorragi, Aziz Mahdawi Dorragi Ghazi Elmanahi, the yalufa Shahram Ebadfardzadeh Sherrie Farhan and her husband Ayar Farhan Issam Hermiz, Sh. Bassam Fadhil al-Haider Eshtar Jawad Sh. Abdullah Khaffagi, Abdelelah Khalafal-Sebahi, Kenneth Kataneh, Abdolkarim Moradi (1902-2011) and his son Saeed Moradi Sh. Fawzi Masboob (d. 2022) Sh. Alaa (Yuhana) Nashmi; Suhaib Nashi, Sh. Brikha Naṣoraia Layla al-Roomi, Sh. Rafid br Sh. Abdullah br Sh. Negm Dakhil Shooshtary (d. 2022) and his brother Nasser Sobbi (d. 2018)

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Diar Sager (formerly al-Haider) Sh. Jabbar Tawoosie (d. 2014) and his brother Abood Tawoosie (d. 2013) Yassmen Yahia

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND VIGNETTES I LLUSTRATIONS

Photo 1: Photo 1: Mr. Nasser Sobbi, as we remember him. Photo by Jesse Buckley. Photo 2: 2017 Nepean River, Liverpool, NSW, Australia. Sh. Salah preparing to baptize his 45-day old grand-daughter, held by Sh. Salah’s son, father of the infant. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckely. Photo 3: 2017, Nepean River, Liverpool, NSW, Australia. Šganda Amin Dorragi, making the klilas, with Šganda Nameen sitting on the ground. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Photo 4: Traditional cartonnage Mand. writing tablet; a present to me by Lady Drower’s daughter, Mrs. Margaret “Peggy” Hackforth-Jones. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Photo 5: Inspecting the baptism site at Charles River, Alliston, Mass., in advance of the 1999 ARAM Harvard University conference. From left: Jorunn J. Buckley, Shukrieh Sobbi, Sada Breegi, and Nasser Sobbi. Photo: Mr. Wisam Breegi, used by permission Photo 6: Lady E. S. Drower (1879-1972) and her daughter, the Egyptologist Margaret “Peggy” Hackforth-Jones (1913-2012), in Baghdad, early 1940s. Photo from the Hackforth-Jones family album, used by permission Photo 7: An embroidery, given to the author in 1996 in Awaz, Iran, by Reema Choheili Sobbi. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Photo 8: Sh. Jabbar Tawoosie climbing the steps of the ziggurat at Choga Zambeel, 1996. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Photo 9: Sh. Salem Choheili and Cyrus Askari in the mountains north of Tehran, 1996. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Photo 10: Mr. Asad Askari. Photo: Steven Askari, used by permission. xvii

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Photo 11 (from left): Jorunn J. Buckley, Sheikh Bassam, Prof. Charles Häberl and Yalufa Shahram Ebadfardzadeh in San Antonio, 2022. Photo: Matthew Busch, used by permission. Photo 12: Jorunn J. Buckley in a robe made for her by Mandaean women in Australia. Photo: Michael Klimov, used by permission. Photo 13: Sh. Abdullah Khaffagi. Photo from an Iranian newspaper, 1950s-1960s. Photo 14: June 2015, Södertälje, Sweden, near the mandi, after the conference: (from left) Jorunn J. Buckley, Diar al-Haidar (alSager), Ganzibra Walid Abdul Razzak, tarmida Salwan Shakir Khamas. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley. Map 1: Mandaean sites in the Middle East. Design Jorunn J. Buckley, cartography by Robert Cronan. © 2005 Fortress Press, used by permission.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND VIGNETTES

VIGNETTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The mongooses The DC 22 snakeskin The lead rolls The Mandelta Neshet Hermiz Issam, “halft Jude” Grotowski, Wroclaw Good meat The skeptical scientist Eshtar “The fat guy” Dakhil and mina Minnesota silver set The cardboard for copying Abdeleleah’s pipe The blue bead Police raid in Copenhagen, 2009 Mand. ended after 1831 Ya, Hibil Ziwa! Little king Faisal’s book Ban and her vase Dakhil’s calendars Ronaldo Oslo cab driver Diar goes to Iran Julian and Sh. Taleb

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VIGNETTES Intentionally, the following vignettes are not offered in temporal sequence and they aim at illustrating various encounters with Mandaeans and matters pertaining to Mandaean studies. 1. Lady Drower’s daughter, Mrs. Margaret (“Peggy”) HackforthJones (1913-2012) was showing me the garden of her house, where Lady Drower had lived. Pointing to a long-abandoned well in the lawn, Peggy told me that many decades ago, as her mother was travelling from her fieldwork in Iraq back to England for a vacation, she managed to smuggle a couple of animals all the way home: two live mongooses, hidden in the sleeves of her fur-coat. One animal survived and lived in that garden well for years until it died. ******** 2. Where is the perfectly preserved, dried snakeskin? I asked myself this question as I sat in the Oriental Reading Room at The Bodleian Library, Oxford, looking again at one of the Drower Collection (DC) texts there: DC 22, a Ginza. Some years earlier, in the 1990’s, the snakeskin had been there, hidden like a secret book-mark in the large Mandaean holy text. Now, it was missing. Had someone stolen it? ********

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3. An intense international exchange of emails and faxes occurred during the late winter and early spring 2006 because three inscribed Mandaean lead rolls, in five pieces, were shown and advertised for sale on the website of a gallery noted for dealing in antiquities. Found in Jordan in either 1995 or 1998, the amulets were offered for the sum $8,500. Said to date to 5th-to-7th century Iraq and containing “partially unparalleled contents,” the items were to be published by an expert. Certain scholars suspected that something fishy might be going on. From Jordan to Belgium to the U. S. was the supposed route the rolls took— but how, and by whom? Two friends of mine went to the gallery to view the rolls. One of them might have been interested in buying them but declined. Had someone in Iraq sold their family treasures? During Saddam Hussein’s reign, the Iraqi Department of Antiquities allowed peoples’ ancient religious items to be kept privately, though the objects were still regarded as state property. Then, anyone attempting to sell such items would risk the death penalty. But due to changing times, this was no longer true, for in 2006, oil and antiquities were Iraq’s top exports. A few years earlier, during the time of the Coalition Forces’ presence in Iraq, I received emails from a couple of soldiers there. Those soldiers had encountered Mandaeans, who badly needed money during war time and wanted to sell their family heirlooms. Via the internet, soldiers found me, asking, “I can do this, can’t I? I want to help these poor people!” I answered: no, reminding them of the UNESCO law. So now, in 2006, I asked one of the leaders of a Mandaean society in Europe if he knew something about the rolls. He did not. Soon, a colleague warned me that I would receive a phone call from an FBI agent, and I did. Obviously, the FBI had checked potential customers’ phone calls and emails to the gallery. The gallery had been told to remove the rolls from its website, as their provenance remained problematic. ********

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4. In 2004, in Stockholm, a person who had been in contact with me for some years arranged a day-long conference on Mandaeism. Not many people came. For me, the most interesting part of the program was a film made by a Swedish resident Mandaean engineer, Yahia Sam, whose business card I still have. He had gone to southern Iran and there he made a documentary film detailing the constructing of the mysterious item called a mandelta. It is a 1’ x 1/4 “object made of local marsh-growing reeds, palm frond stalks and palm leaves.1 Consisting of three separate standing bundles of reeds secured to a horizontal foundation made of the same plants, the item is placed over a shallow, oval hole in the ground. The site is specific: a courtyard near the threshold of a house where a person has just died. As far as I know, the mandelta has not received any detailed scholarly interpretation, but Drower calls it a kind of “spirit house” aiming at preventing the spirit of the dead person from returning to harm the living. In the film, I recognized the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili as one of the men tasked with finding and collecting the reeds, then cutting them, making the mandelta and setting it up. All of this was meticulously recorded in the film. While the film was running, a Mandaean friend of mine stood up, came over to me and whispered, sighing, “How long do we have to watch this strange stuff, Jorunn?” Not bored at all, I was fascinated and felt transported back to Khuzistan. “I love seeing this,” I responded. And I found it absolutely fitting that a Mandaean engineer would create a film about the crafting of a little-known ritual object. ******** 5. After pressing a button, I entered Mr. Neshet Hermiz’s goldsmith shop in Berlin in August 1988, on the day the Iran-Iraq war ended. The owner buzzed me inside, for thieves had recently broken in. “How can I be of service to you, young lady”? he inquired, in German. I did not answer immediately, but silently put on the counter a many-decades old postcard featuring a photo 1

See Drower’s The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (pp. 182-84).

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from the shop of his father in Baghdad. The picture showed Mr. Hermiz’s father—the famous Hermiz br Anhar—and several other persons. The Berlin goldsmith exclaimed, “Yi yi yi yiiiii!” and went to the back of the shop, returning with the same picture, but in larger format. I told him who I was, and that I had just come from England, where Drower’s daughter Margaret HackforthJones had given me the postcard. We talked for a long time, and I brought greetings from Mr. Hermiz’s nephew, Issam Hermiz in Sweden, a friend of mine there. I offered Mr. Hermiz the postcard, and he said he would keep it and send the big photo back to Baghdad, where it belonged. The reason I was in Berlin then was mainly to visit the wellknown scholar of Mandaic, Professor Rudolf Macuch. He did not know of Mr. Hermiz; in fact, he seemed to know no Mandaeans living in Berlin. ******** 6. In Sweden for education in the early-to-mid-1960s, Iraqi young men were invited to dinner with the King soon after their arrival. For the annual celebration of Iraq’s national holiday, they were also guests in the Iraqi embassy. That is how many of the Iraqis got to know about each other. Among them were a handful of Mandaeans. The first Mandaean I met in Sweden, in 1974, was the aforementioned nephew of Mr. N. Hermiz: Issam Hermiz. I found him via an Israeli girl who had fled to Oslo, Norway, to avoid compulsory military service at home. Born in Baghdad, she felt that having to train to go to war against Palestinians, Arabs and Egyptians would be like attacking her own people. Now in Sweden, she studied international relations. Many of her friends there were Middle Easterners, and one, from Baghdad, said, when I asked about Mandaeans, “Yes, there is one of them in a town just south of here! I remember those people; they always went in the river!” I got the name and address, and when I met Issam, he said, “I can see by your jewelry that you have been in Iran.” I had indeed, in the previous year, 1973.

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At Issam’s workplace, Enskilda Banken, one of the chiefs of the company belonged to the famous Wallenberg-family (Raoul Wallenberg rescued thousands of Jews during the Second World War). When Issam worked at the bank, the Wallenberg chief had been told by some of the workers that they had noticed something special about their new colleague: at lunch time, in the bank’s cafeteria, Issam regularly selected a nice lunch for himself, mostly vegetables, seldom meat, and never pork. Having learned that, Wallenberg greeted Issam with special respect when the two happened to meet in the bank’s corridors. After their first encounter, he asked Issam about his food habits. Issam replied: “Jag är halft jude” (“I am half Jewish”). ******** 7. In the summer of 2000, Jaroslaw Fret, of the Jerzy Grotowski Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland, wrote me a letter accompanied by photos from Ahwaz. His first sentence was (and I am quoting him verbatim), “That is not ease to a man who was bited by strong fascination of people from far-away country to do something real important with his life and not to lose it.” Jaroslaw told me that the Theatre would like to hold a conference in Wroclaw on the Mandaeans, with two Iranian Mandaeans—the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili and the international businessman Mr. Asad Askari—and myself as guests. Could we come? Yes! The conference took place in 2001. Travelling from the U. S to Poland, I changed planes in Berlin’s Tegel airport. I did not know then that a young Mandaean refugee was detained there at that time. Later, I got a message about the Mandaean man from a woman working at the social services in the airport. Even later, I received a letter from the interned Mandaean himself. Some years passed before I realized that the young man was related to a U. S.-residing Mandaean I know. In Wroclaw, I learned that the Grotowski Theatre people had indeed been in Ahwaz in the fall of 1999, filming Mandaean rituals. At the conference, I was very happy to see my Iranian Mandaean friends again; we had met in Iran in 1996. One night,

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while in Wroclaw, we had dinner in a Palestinian restaurant, with good Middle Eastern food. I tried to tell the restaurant owner that my Iranian friends were the Sabeans mentioned in the Qur’an. He didn’t seem to understand what that meant; maybe he was a Christian. ******** 8. Living legally in a major U. S. city, a Mandaean man entered a halal butcher shop to buy some good meat for grilling on the Fourth of July. The butcher eyed him suspiciously as the Mandaean asked about the price of a specific type of meat. Somehow, the butcher sensed that his customer was not a fellowMuslim. “For you, the price is double,” the butcher said. The Mandaean shook his finger at him and said, “You cannot do that. It’s illegal. This is a free country! We are in the U. S.!” ******** 9. In exile, Mandaeans may feel nostalgic and think fondly of their baptismal traditions. Still, even if they have the chance to get baptized, they may choose not to don the white rasta, descend into cold water, undergo multiple ritual acts there, sit shivering on the riverbank when the weather is cold, and undergo additional rituals on land, with the priests in charge. But they will watch other Mandaeans taking part in the ritual, and women may utter the celebratory ululations. On such occasions, I stand close to the action, follow the liturgy, watch the ritual details closely, and listen to the priests’ pronunciation of the ancient language. Some priests speak fast, others more slowly. Often, I recognize the sequences of words and actions in the very complex ritual. Once, in North America, while I was paying close attention to the baptism ceremony, watching the actions of the priests, a Mandaean whom I did not know came up to me, irritated and quietly outraged. She, a scientist, said to me, “How can you watch this old-fashioned, primitive stuff? It’s embarrassing.” “No”, I responded, “I’m a scholar of your tradition, as you know, and I know what’s going on, and it is of great interest to me to see it for

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real.—And why are you saying this? Why are you even here at the river-bank if you find this so embarrassing?” She had assumed that I, a scholar, would adhere to “scientific” standards and look at the ritual with detached skepticism, like it was some childish primitive game. I did not, and asked her if she had ever thought of this: “Are you not making your own worship of so-called science into your own religion? Isn’t that perhaps a type of idolatry?” Obviously disappointed in me, the scientist had no answer and walked away. ******** 10. A Mandaean Iraqi woman, experienced in the martial arts and a former dancer, lives in a major city in Scandinavia and is not afraid to go out alone in the dark streets. Once, at midnight, from a street-corner, she observed and heard some men speaking in Russian while they were eyeing a blond woman on the opposite corner. They talked of “getting” her. Fluent in Russian, the Mandaean woman called out, angrily and loudly, to the men, “Be ashamed of yourselves!” They immediately ran away. ******** 11. In a neighboring northern European country, an Iranian Mandaean immigrant works in a canning factory. He is a trusted employee, and the administration at his workplace appreciate him especially for his talent at informing other, newly hired immigrant workers at the factory. The newcomers need instructions in local customs and standards of behavior. Himself a hefty man, the Mandaean man tells his new colleagues, “It is bad manners here in this country to refer directly to how a person looks, to the body. So, to use myself as an example, don’t call me ‘fat guy,’ okay?” ********

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12. In December 2003, I had asked a U. S.-residing Mandaean gentleman, Dakhil Shooshtary (d. Jan. 26, 2022), how Mandaean jewelers make the mina, the special black material so famous in Mandaean silverwork. (In other contexts, this material is called niello, and credited as an old Egyptian invention). The tiny black figures engraved on the Mandaean silverwork—such as camels, palm-trees, boats, miniature landscapes, the arc of Ktesiphon— are exquisitely drawn. First, Mr. Shooshtary said that he hadn’t made mina for a very long time, so he could not remember the precise procedure. But after consulting with his brother, he did. In his description of the process, he was obliged to leave out one particular step, for the complete mina recipe must remain secret. Melted silver, copper and lead are combined, and phosphorus added. Next, substance X is applied, then the alloy solidifies, and it is later made into a powder. After heating and liquefying the substance, the specialist pours it on the silver piece to be engraved. Heat is applied again, before the art is engraved on the silver, and the product will finally be cleaned and polished. ******** 13. A knowledgeable Mandaean may still be able to identify an artisan by examining a particular piece of silver merchandise, its style and signature. In 2007, the Minnesota Institute of Arts was offered a donation of a beautiful five-piece tea silver set dating to the 1940s, plus six other, related pieces. A silver-expert, an appraiser who had been asked to search for the origin of these works of art, found me and sent me an email, attaching all the supporting documents. Could I help? Luckily, I was able to connect her with a Mandaean, Dr. Ayar Farhan, then living in Europe, for I had recently met him at his home. There, I was invited into his office, which held Mandaean art and objects. With the help of Dr. Farhan’s father—a silversmith—both the maker and the engraver of the objects were identified: Enisse (the creator of the silver-set) and A. R. Saif (the engraver). The silver set derived from Amara, Iraq. No surprise, because silver work created there was famous. I assume that the Minneapolis Institute of Art still possesses this set, and that visitors can admire the objects.

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In the time of Queen Victoria, Mandaean silver work became famous in England. Later, American oil-workers in the Near East sometimes purchased Mandaean silver-items and brought them home. In the present era, potential customers can search for Mandaean silver-and-gold objects on the internet. Israelis, especially, are rumored to be hunting for such Mandaean art on the Web. ******** 14. I have an 8 by 5 ½” piece of grey, double-thick cartonnagecardboard with sewn-on string lines marking straight horizontal lines. The margins are also marked with sewn string, and the cardboard has faded Arabic script and visible ink-spots. Drower’s own handwriting appears on the object. In fact, this item had belonged to her, and it was given to me by her family. The doublethick cartonnage tool serves as a line-marker for creating straight orderly lines when a scribe copies a Mandaic manuscript. The way it works is simple: you press the individual paper-pages against the strings. Those clear and straight imprints on the paper help you to write the text in a nice, even manner. On at least one occasion, I brought this cardboard to an academic conference when giving a presentation on Mandaeism. After explaining how this cardboard piece works, I sent it around to the audience. None of the attendees had seen this type of tool, as I recall. ******** 15. A nephew of the famous Mandaean priest Sheikh Negm (d. 1975), Abdelelah Khalaf al-Sebahi, an Iraqi Mandaean, lives in Denmark. He was educated in Moscow during the Soviet-regime, a time when Iraq was a friendly East-bloc ally. The first time I met him, I noticed his pipe: tiny diamonds encircled the pipe-head. I admired this special decoration, which was his own work. For many years, I naturally thought that all Mandaean men were experts at working in the jewelry trade—an erroneous assumption, it turned out. ********

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16. In southern California, in the early 1990s, I visited the jewelry shop of Amjed Bahur, a Mandaean goldsmith. He gave me a pendant, a blue faience bead that had just arrived from Baghdad. Years later, I was wearing this bead as I stood in the check-out lane in a large grocery shop in Massachusetts. The cashier looked intensely at my throat, and she asked, with quiet astonishment, how and where I got it? I told her. She knew that type of bead; she hailed from Baghdad. ******** 17. In June 2009, police raided a church in Copenhagen, Denmark, where asylum-seeking refugees had taken shelter. Many were Iraqis, some Mandaeans among them. In the darkness of the night, the people were taken to a military airport and deported to Iraq. Danish media got hold of the news and reported on the raid. ******** 18. A younger colleague told me, in 2011, that when he began to take an interest in Mandaean studies, several scholars said that the Mandaean culture and language had died out after the 1830’s cholera (or: plague resurgence) in Mesopotamia. So, there was no point in getting interested in Mandaeism, for both the religion and the language had been “re-invented” after the epidemic. As we know, this is not true. ******** 19. Some Mandaeans in the USA—and elsewhere in exile—call on the Mandaean Light-being (‘uthra) Hibil Ziwa, exclaiming “Ya, Hibil Ziwa!” for protection and safety when dangers loom. For instance, when trying to handle your vehicle on an icy road in winter or needing extra strength for a task, you may call on him. Issam, in Sweden, cutting down trees for firewood together with friends, once called on Hibil Ziwa in order to acquire added power. But he was offended when one of his non-Mandaean

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friends mimicked him by also invoking Hibil Ziwa. Issam objected, “You cannot do that! He is my god!” ******** 20. I was with a Mandaean physician, Dr. Layla al-Roomi, in England, some years ago. In The British Museum, we lingered especially at the Assyrian galleries. Visibly happy and excited, Layla called out, “This is ours!” A former pediatrician who had run her own clinic, Layla interpreted for me a particular piece of art, which I had seen some days prior, in a totally different context. I described this art to her: a small, handmade book, with drawings done by the Iraqi child-king Faisal II (b. 1935) several years after his father’s 1939 death by car. (King Ghazi liked to drive fast, a well-known fact in Iraq). The extra-ordinary document, a child’s several-pages long book with his own drawings and text, was given to Lady E. S. Drower in Iraq by the little king himself. The hand-made book tells the story of a run-away car. Luckily, at the end, the car manages to slow down and to arrive home intact. This shows a child’s attempt to overcome the trauma of his father’s death, to make a happy ending. At Ghazi’s demise, his son was too young for the throne, so regents ruled in his place from 1939-53. The boy had been brought to Iraq from Mecca in Saudi Arabia. He stayed in power from 1953 until the revolution in 1958, when he was executed. I was very grateful for Layla’s interpretation of the story in the child-king’s book. ******** 21. In Scandinavia, an Iraqi Mandaean woman, alone with her son, was in the process of seeking asylum (later, she succeeded). When I met her, and we had talked, she gave me a small glass vase, which I still have. It is sealed at the top, decorated in waves of colors, with palm trees and camels in black. The vase contains desert sand from her home country. I think of this vase as a

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reversed, static hourglass, for the top is sealed, and sand/time cannot leak out. ******** 22. Mr. Dakhil Shooshtary used to make Mandaean calendars, and I kept many of them from the period 1994 to 2009. A nonMandaean, Michael I. Kaplov—whom I once met—designed and produced the calendars. John the Baptist’s birth occurred in 3 B.C. In the 1997 calendar for the period July 1997 to July 1998, Adam’s birthday is given as 445.376 years ago. A few times, I have gotten in trouble with Mandaeans who insist on this “proof” about Adam, but as a scholar I cannot agree with it. Most people understand that, but a few resist, and are not eager for any further interaction with me. The Mandaean year has 360 days, plus the intercalary period of five days, Panja; the reckoning is lunar, not solar. Mr. Shooshtary’s calendar uses both Mandaic and Arabic. Holidays, partial-fasting and full-fasting days are clearly indicated. In 2006, the revised layout of the calendar began to combine Western and Mandaean formats, in order to facilitate understanding of the different time-reckonings. Iranian color photos of rituals decorate the calendars, and I recognize most of the priests on the photos. On the cover of his calendar, Mr. Shooshtary explains why he makes the calendar, and here are three segments, “It is time now to look to the year ahead. Please take this opportunity to note the important holiday dates and be sure to celebrate them. Honor these special days in our year by teaching their meanings to your children. By sharing our religious heritage with the children, and grand-children, we ensure the survival of our culture.” — “Through the years, we have settled in many places outside of our ancestral towns and villages. In America, as in other nations around the world, we are small in number, but great in tradition. Even though our travels have forced us to set aside some of our strictest practices, we must never forget them, wherever we are.” — “No matter to which town or village we may trace our humble beginnings, we are all the product of our past, and the only preparation for our future. Our roots are deep. Our

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branches are spread out. We are all Mandaic. May our New Year be one of peace, good health, prosperity, and preservation, for all Mandaeans throughout the world.” ******** 23. Ronaldo, a sleek black rooster named for the Brazilian soccer player, belonged to a Mandaean boy living in Australia. The tame bird sat quietly on the child’s lap. I was allowed to stroke Ronaldo’s shiny, beautiful feathers, and he did not flinch. This reminded me of one of my local airplane rides in Iran, in 1996. Then, a woman passenger kept a cage containing a few live, silent hens directly on her lap. ******** 24. In Oslo, Norway, years ago, I suspected that my taxi-driver was a Middle-Easterner, and I asked him where he was from. “Iran,” he replied. “Where?” “A small town north-west of Tehran.” “Which one?” “Kharaj.” “I have been there,” I responded calmly. He almost lost control of the steering-wheel. He remembered the Mandaeans in Kharaj. “Good people!” he exclaimed. We talked of politics. The driver was by now quite excited, and when we arrived at my destination, I exited the car, got my luggage, and we shook hands. Finally, we hugged, mutually expressing our wish for freedom for the Iranian people, and especially for the women of Iran. ******** 25. Preparing to travel from northern Europe to Iraq in 2004, a Mandaean layman grew a beard, disguising himself as a Shi’a. How he managed to arrive in Baghdad, I do not know. But, in a conservative dark suit and with his black beard, he did get to Baghdad. It was night-time. He knocked on a door in a neighborhood he assumed would be friendly, and people let him in. Later, by previous secret arrangement, he went eastwards

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toward the marshes bordering on Iran, and he met one of the priests at a specified spot. The two men continued travelling, on foot and/or by boat, and arrived in Ahwaz. There, the men linked up with other Mandaeans, and the North-European Mandaean visited his relatives in Iran. Subsequently, the man succeeded in returning to his home in northern Europe. ******** 26. A few days before the ARAM conference at Harvard in June 1999, a friend of mine visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, she noticed a foreign, white-clad man and politely asked him, “Excuse me, Sir: are you a Mandaean priest?” He confirmed that, indeed, he was. Where did this little encounter take place? In the gallery devoted to meteors. Aha, of course: stones fallen from the upper worlds.

PART I

CHAPTER 1. IRAN 1973 AND 1996 1973

In the autumn of 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, my boyfriend Mark Krämer and I were on the over-land route from The Netherlands to Tehran, Iran. The trip took fourteen days. The only reason I had agreed to this trip was to meet Mandaeans in Iran. Among numerous places, we stopped at an antique shop in central Turkey. The owners of that shop, in Turkish Kurdistan, were a Jewish couple. They wondered what we were doing in that area, and where we were headed. We explained that we had a job: delivering a vehicle in Iran. Our Iranian boss traveled in his other, much bigger car, filled with his family and goods. We drove in tandem, more or less, staying at the same hotels along the way. “Who is your boss?” the shopkeepers asked. We didn’t know much, except his name, and that he had a European university degree in economics, but he seemed honest enough (he was, at least to us). Skeptical, the antique-dealers wondered, “Pourqui risquer?” We shrugged. The woman, originally a German who as a child had survived the concentration camps in Germany during WW2, had afterwards been sent to Norway for rehabilitation. Due to my Norwegian identity, she connected with me immediately, emotionally. I acquired a silver bracelet at that Turkish shop, an omen of what I would find in Mandaean silver-smith shops in Khuzistan, Iran, more than a week later. In Tehran, at the central market, we found Mr. Muhammed Mirzaie, owner of a high school in Khorramshahr. He said that he was planning to write a thesis on the Sobi (the Mandaeans).

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Afraid of theft of ideas, he was cautious toward us, even somewhat hostile. Still, he offered to answer questions by letter, if I promised to tell him how I aimed to use his information. Of course, I never contacted him. But another man we met, Mr. M. H. Kushrabi—connected to the National Center for Ethnography and Folklore—said that he thought Mr. Mirzaie had already written such a thesis. Who knows! Having explained our real errand in Iran—to meet Mandaeans, but not quite knowing how to go about it—Mr. Kushrabi said, “Just go to Abadan! You will find them.” With Hawa, an Iranian academic, as our guide and interpreter, we did. On Shapur Street in Abadan, we met the silversmith Mr. Shaker Fayzi in his shop. A very friendly man, he identified himself as “Nazarie.” He told us that he lived in Khorramshahr but had his shop in Abadan, where only two Mandaean families resided at that time. Mr. Fayzi said that his own brother had met Lady Drower, and he knew that one of her most important Mandaean friends and informants was the goldsmith Hermiz br Anhar, Issam Hermiz’s grandfather. A few months after our visit to his shop, Fayzi wrote to me in The Netherlands, inviting me to his daughter’s wedding in Abadan. In nearby Khorramshahr, on Ferdowsi Street, we found the goldsmith Aran. Christians—Assyrians—worked with him. They understand our script, Aran informed us. He emphasized his Iranian identity, and that the Shah was his shah! Mandaeans were represented in the Iranian Majlis (Parliament). Indeed, on the wall of his shop hung a picture to prove it: three bearded Mandaeans greeting the Shah. No other Westerners interested in Aran’s religion had ever visited his shop. In another jewelry-shop, we saw a Mandaean calendar made in Baghdad, Iraq, by Hassan Safet and Gherzban al-Romi. We were told, “You have to travel to Ahwaz, to meet our priest!” In a collective taxi, we headed there, past date-palms, fields and waterways. Already furnished with addresses, in Ahwaz the three of us (Mark, Hawa and I) found Sh. Abdullah Khaffagi, said to be ninety-five years old. We were warned: do not touch him, for he is pure, he makes his own food, and is subject to specific purity rules. A goldsmith on Pahlavi Street, Mr. Abdullah Tawoosie, was the brother of the priest. Sh. Abdullah told us that

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Lady Drower had visited him many times. Around 1961, the sheikh himself went with Prof. R. Macuch to Tehran. Indeed, we saw a letter to the sheikh from Prof. Macuch, written in beautiful Mandaic. A second letter, from 1950—also in Mandaic—was shown to us: from Gautier Henri Schütz, in Haute-Savoie, France, a person connected to The Geographical Society of Geneva. The most amazing item we admired in the priest’s house was the weighty Book of John, made of lead-plates.1 The priest also had a paper copy of the Book of John and told us that it was written by John the Baptist himself, two thousand years ago. I obtained a piece of paper, with the printed-on skandola on it. The four creatures on the seal are hornet, snake, lion and scorpion: the elements of life. Over the years, the paper imprint disintegrated, due to much handling, but later, a Mandaean presented me with the real silver tool, used in rituals: the silver seal-ring (used to seal Mandaean graves, on their four corners) depicting the four animals. The ring is attached with a chain to the knife employed in the task of ritual slaughters. There is no reason to teach young Mandaean people the religion, for the world will soon end, said Sh. Khaffagi. Jesus was baptized by John, yes, for that’s the way it was, but what is colored, does not turn white; i. e. Jesus cannot become a Mandaean. That’s the logic. We learned much of Mandaean religious lore from the priest, and I recognized most of it. 365 universes exist, and ours is one of them. Paradise lies near the north pole, and north is the sacred direction, the direction you face when praying. Sh. Abdullah wondered if Prof. Macuch was teaching courses in Mandaic in Berlin—he had told the sheikh that he would do that. The priest asked whether I could find out. I promised to try. Sh. Abdullah’s sons were not priests and did not aim for that office. One of them worked for the national Iran Oil Company. Twenty-three years later, on my second trip to the Mandaeans in Ahwaz, the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili told me that Sh. Abdullah— who had long since died—had appeared to him in a dream, asking why his son had tied up all the sheikh’s books and texts with rope and put them in a box. There, hidden and subject to decay, the 1

For greater details, see the Preface in my 2002 book.

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texts were weeping. Sh. Choheili had then told the man’s sister about his dream, asking her to inquire on the matter with her brother. A suggestion was put forth: the next time I come visiting, I ought to bring money to pay the son, so that I could inspect the books to see if they are still all right. Sh. Abdullah does not quite trust Muslims or Jews, he told us. To me, an apostate Lutheran from a country where Lutheran Protestantism was still the state religion, the sheikh voiced no equivalent criticism. Toward the end of our visit, we met several members of the priest’s family, exchanged warm greetings and we were served soda drinks. Finally, with respectful and grateful farewells, we descended the outside stairs. On the ground, we were in a very different world than the one we had inhabited for several hours.

1996

My chador had already created a stir, because it was not solid black, but had small white flowers. I had made it myself, and thought it was drab enough. In Stockholm, right before I flew to England on my way to Iran, I modelled the chador to Issam and his family, and he immediately dubbed it “stridsvagnen” (the battle tank). I switched into my chador in the Bahrein airport, and a woman on the plane to Iran asked me, “Are you a nun?” I said no. Then why was I wearing that garment? “For security,” I replied. I also entered into conversation with a woman originally from Abadan, and she knew about the Sobbis. “I will never forget his face,” she said, dreamily, of the Sobbi goldsmith who had made a heavy gold ring for her mother. At customs at Mehrabad airport, I did not have to unpack all my luggage. In the hall, near the top of the escalator, stood three men: Mr. Askari, the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili, and Moussad Frouzandeh (a Muslim who was a student of Mandaeism). Watching us, a man followed us, as we headed toward the airport’s restaurant, where I have my first Islamic, non-alcoholic beer. It tasted familiar and good to me, like the Norwegian dark, sweet non-alcoholic beer, which I have loved since my childhood. The yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili and I took a plane to Ahwaz, and talked, of course. He had hoped that I had a university

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position in the USA, for he wished to visit there, and work with me, like he did with Prof. R. Macuch in Berlin, years earlier. But no, I have no real job at that point, I told him. He explained some technical terms for me in relation to the colophon research I was doing—work that occupied about seventeen years of my life. On our arrival in Ahwaz, a large welcoming committee awaited us and I thought there must have been somebody important on that flight. But this was all for me. A smiling little girl approached me and gave me a big bouquet of flowers. Video cameras whirred, as I greeted the people. The priest Sh. Salah Choheili was there, white sneakers on his feet. I took note of how both the priest and the yalufa looked similar: long beards, dark, and alert. Suhrab, Mr. Askari’s thirty-one years old son—a goldsmith—would be my guide and interpreter. He had spent years in England. Careful not to shake hands with any men, unless they initiated the gesture, I kept a respectful distance, though I would realize later that in relations with women and children, things would be quite different. A typed-up program was handed to me, for we would start already today, after I deposited all my luggage at Hotel Fajr.2 In the hotel lobby, the first afternoon, Suhrab engages a group of Swedes in conversation. Instant cultural confusion for me, “disguised” as I am in my chador. What are the Swedes doing here? I don’t know. I meet Hamid, Suhrab’s brother-in-law, who arrives with Sh. Salem. Before we go to the mandi, we wander through streets where I probably walked back in 1973. But the area has been bombed in the war, streets are re-named, and we pass at least two fountains with memorials to fallen soldiers, and flag monuments. No sign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi era. Chaotic traffic; no rules. I see no accidents. Black banners on house-façades show that someone there has died, Suhrab informs me. I learn that Ahwaz has fifteen-to-twenty thousand Mandaeans. After the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), Mandaeans spread to cities where they had not lived earlier. Suhrab tells me that it is difficult for Mandaeans to get good jobs. What it implies, practically, that 2

From here on, in this section, I turn mostly to the present tense.

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the Mandaean religion is not officially recognized, will gradually be revealed to me. Internally, in the community, the elders tend to be conservative, while many of the young people feel that changes are necessary. Food issues are central, as I will find out, and I know something about that from exile-living Mandaeans. Suhrab says to me that my friend Mr. Nasser Sobbi in New York exaggerates the number of Iran-residing Mandaeans who still speak Mandaic. Only some of the elders still do; the middle generation and the youth— including Suhrab himself—do not. Mandaeans in Khuzistan understand and speak Arabic, of course (due to the proximity to Iraq, Khuzistan is also known as “Arabistan”). At some point later, I listen to Sh. Salem as he speaks on the phone, and I am puzzled by his language. “Which language was that?” I inquire, after he had hung up. He smiles, “A mix of Arabic, Farsi, and Mandaic.” Ah yeas, I could understand that there was some Mandaic in it. In the mandi, Sh. Salem Choheili runs a school for the children, so they can learn Mandaic, Suhrab says. From the outside, the mandi looks no different from other buildings. In the yard, some men are already present as we arrive. Shoes are placed outside, on the steps to the mandi, and I add my shoes to the line. Inside, cameras and video equipment dominate, and the hall is full of men. Sh. Salah sits on the floor, wearing his white sneakers. Other, older men in traditional garb occupy the front row, incl. Mr. Abdolhamid Moradi,3 and the goldsmith Mr. A. Tawoosie. All the men stand up when the head priest Sh. Jabbar Tawoosie enters the mandi. Several priests are present, and one man tells me that he remembers me from his shop, back in 1973.4 Slowly, I realize what I didn’t know twenty-three years earlier, in 1973: that Hawa, our Tehran-residing guide and interpreter then, had told Mandaeans that my boyfriend Mark was my brother. Indeed, she had rescued my womanly honor, for if she hadn’t done so, we would never have met Mandaean people, and certainly not been invited to the home of the priest Sh. Abdullah Khaffagi.

He will later move to New York, and I will meet him there. Another, much younger man there turns out to be the yalufa Shahram Ebadfardzadeh, who will become a good friend years later, in. the U. S. 3 4

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In the mandi, Sh. Salem starts the program, with prayers and introduction. On the wall right across from the lectern is written the well-known formula: marai mšaba bliba dakia (“My Lord be praised, with a pure heart”). On the north wall hangs a large painting of John the Baptist. Myrtle is stuck in a vase on the lectern; carpets decorate the floor. Men and boys sit along the walls, and some stand in the back and in the doorway. One little girl was present (perhaps with her father?) I have a translator, but Suhrab complains, later, that he doesn’t translate everything I say. My topics are: my studies, Lady Drower, Mandaean history, etc. On and off, I sip from my glass of water. The air-conditioner rumbles softly, but it is nevertheless quite hot. Someone releases insect spray in the room. Questions arise and I tackle them as best I can; another man takes over as interpreter. I meet Sh. Abdullah’s son, who remembers me. He says that the goldsmith Aran, whom I met in 1973, is no longer there (perhaps deceased?), and another one. Mr. Fayzi, has moved to Kuwait. Sh. Abdullah’s son says that he has in his care all the books from his father—we saw several of the books in 1973— including the lead Book of John! Now, the line of priests in the family has ended. Important to me is the information that Sh. Abdullah and Sh. Negm (Lady Drower’s main Mandaean friend and informant) were cousins; their fathers were brothers. I had not been fully aware of that relationship before, and now a piece of a puzzle was found. And it explains how some of the texts Drower acquired originally came from Iran.5 After warm applause, the end of questions, and mutual thanks, Sh. Salem utters the ending prayer, and we all stood up, with our faces turned to the north (the sacred direction). We held our palms up and repeated the prayer in booming unison. I begin to sense Sh. Salem’s status, the respect he enjoys in the community. Several days later, in fact, I ask him why he didn’t become a priest. He answers, “Then, I could not work with someone like you.” I understand his mediating role; he does not

Sh. Negm was born in Huwaiza, Iran and had relatives in Iran (for more information, see Chapter in The Great Stem of Souls). 5

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have to abide by the priestly, strict rules for interaction with outsiders. The goldsmith Mr. A. Tawoosie comes up to me, stretches out his hand and shakes mine. Earlier that day, he had delicately grasped my fingertips in his right hand. Now, the greeting is different, more hearty. Later, in the car Mr. Tawoosie explains to me why he wears a thin, gossamer brown cloak over his white garments: it is because of the Muslims, for “blending in,” looking more like a Muslim cleric. In fact, outside the building, earlier in the day, he had called out to me: “Forgive me, forgive me!” I had wondered why he needed my forgiveness, but now I understand. Back at the hotel, the doorman suspects that I am hiding a bomb in my blue bag. (Is he joking? I don’t know). A bit later, a woman in the ladies’ restroom asks about my nationality, and she informs her daughter about it. People take note of my presence, as I am obviously alone, not chaperoned by a foreign man, such as a son or a husband. I rest in my room, where the gladioli I received at the airport stand in a metal jug on top of the fridge. Suhrab arrives to take me back to the mandi for a meeting with women and children. But before Suhrab comes to pick me up, I contemplate a long, low boat equipped with an outboard motor, headed upstream on the river. I watch the vessel, longingly hoping for a boat ride (it does not happen). Suhrab, Sh. Salem and I have tea downstairs in the lobby. We talk about the spiritual needs of the Mandaeans living in the U. S. I go upstairs to my room to find my photos of the fresh-water springs in Florida, for my USA-residing Mandaean friend Lamea Abbas Amara has expressed hopes that maybe a Mandaean center of some kind could be built near such a spring, whether on private or near state park property. As we look at the photos—all that ever-flowing fresh water!—we dream of such a possibility. Sh. Salem tells me that a Mandaean Sheikh went to Turkey to do rituals for Mandaeans there. The river was fine, but not the accommodations for the priest. “Where do they think we come from; the mountains?” I enjoy Sh. Salem’s way of telling stories, with glinting eyes, humor and wide, expressive hand-movements. Before we head to the mandi again, we pass a monument to fallen soldiers; formerly, it was a monument to the Shah. My

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companions decide that I need to see the German bridge, rebuilt after the war, so we go there. I feel almost naked, for I am not wearing my chador, and here I am, in public! But Suhrab insists that the people looking at me are not hostile, merely curious. I remember how, back in 1973 in Tehran, when my boyfriend and I hurried across a dangerous intersection, a couple of fast-moving men pinched my behind through the thick fabric of my hooded cloak. On the way to the mandi, I observe the swaggering, confident gait of young men on the street. Many people mill about, and a family enjoys a picnic on a grassy patch nearby. My eyes linger on boats going up the river, which is full of debris and mud—it is spring-flood season. In the car, Suhrab tells me that when the temperature exceeds 50 degrees, all businesses must close. But they never do, for temperatures that high remain unannounced to the public, so business continues. The mandi is full of excited women and children! I get flowers, and a white gold-ring from a woman who introduces me to the audience. Two children recite prayers, and later a group of seven or eight white-clad kids utter another prayer, loudly, in both Farsi and Mandaic. These are Sh. Salem’s pupils, who learn Mandaic. I am sorry I cannot see their faces, for their backs are turned towards me. One girl, who prays alone, has a beautiful voice—belting out the words. Then, I make some statements, and have the same interpreter as before, but I ask Suhrab to take over after a while. Questions are written down on pieces of paper, and kids come up to me with them—some kids also want my autograph. Gently, I have been reminded of an important detail: I must begin every speech with a “thank you” to the Iranian government, for without its agreement I could not be present. Such a “thank you” from my side is greeted by acclaim by several persons in the audiences.6 A woman says that they regard me as a sort of visiting angel, and I am overwhelmed by the warmth and hospitality. Will I become a Mandaean, if possible? Another woman does ask me that question…. At the end, we pray again, The phrase will become very important in Tehran, later, on decidedly Muslim territory. 6

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and many turn around to see if I pray, too. In order to refresh myself, I receive chewing gum, and am asked to write no more autographs. Soon, I am guided upstairs to the mandi office. We ascend on an outside metal staircase to the office, where men work without pay on all internal Mandaean affairs. Disputes are settled there. I sit down, sip tea, listen, and am asked a few more questions. Then, before I am taken back to the hotel, Sh. Salem gives me some printed matters, his own articles. A man tells me that they hope that the Mandaeans of Iran will be legally recognized soon. (President A. Hashemi Rafsanjani’s portrait hung prominently in the mandi office). I eat very nice shrimp for dinner at the hotel that evening and am surprised that such food is served. The reason is that Iranian government wants to support the shrimp fisheries in the Persian Gulf, so now shrimp are halal. What else is pure? I learn that Sh. Salah is preparing to move to Australia, and he has made a couple of preparatory trips there. Carrying clean river-water from the Karun in bottles, the sheikh experiences confiscation of one bottle as his luggage is inspected at the Mehrabad airport. Suspicion of alcoholic content! Luckily, one bottle is saved, arriving intact in Australia. Suhrab remarks on the sight of the line-up of priests in the mandi earlier that day, and I agree, for they looked like prophets, and Suhrab smiles. Other Mandaeans make good-natured fun of Suhrab’s Farsi, for he speaks the language almost like a child, they say: he left Iran for England as a thirteen-year-old. The next day, Sh. Salem arrives with two other men, one of them the official photographer, Mahmoud. I will make factory visits, and this is calculated carefully, for when I get to Tehran, Muslim authorities will need proof that Mandaeans are good Iranians, engaged in well-regarded—not suspect— employment. As a foreign visitor, I will be asked about this. In other words, my visit includes official aspects that I could not know in advance. We visit factories; two of them make pumps for irrigation. Mahmoud will take the photos, for official proof, and it is important that I appear in some of the photos. At one of the sites—after the inspection—we sit sipping tea. On the wall hangs

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a picture of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. I am asked to identify each one of the disciples, and can at least name several, though I say that I’m not familiar with all of their individual faces. Nods. Other art includes a Mandaean calendar, and a page from the Left Ginza, for prosperity, health and good business. We also visit a steel-plate workshop, where large sheets are cut, and go to a ball-bearing factory. Far out in the desert—past an industrial waste area—we enter a metal-melting shop. I find this a most interesting place: burning furnaces, a man slugging away with a sledgehammer and beating a great piece of iron. Then, we proceed to a factory making ice-cooling machinery. All this is to show the industriousness of the Mandaeans. Yes, they are metal-workers, experts not only in gold and silver! The factories employ both Muslims and Mandaeans, and the materials they use are made by the factories, keeping imports to a minimum. A friendly and courteous ambience everywhere. Leaning close to the machinery, Sh. Salem—always in his greygreen suit, cap, white shirt, and long beard—asks questions and looks with great interest at everything; he wants to see how all of it works. Later, I am in my room, but soon interrupted by phone call from the lobby-desk. I need to come downstairs. Who needs to see me? My husband, they say. I know that cannot be right. But I go downstairs, my chador over my bathrobe. A young man who wants me to help him immigrate to Israel. We drink tea/coffee. I promise I will help but doubt that I can. On many days, I observe street-scenes: animals, cars and lorries, people carrying heavy stuff, flocks of black-clad schoolgirls like crows on road-sides; young men swagger, holding hands, hug and kiss in the streets, and ignore the anarchy of the traffic. Iran’s industrial revolution chugs along in heavy-leaded gas atmosphere. Still, good cheer and no uneasiness, despite everpresent uniformed guards, mostly without visible weapons. Gulls swim on the river, and I see egrets and swallows. People rest on the lawns outside the hotel. And inside, I, too, rest. Sh. Salem arrives to take me to a wedding party, with music, women dancing, and many kids. Women motion to me: take off your scarves! I obey, and join in the dancing. The bridal couple

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appears. Cakes, flowers, jewelry, and, again, air-freshener. It is hot. The energy keeps up for hours. I see the women’s prancing dances as the private parallel to men’s public displays on the streets. Anthropological theories are proved: men=public, women=private. At the wedding party, there are ululations and chants, stomping, clapping. I am observed more than I observe; for I notice that wherever I look, at least six pairs of eyes are fixed on me. Sitting on the floor with women and children, I eat shredded chicken with tomatoes, pickles, and bread. As I fade, an Armenian cameraman wants to interview me, and Suhrab translates. His sister lends me an elastic band for my hair— women have noticed how I struggle to keep my hair tucked safely under the scarf. So, slowly, I learn to keep a pin or two under the collar of my shirt, so that I can tighten my scarf. I feel strongly that I am acquiring a second family. Kids look at me, and scream, but not in fear, it seems. “It is your eyes,” a woman explains. Ok, not the unruly hair, or my fair skin. We head for Mr. Tawoosie’s goldsmith shop, where he has prepared some gifts for me. We visit other Mandaen shops. Sh. Salem drives his old Ford with its bullet-shattered part of the front-shield; it is a war-wound from seventeen years ago. The car’s suspension has succumbed. Once, Sh. Salem backs accidentally into another car, but no harsh words emerge: he and the other driver speak calmly together on the street. A few traffic cops wander around in the intersections, hands on their backs. I suddenly remember a scene from Tehran, in 1973, at a busy intersection, where two cars almost crashed, but didn’t. We were watching this from the sidewalk: a car approached the intersection from the left, while another one came, too fast, in a south-to-north direction. The driver of that car managed to lean his car over so far to the right that the vehicle, while in motion, balanced on its two right-side wheels. It looked like tilted flying. Very slowly, like in a film, the car leaned left—and down-wards, finding balance on the ground, with the two airborne wheels settling, ballet-like, where they should be. Collision averted. Now, in Ahwaz in 1996, there are no seat-belts, except for earlier in the day, in a Hyundai, seat-belts had been put on, probably just for show. Days later, out in the desert, seat-belts are

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slung, loose, across the driver’s lap—not fastened—only when we see signs ahead: “Reduce Speed.” That sign means that we will soon see cops. The next day, the bridal couple is baptized.7 At one point during the ritual, when we are sitting outside and watching the goings-on in the wedding canopy, I am next to a Muslim guest, a friend of the family. A former teacher of English, she is now, in the new regime, unemployed. She shows me her bracelet, a string of gold coins with the Shah’s profile on each one, and she explains, soft-voiced, “I loved our King.” A Mandaean woman offers me a peeled cucumber. We head inside the house to see the bridal couple’s heads being knocked together, they are sitting back-to-back, separated by a thin muslin sheet hanging from the ceiling. Knock, knock, knock: three times. Then, drumming, songs, hands clapping, shrill cries of joy from the women. Outside, Sh. Salah, book in hand, finishes the wedding liturgy. I leave the wedding party after a long, fun time and a good meal with the younger Mandaeans. By now, I have been showered with silver, for Suhrab tells me that the word has spread: I like silver. With Sh. Salem and Mr. Kenneth Kataneh (the latter is a steady companion by now, an engineer educated in Scotland, now a goldsmith in Ahwaz), I go to Mr. Kataneh’s house. We will view the day’s wedding video. But first, at his home, a heaven-sent, short nap is prepared for me, for a mattress on the floor is ready, with a transistor radio (for relaxation) next to the bed, a hairbrush, a hair-dryer, and a soap. Increasingly, Mr. Kataneh had begun to function as my “shadow,” ever-present, interpreting. I am very grateful for how well he does his job. At dinner in Sh. Salah’s house, he and I have conversations that hover close to the difficult issues: can we talk together across the divide of my research standards, and his religious beliefs? Not in all respects, but we understand one another. A statue of the priest stands in the house, and there are various religious pieces of art. After entering the house, I had immediately been invited to remove my scarves, for this was private, not public territory. The next day, we head into the desert. 7

This is described in my 2002 book, p. 67-72.

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After I returned from the Iran trip, I had a conversation with the Iranian professor Eskandar Amanollahi, at Harvard University. Connected with the Iranian People’s Culture Encyclopedia department, Professor Amanollahi visited Harvard regularly for years, and he happened to be there when I got back. He told me how, as an anthropology professor at one of Iran’s universities, he was prohibited, after the revolution, from mentioning anything about pre-Islamic Iran. In fact, he was the only professor in his department who “survived” the revolution. When he ventured to teach something about the forbidden period, he would first send a student out in the corridor, to make sure no one hid there to eavesdrop on what the professor might say. Hearing parts of my Iran story, Professor Amanollahi was amazed that I had been permitted to give a lecture at Shahid Beheshti University on a non-protected religion in Iran: the Mandaean one.

CHAPTER 2. CONFERENCES AND PRIESTS ARAM JUNE 13-15, 1999, HARVARD

The ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamean Studies had held a conference at Harvard University in 1996. The topic was “Who were—or are—the Aramaeans?” I gave a paper there, on the Mandaeans living in the U.S., and some of the ARAM participants suggested that a conference dedicated to the Mandaean religion ought to be held next. Among them was the leader of ARAM, Prof. Shafiq Abouzayd, of Oxford University, who became excited about the possibility. Two Harvard professors, J. F. (“Chip”) Coakley and Peter Machinist, got involved in planning such a conference. Due to my many years of activity in Mandaean studies and my contacts with Mandaean people in various countries I, too, became part of the planning group. During 1998, an international correspondence intensified, for scholars and Mandaeans wanted to attend such an event. One of our primary contacts in Iran was Mr. Asad Askari, one of the three men who greeted me when I arrived at Mehrabad airport in Tehran in the spring of 1996. He acted as our major advisor on how to plan for ARAM 1999, especially on the visiting Iranian clergy and their ritual helpers. Regarding purity, we had to deal with issues that the organizers from the Harvard faculty side had seldom faced: guaranteed clean river-water for the Mandaean baptism (maṣbuta); shelter (not a hotel!) for the two Iranian

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priests and their helpers (ašgandas); access to pure foodstuffs for the officiants.1 Iranians could not get tourist visas to the U. S., and Harvard University needed to send detailed information for visas to the U.S. Consulate in Dubai. Also, Mandaeans would have to present certain documents to the Iranian authorities. An official announcement about the conference and a formal invitation to it from Harvard University to the Mandaean Iranian ritual specialists must also be sent. Certain guarantees had to be secured: that the religious specialists would return to Iran at the conference’s conclusion (no defections!). Not the least: Shahid Beheshti University—where I had lectured in 1996—needed proof that a prominent U. S. university indeed was planning a conference on an un-protected Iranian religion. Mr. Askari specified all these matters to me, via faxes or in letters from the Tehran-based company The Red Sea Shipping Agency, where he held the CEO position from 1987 to 2005. The preparations took more than a year. A hoped-for exhibit of Mandaean artifacts could not be held, unfortunately, due to the prohibition against items of Iraqi origin to be carried in luggage belonging to Australiaresiding Mandaeans. But a few items from Harvard’s own collections were exhibited. The chief celebrants would be the Iranian priests ganzibra Sh. Salah Tawoosie (Choheili) and the tarmida Sh. Taleb Doragi. In addition: their two ritual helpers, the yalufas Sh. Salem Choheili and his brother. The only Mandaean priest in the U. S. at that time, Sh. Fawzi Masboob of Detroit, would also be present, though not in a fully priestly role. Well in advance of the event, a few U. S.-residing Mandaeans had come to confirm the suitability of the baptism site, in a park on the Allston side of the Charles river. Thanks to our Mandaean scientific contacts, numerous laboratory tests were taken of the river water at the park. A fire permit for the required ritual coal-fire and incense had to be secured from the local authorities. That was done by

Luckily, we had access to Armenian food-stores in nearby Watertown. Still, New York-based Iranian Mandaeans brought pure wheat flour for the ritual breads (pihtas). 1

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our errand-boy, the Harvard student Charles Häberl, who later became a prominent scholar of Mandaean religion. The priests and their helpers were lodged at a Harvard house within walking distance to the river, for the priests require water directly from the river, not tap-water. Before the conference itself began the baptism was held soon after sunrise on Sunday June 13, and my stepson, Jesse Buckley, who is a video-maker, filmed the ceremony, with two assistants.2 The baptism took ca. seven hours; the film time was edited from nine hours to the final product of fifty minutes. Men, women and children were baptized in separate groups, and, as anyone familiar with the Mandaean baptism knows, the ritual is an extremely complex one, bearing no resemblance to what Christians might expect. I was pleased to see that two Iranian Mandaeans I knew, Mr. Askari and Mr. Dakhil Shooshtary3 were the first to be baptized. This was the first Mandaean baptism to be performed in the U. S. in the traditional way: outside, in running water. Ninety-one persons attended the conference, and more than half of them were Mandaeans. That ratio of scholars to adherents of a tiny Near Eastern minority religion was new for Harvard! I had invited Lady Drower’s daughter, the English Egyptologist Mrs. M. Hackforth-Jones to give a paper about her mother. Overcoming an initial hesitation, she agreed to come, and her presentation was a wonderful success. An old friend of Lady Drower’s, Prof. Cyrus Gordon, who lived in nearby Brookline, wanted to give a short greeting, which he did. For me, it was a moving sight: in warm, relaxed conversation, he and Mrs. Hackforth-Jones sat in chairs on the riverbank, watching the baptism ritual. The local newspaper, The Boston Globe, published a report on the unprecedented event, with photos. When I was in Iran in 1996, I had been fascinated by the Bakhtiari tribesmens’ woolen, long white-and-black striped coats. In our many communications before the ARAM conference began, I had written to Mr. Askari, “If you could bring me a coat, just say 2 3

I wrote a pamphlet explaining the proceedings in the film. Mr. Shooshtary passed away Jan. 26, 2022.

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to the customs officials that it is yours!” (Arriving from Iran at JFK airport in NYC, in 1996, I had had my own experiences of bringing in illegal Iranian items). When Asad Askari and his son-in-law Hamid Ahwazi arrived (via Canada) at Boston’s Logan Airport, I met them, and drove them to our place in Cape Cod’s National Seashore. Asad looked around and inquired if there were any lions in the woods right by the house. No, I answered. (I didn’t think, then, of the lion as the fire-symbol on the skandola attached to the ritual knife). My husband and I spent a few days with Asad and Hamid on Cape Cod a few days before the ARAM conference began. Chip Coakley had made a draft of the conference program and the segments in it were followed to a satisfying degree. Included were scholarly papers; a few presentations by Mandaeans; a speech by the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili on Living Waters4; a conversation in Mandaic by a couple of the Iranian Mandaeans; Mr. Askari’s singing religious songs, partly of his own composition (he is a famous singer); a cultural evening—for which I was responsible; a dinner, and a press conference. Photos were taken. After the conference had ended, everyone seemed happy, and we—the gratified and satisfied organizers—received oral and written thanks. ******** A two-day conference was held at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, November 13 and 14, 2014. Professor Albert de Jong, of that same university, and Professor Christine Allison (later Robins), of the University of Exeter, England, led the event. A total of seven international academics took part in the conference’s first day, including the Mandaean priest Sh. Brikha Naṣoraia. The first day was dedicated to papers delivered by various professors and specialists, with some of the local students interested in Mandaean religion as listeners. But the main part was this: planning to make a film, “The Worlds of Mandaean He had sent me a copy of it in advance, in Arabic and an English translation. 4

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Priests,”5 focused on interviews with priests in different parts of the world. Money from the Arcadia Fund had already been secured for the production of the film. Sh. Alaa (Yuhana Nashmi), a Mandaean tarmida based in Australia, would be the fieldworker, tasked with finding Mandaean priests to be interviewed. At that point, Sh. Alaa had temporarily given up his priestly office, so he seemed a good choice to hold the position. No easy job, for nationalistic issues were involved, and the delicate topic of “modernizers” vs. “traditionalists.” In addition, ongoing discussions and conflicts about titles of Mandaean high-ranking priests complicated the issues. And: what should be discussed, by whom, and how? In the final product, three priests were interviewed. After the successful conclusion of that event in Leiden, some of us went to another Dutch city, to Den Haag, where a very different gathering took place: a meeting in an auditorium with a large audience of exile Mandaeans, some of them recently arrived from Iraq. We academics spoke about our work, and the proceedings were recorded and filmed. Sh. Brikha Naṣoraia acted admirably as translator, and this role did not just include translating between English and Arabic, but also navigating the problem of bridging the world of academic activity with what the audience (i. e. the Mandaeans) assume that academics do. The atmosphere soon became testy, as several people wanted us academics to convince the young people to marry only inside the religion, and to remain loyal to traditional, “old country” Mandaean values. In exile, these are of course among the primary issues in the task of preserving a collective identity. Prof. Albert de Jong and I tried to explain that such advocacy of traditions is not the job of academics, and Sh. Brikha Naṣoraia (who himself has Ph. D. status) patiently attempted to make that difference understandable to the audience. Next, I had an appointment of my own: to visit the Mandaean priest Sh. Rafid, son of Sh. Abdullah, son of Sh. Negm. He lived in the eastern city of Nijmegen. I took the train, found his home, and spent many hours there. I already knew he had a number of 5

The film is available on YouTube.

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Mandaean texts. After several hours of conversation- mostly with his son, a graphic designer, as translator— the priest took me upstairs to the second level of his home. There, in the corridor with a row of closets one would expect to hold bed linens, the sheikh opened the closet doors, and the shelves revealed Mandaic objects and texts. I was allowed to unwrap several texts from their white cotton bags. The bottom shelf held something very heavy, made of metal. Immediately, I wondered: was this the Book of John I had seen and handled in Ahwaz in 1973? No. It was something else: the metal had a greyish color, and the large book was loose-leaved, not bound. A qulasta, a liturgy. Is this the only one of its kind in Europe? Later, I took my leave, expressing deep thanks for having been permitted to see these treasures. ******** In southern Sweden, the Mandaean Diar Sager6 has his own scriptorium at home. By hand, he copies Mandaean manuscripts. I have been there, seen his works. In June 2015, he and I met again during a special event in Södertälje, south of Stockholm. I had been invited as a guest to give a talk and to observe the election of officers in an international organization of Mandaeans. Indeed, this marked the second gathering of the Mandaen World Congress, with Wisam Breegi and Fouad Sobbi as the chief leaders of the meeting. Election of the board was done by ballot voting. I noted that very few women were present in the audience. The Mandaean priests left the big room just before the voting began. I thought they were protesting, but: no. By walking out, they declared their neutrality, someone explained to me. The priests considered the voting to be a matter for the laypeople, and the priests wanted them to figure out their own authority and then come to the priests to talk about the result. After the meeting, I went with Diar for a get-together with several of the Mandaean priests in the nearby mandi. A baptism had taken place in the adjoining river that morning, June 7. (Diar confessed to me that if the water hadn’t been so cold, he would 6

Formerly, his surname was al-Haider.

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have been baptized). The mandi is a regular house and visiting Mandaeans often stay there; some people taking part in the Congress did. Asa (myrtle) grew in several pots inside the house. Diar, several priests, and I sat in the mandi. Sh. Salwan Alkhamis, the ganzibra, took the lead; he speaks good English and also Swedish. Sweden harbors the largest Mandaean population in Europe, and at that point the country had eight priests. On earlier occasions, I had already met some of them. What I learned that June, was that the mandi—with its very convenient river so near—would soon be abandoned. I asked: why? Because the locals, right across the river, had been complaining about the “noise,” especially by the women’s ululations during baptism ceremonies. Sh. Salwan said that the Mandaeans had already bought a new religious site in Stockholm, which offered more distance to potentially irritable native neighbors. One reason for my being invited to the mandi with Diar was that he—at that time a MA degree student of Mandaeism at Lund University—had several issues he wished to raise with the priests. Holding a paper with listed questions in his hand, Diar asked the priests about Mandaean cosmology. First: where exactly is the maṭarta (custom station) of Abatur, the personified scale? Further, is Mšunia Kušṭa (realm of truth/ realm of ideal counterparts) part of the alma d-nhura (the Lightworld)? Or is it separate? Discussing these weighty issues, the priests rapidly listed the various levels of the maṭartas in sequence—from bottom to top. Politely listening to his colleagues, Sh. Salwan—the youngest of the priests—also took part in the answers. I recognized most of the Mandaic, but I do not know Arabic; the priests and Diar used both languages. Many direct quotations of Ginza passages were uttered, and I nodded silently, glad to recognize parts of these quotations. Diar listened carefully and made notes. The dynamics in this session reminded me a bit of what Drower had written in her 1937 book: that a priest sometimes interrupts if he has an objection to how a colleague is handling a detail in a ritual, or if he forgets a part of a prayer. Drower says that such interruptions, to discuss a matter of procedure, are not at all resented or taken as an offense. Now, the priests in the Södertälje mandi were

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prepared and willing to deal with seeming contradictions in the sacred texts. Diar asked about the ritual of the ganzibra-initiation. A special ritual for such an occasion is not described in any text, as far as I know, so I took the opportunity to ask about the topic. I had read about it in Drower’s work, but never seen it treated in any of the old Mandaean priestly commentary texts. My question was this: what is the reason for the obligatory rule of tying the ritual elevation of a Mandaean tarmida to ganzibra-status to the expected, imminent death of a pious Mandaean woman in the local community? (People have often told me that Mandaean priests are experts at predicting an old and/or ill person’s death). The making of a ganzibra initiation requires that another priest must take a second wife so that his priest-colleague can rise to ganzibra status. What kind of religious logic is at work here? Does it involve an exchange of soul-energy, so that the pious dying woman’s soul ensures a transfer of positive soul-force only if a priest in the community takes a second wife? So it seems, and from the perspective of comparative symbolic anthropology it makes sense. I had read that a ganzibra elevation ritual was once cancelled because the supposedly dying elderly woman did not die. In the Södertälje mandi, the priests provided no explanation to my question. But I remembered, later, that one time, in Flushing, New York, I had raised the same topic, and Mr. Nasser Sobbi,7 several Mandaeans and I were discussing it. Desiring a quick and reliable answer, Mr. Sobbi made a direct phone call to the house of the head priest in Ahwaz, Iran. Nobody answered, for, “They are all at the river,” said Mr. Sobbi then, shrugging as he hung up the phone. But now, in the Södertälje mandi, Sh. Salwan did answer me regarding the pious woman. An eligible woman’s well-established piety is unquestioned in a traditional, local Mandaean community, where everybody knows everybody else’s level of religious observance. “Just go to Iran and see for yourself!” exclaimed Sh. Salwan to me. Often, such a person is an older, 7

For more on Mr. Sobbi, see below.

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much-baptized woman of a pure (hallali) family, who has scrupulously obeyed the food-rules, the prayer-regulations and kept the holidays and sacred seasons all her life. In short: she embodies the highest religious ideal. But why a woman? Well, it’s not necessary, said the priest, for it might be a man, but it so happens that in most cases women are more pious than men. In the current conditions, with the loss of local, stable, old-time Mandaean communities, and the great majority of Mandaeans living in exile, how can these criteria be applied now? What I know of present-day ganzibra-elevations is this: a tarmida who wants to become a ganzibra usually travels to Iran or to Iraq in order to go through the ritual, which requires a certain number of priests, and at least one of them must be a ganizbra. In long-established communities, the piety requirement can still be firmly proven. As for a second marriage for a colleague-priest, that can be done, but if the country’s law forbids polygamy, you ought to be quiet about the second wife, or, better: perform the ritual in a Muslim country that will not create trouble. As we wrapped up our visit in the Södertälje mandi, and took farewell, I received a small gift, a twig of asa, which I gave to a Mandaean woman friend in Stockholm some days later.

CHAPTER 3. A YALUFA AND THREE ELDERS THE YALUFA

“Morghe hamsaaje ghaze” is a Persian proverb that I learned from the yalufa Shahram Ebadfardzadeh in San Antonio, Texas. It means: “the chicken in your neighbor’s yard is not a chicken but a goose,” i.e., the equivalent of “the grass is greener at your neighbor’s.” Being learned laymen, yalufas occupy a mid-position between priests and laypeople, and enjoy a certain level of freedom to deal with persons like me, because yalufas are not subject to the purity rules for priests. At few times, I have experienced my conversations with priests to become a kind of competition for knowledge: whose knowledge counts, in what kind of context, what is at stake? A young Iranian Mandaean man residing in California, Shadan Ahwazi, alerted me to the Iranian Mandaean yalufa in Texas. In a September 2016 email to me, Shadan wrote about Shahram being “a religious activist.” Shadan also said that the yalufa had met me when I was in Ahwaz in 1996. This sounded promising, and I first met Shahram during the academic conference (AAR/SBL) taking place in November 2016 in San Antonio. With several scholars, we got together in the conference arena, and Shahram had brought the resident Mandaean tarmida, Sh. Bassam Fadhil al-Haider, who said very little, but I later found out that he speaks very good English. After the conference, I spent time with people of the Mandaean community in San Antonio and enjoyed the company of Shahram’s family: his wife Bita, his children, and his old and

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fragile father. Bita, very sweet, was always in the house, cooking meals. Shahram’s father, Rezij Ebadfardzadeh (d. Oct. 1, 2021) came and went between his bedroom and the living room, rolling his oxygen-tanks. His frequent coughs were due to years of inhaling dust from metals and chemicals in the goldsmith trade. Very friendly to me, this elderly gentleman looked like God in Michelangelo’s creation of the world and of Adam. Shahram told me that his father had once been in Hamadan, and that he now missed the mountains and the outdoors. Sharing much information, Shahram and I talked and worked, and he told me how once, while he had a job on an engineer-team in eastern Iran, he and his Muslim fellow-workers embarked on a conversation on theology. Escalating into an argument, the talk got very serious, and the Muslims became surprised at Shahram’s ability to counter their arguments. At the end, an imam had to be called in, but I don’t think even he could settle the debate. Hearing this, I was reminded of Shafia A. Amara, who, as a young Mandaean woman in Iraq, was not required to take the school-class in Qur’an interpretation. But she did, because of her own choice and keen interest, and she bested her fellow-students in Qur’an exegesis. I told Shahram this story, and he nodded, smiling. Sometime in 2010, when Shahram had a jewelry store in central San Antonio, a European lady entered his store to look at the merchandise. She was accompanied by a man, and the two visitors attended a conference or business meeting in town. Shahram politely asked the lady where she came from, and she looked at him haughtily down her nose and replied, “Great Britain.” (Shahram said, to me, that she could just as well had said: “England”). Then, the lady asked him, “And where do you come from?” “The Persian Empire,” Shahram answered. The woman was puzzled, and her companion explained to her, in a whisper, that the store owner had upstaged her with his response. Making very nice cheese from a Texas farmer’s cow-milk, Shahram once sent me, via regular package mail, a big chunk of his home-made product. Also, Shahram made yoghurt, and pickled cranberries, both of which I tasted in San Antonio. Observing that it is necessary to take care of the land, and if you

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don’t, it will turn into a desert—like in Ahwaz—Shahram specified that in San Antonio, people ought to be aware of that danger. On my first visit to the community, I illustrated my talk with a few pictures from my most recent visit to Mandaeans in Australia. But soon it became clear that the people were not used to hear an academic speaking, for the audience seemed puzzled, and people mumbled comments among themselves. Reminded of a somewhat unruly college class, I tried to be patient. Suhrab Askari translated my English into Farsi, not very satisfying for the Arabic-speaking Iraqi Mandaeans in the audience. Things settled down a bit after Shahram took over the translation. At the end, I commended the women—who sat in the back—for behaving better than the men. The women seemed to appreciate that. Often, speaking to groups of Mandaeans, I have noticed that men are more apt to be skeptical, to rush to interrupt me. But when that happens, I tell them that I am not a priest, and I don’t talk like one. Once or twice, I have run into quite hostile opposition. On one occasion (not in San Antonio), an aggressive Mandaean wanted to hear nothing more from me until I agreed with him precisely on how many years have passed since Adam’s creation. But that is “insider” Mandaean mythological material, not something that a scholar must nod to as an undisputed truth. In February 2020, on the cusp of the covid pandemic, my colleague, the linguist Charles Häberl and I arrived for a meeting with the San Antonio community. Shahram had made careful plans, and this event worked out well. Charles and I spent much time with Shahram and his family and had meals at their home. Somehow, the issue of the priestly pandama came up, and Shahram contradicted what Lady Drower had written: that the pandama placed across the mouth and nose serves to keep flies and other insects out of the praying priest’s mouth. “No,” said Shahram, “when the priest officiates, he is an angel, and his lower face must not be seen, but covered up.” That was news to me. One day, Shahram polished my silver bracelet and tightened the lock on it. He thought the bracelet had been made in Iraq, because Iraqi Mandaean goldsmiths don’t write the signature in

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gold, like the Iranians do, but in silver. A bit later, when I met Nargess, Sh. Salah’s sister, in the mandi, she greeted me warmly. She recognized me from my 1996 visit in Ahwaz. Now, she noticed my gold-and-mina pendant, and she told me that it was made by her father, Sh. Jabbar Tawoosie. I didn’t know that. This piece of jewelry, my protective amulet, was a gift to me from Mr. Nasser Sobbi, years ago. Regarding Mandaean jewelry, let me note here something that happened a few days later, when I flew from San Antonio to Los Angeles. On the airplane, my seat-back malfunctioned, and I moved to a different seat. I sat down next to an Asian man who looked intently at the just-mentioned pendant. He asked: “Have you been to Kuwait?” I smiled and remarked that he obviously recognized this type of jewelry. He nodded, and we did not talk more. But sometimes, in large airports, I check around to see if anyone notices my Mandaean jewelry. So far: no. Back to San Antonio: we headed to the meeting in the mandi. Inside, two male policemen were already seated, and the mayor of San Antonio arrived a bit later and gave a welcome speech. A woman from the local refugee agency was present. She later said to me that she had learned so much. A journalist and a photographer from a San Antonio magazine did their work. Weeks later, they sent me their article, and I commended them for their fine product. Mr. Asad Askari sang a few Mandaean songs (one was his own composition), and before he began, he glanced at me and told the gathered people that I had heard him perform twice, in Iran in 1996. After M. Askari had finished, a choir of children also sang. A small table held several Mandaean texts and other items, among them a Mandaean brass amulet against the evil eye, a present given to me long ago by Lady Drower’s daughter. Also, I had asked the tarmida, Sh. Bassam, to show and to explain another special object I had brought: the old cartonnage manuscript line-marker.1 He agreed happily, for he knew well what this was.

1

See the section Vignettes, above.

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I told Charles that one of my Mandaean friends in northern Europe had long ago been a member of a Baghdad street gang, and Charles wondered if my friend still knew the particular street argot used among those gangs. I don’t know but I have heard that Mandaeans in such gangs used to sprinkle their speech with Mandaic phrases, aiming to puzzle Muslim antagonists. Now, in San Antonio, Charles had conversations with the teacher of the Mandaic language. The two men agreed on the importance of teaching the Mandaic language to children. A bit later, Charles admitted to me that he was a little nervous about his own command of the Khorramshahri Mandaic dialect, but he dove into his special task: gathering some of the language students into a circle for a conversation. He posed the test question, “What did you eat for lunch today? Please describe your meal!” Those who felt confident enough in Mandaic, answered. It was a delight to hear this exercise. At the very end of our visit, Charles and I were taken to the Mandaean baptism site, in neighboring Boerne, at a fine, treelined river, quiet, with minimal traffic-noise. Shahram told us that the Mandaeans keep the river-edge free of trash, and the local Texans are used to the sight of white-clad people being baptized by their leaders. Another Mandaean Texas community is currently trying to acquire its own priest, an Iranian tarmida who has been stuck with his family in another country for several years. I hope the effort will succeed.

THREE E LDERS

Lamea Abbas Amara (1929-2021) was one of the first Mandaeans I met in the U. S. t happened in the fall of 1992, when I spent a week with her and her family. Lamea lived in California, and we kept in contact for decades.2 A well-known poet from Amara, Iraq, Lamea possessed a great deal of Mandaean knowledge, and she had a collection of Mandaean handwritten texts. In the apartment where she lived with her family when we first met, I transcribed My 2002 OUP book contains material on Lamea and her family, and her Mandaean manuscripts are described in chapter 3 of The Great Stem of Souls. 2

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the copyist lineages (colophons) in those texts. On her mother’s side, Lamea came from a priestly family. When Lamea’s uncle Sh. Dakhil died in 1964, he left his Mandaean books and handwritten manuscripts to her, because he trusted her to take good care of them. Lamea and her sister remembered that, when they were very young, some Mandaeans in her area would throw out the old handwritten texts in the garbage, because a new, more secular age had dawned, and many Iraqi Mandaeans wanted to be modern. So why should they save these outdated items? Genealogical charts of Lamea’s family were drawn up for me, and I was soon able to connect many of the names to those of priests and scribes I encountered in my colophon research. Gradually, I became familiar with priest-and -copyist lineages in Iraq and Iran over many centuries. Often, as I was sitting in Lamea’s living-room, covering the dining table with my papers, I would exclaim, “I know him! I’ve seen this name and the lineage in another manuscript!” Even a specific priests’ handwritings might become familiar to me. Shafia and I wondered what the long-dead copyists of the colophons would have thought of my activity here in La Mesa, California. She thought they would have been pleased. We talked about priests, Lamea and I, Lamea telling me that the priests’ diet is so healthy that they often reach a very ripe old age. When they pass away, it is sometimes due to pneumonia, because so much of their work takes place in cold water. Both in 1992 and 1993, I took breaks from my intense colophon work by walking on Cowles Mountain or going to the seaside. One day, returning from such a break, I asked Lamea, “Will you write your autobiography?” “Never,” she replied, in a way that did not invite further questions. With her sister Shafia, she published a Mandaean newsletter, Mandaee Magazine (mostly in Arabic). Information from these newsletters is quoted, without attribution, in a publication for Mandaeans in Sweden, I was told. Lamea also showed me issues of a Mandaean magazine published in Baghdad by the Highest Mandaean Spiritual Council there. I heard many stories from Lamea and her sister Shafia. When walking to school in Amara, the sisters regularly passed through a Shi’a neighborhood. Squeezing their nostrils to avoid inhaling

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the smell of the cooking kebabs of the Muslims, they hurried toward school. “It’s the same kebab as ours,” Lamea explained to me, “but it’s THEIRS, still!” While with Lamea, I was once allowed into her kitchen, to cook dinner for us, introducing something new: how to cook salmon, Norwegian style. When Lady E. S. Drower’s Folktales of Iraq (1931 edition), was going to be re-published in 2007, I ensured that tales omitted in the book would be included.3 One of the two Mandaean stories, “The Appearance of the White Cat,” was told to Drower by an unnamed son of Mulla Khidr. Despite the Muslim-sounding appellation, Mulla Khidr was a Mandaean. Once, a Muslim darwish approached him, and asked the Mandaean for help against an evil spirit that kept causing havoc in the darwish’s Muslim village. Mulla Khidr was a close friend of the Mandaean ganzibra Sh. Mohi, a brother of Sh. Joda (d. 1941), Lamea’s greatgrandfather. Sh. Mohi was loved and respected by both Mandaeans and Muslims. Once, he used his special powers to stop a very dangerous flood in a small river4 near Naṣoriya; no other religious authorities/exorcists had been able to tackle the task. In 1993, during my next visit to Lamea’s family, she listed her own and her children’s baptismal names, used in rituals (these names are based on Mandaean numerology and science). The next year, my stepson Jesse came with me to meet Lamea’s family and to take photographs.5 At that time, he was studying anthropology and film at the University of California, Berkeley, and he paid close attention to the dynamics in the Mandaean household. During one of her lessons to me, Lamea said that priests have long beards and never cut their hair because they wish to look like Šamiš, the sun. Power resides in hair, like the sun’s rays. There are other forms of power, too, and I thought of Sh. Faraj, who was famous for making magical amulets and talismans in his shop in Baghdad in the 1930s (he made an amulet for Lady Drower). What about Jesus, I asked Lamea. She explained that Jesus wanted to be baptized by a prophet, and John was one, for

See the section on “Intellectual Time-line,” above. This may be Akaika, a river still found on modern maps of Iraq. 5 Several of his photos are in the OUP 2002 book. 3 4

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being baptized by a priest with prophet-status would erase all the impurities that you might have inherited from your family. And as a Mandaean, Jesus surely knew that. On various occasions, I noticed that Lamea’s sons Zakia and Zaidoun seemed to inhabit dual universes, modern and ancient. One evening, after conversations on religious issues, the two men accompanied me out to my rental car. Gazing upwards to the sky, I called out, “Look at the moon!” “Yes,” said Zakia, a former air pilot, “it has just been born; it is only three days old.” In November 2007, I visited again. At that time, Lamea went regularly to a senior citizens’ center several days a week, for a meal, entertainment, social life, physical exercises and medical attention. It was a very friendly place, and the seniors there were refugees, from Egypt, Russia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, etc. Leading me by the hand, Lamea introduced me all around, showing me the center. She and her three sisters lived in an apartment complex nearby, and she seemed happier than on some of my earlier visits. ******** It was Lamea who introduced me to Mr. Nasser Sobbi (19242018), an elderly Iranian Mandaean in the New York City area. He first came to the U. S. in 1970. Mr. Sobbi and I met for the first time in 1994 and on many other occasions later. I became very fond of him and his lovely family. In 2000, he and his wife Shukriyeh celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a large party in a rented hall, with live music, wonderful food, and many, many guests (my husband and I among them). A high point in the party was when Mr. Sobbi, dressed up in a sultan’s cape and with a turban on his head, entered the dancefloor with his wife. Wild applause! Among the older lay Mandaeans I have met in the U. S. Mr. Sobbi was the person possessing the deepest knowledge of the religion and its people. It took years before I realized how respected he was by both Iranian and Iraqi Mandaeans in exile.6 Consult chapter 10 in the OUP book for details of my interactions with Mr. Sobbi. 6

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35

Early on, he gave me a silver drabša, made in Iran, and I have carried it on my keychain ever since (it keeps me safe). Another time, he drew an emblem for me, with a ball-point pen on a paper napkin. The image, looking like a coat of arms in European style, consisted of two letters, one inside the other. I never asked him what this emblem meant, but years later, his son Issa explained that it was of course my initials. Indeed: a B with a turned-around J inside it. Mr. Sobbi often made such decorative images, Issa informed me, writing in an email to me, “He used to make pendants or charms of people’s first and last names. He would sketch it on a thin piece of paper and then either make a charm pendant or an engraving on a cigarette box holder or any piece of artwork.” In 1995, before I went to Iran the second time, Mr. Sobbi showed me photos of the priests belonging to the Choheili family in Iran. The next year, I met them all, as already described. Years later, I found out that Sh. Salah’s and Sh. Najah’s late father, Sh. Jabbar Ṭawoosie, had lost his own father when an armory exploded in 1924 in Ahwaz. This happened during a conflict between Reza Shah and Sh. Khazal, the Arabic governor of Khuzistan. Reza Shah ordered the governor’s ammunitions depot to be destroyed, but the building blew up. Many Mandaeans were killed. Sh. Jabbar and his brothers were raised by their grandfather, Mulla Sa’ad, a very learned man who taught his grandsons Mandaean knowledge and who copied Mandaean texts. Indeed, the text Haran Gawaita, which Mr. Sobbi owned, was copied by Mulla Sa’ad in 1930. Mr. Sobbi had met Mulla Sa’ad in Iran, in 1942, during World War II. I heard so many stories from Mr. Sobbi. For instance, once, when I drove the two of us on the Long Island Expressway to visit his brother, Mr. Dakhil Shooshtary, Mr. Sobbi began, excitedly, to tell me about the adventures of Mani, the 3rd century religious founder. I had to hold on hard to my steering wheel as Mr. Sobbi, vividly gesturing and happily exclaiming, described Mani’s voyage down one of Iraq’s main rivers. It felt as if Mr. Sobbi had been an eyewitness there and then. The story was unfamiliar to me, and I assume he had the information from Arabic sources.

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We were headed, as I said, to Mr. Sobbi’s brother’s home, and once here, we descended into the basement, which harbored Mandaic texts and books. Mr. Sobbi had taught his brother to copy Mandaic manuscripts. To my knowledge, Mr. Sobbi had the most extensive collection of Mandaic original manuscripts in the U. S. (fifteen, he told me). As a clarifying aside, I might mention here that I was told the reason for the brothers’ different last names: to fool the military officials needing soldiers in Iran. “No, he is not my brother, and, in any case, he is too young for military service; he is only twelve years old,” was the explanation. The military officer doubted this, and said, “But he looks much older.” “No, he’s just big for his age.” A variant says that after World War I, when the Iranian government took a census of the population, Mr. Sobbi told the authorities that he came from the Saba (Sobbi) people, so the military gave him that last name. As for Mr. Sobbi’s brother, he was named after the city Šuštar: “Shooshtary.” In August 2000 I sat with Mr. Sobbi’s in his living room. We wondered about the name of a specific copyist in the colophon of a Mandaic manuscript. I had found the name of the scribe, Zakia Zihrun, attested in the first colophon of the text 1012 Questions (ATŠ, in DC 36). Zakia Zihrun had copied the text in Šuštar in 1677. Centuries earlier, an odd name and epithet appears in Zakia Zihrun’s scribal lineage: Yahia Baliq Hiwia. Does it mean that this scribe ate snakes? No, more likely, he was a snake charmer. And might not that be a suspect professional role if the scribe was a priest? I had noticed that the expected indication of priestly office is lacking at the name Yahia Baliq Hiwia. The immediately adjacent copyist’s name is Yahia Halal, “Yahia the Pure.” Perhaps the juxtaposition of the two Yahias is completely deliberate: readers should not mix up these two men! The text says that the snake charmer copied the text from a document owned by the pure Yahia. Nearby scribes in this colophon indicate that the two Yahias can be dated to the 11th or 12th century. Mr. Sobbi’s Ginza, which took him four months to copy, is based on the manuscript belonging to a friend, Mr. Ghazi Elmanahi. In the requisite section at the beginning, when the copyist tells the reader when and where he copied the text, Mr. Sobbi follows the ancient custom of using his own baptismal

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name, not his secular one. The original book was copied by the well-known Iraqi Mandaean priest Sh. Abdullah, son of Sh. Sam, one of Lamea’s ancestors. This is what happens in my work: I sometimes realize, gradually, how Mandaean friends of mine are descendants of illustrious, learned Mandaeans in past generations. For instance, the Ginza by Sh. Abdullah son of Sh. Sam, from which Mr. Sobbi copied his own, was written for the salvific benefit of Mr. Ghazi Elmanahi’s grandmother, Lamia Sachet. Early on, in the context of Mr. Sobbi reading aloud the text “Hibil’s Lament” in the Mandaean Book of John, I showed him my own copy of Lidzbarski’s 1915 edition of the text. I pointed out Lidzbarski’s handwritten Mandaic transcription of the whole document. Understanding that this work was done long before fonts existed, Mr. Sobbi was impressed, and admired the European scholar’s strong talent at writing Mandaic. Mr. Sobbi had once been in India, he told me, and there he had been struck by the strong religiosity of the people. Also, he said, it was not necessary for him to exchange his own Iranian currency into Indian money, for he got along fine by means of the gold he carried in his pockets. Gold=gold, easily converted among professionals in the precious metals trade. ******** I have known one of the elders among the Iranian Mandaeans, Mr. Asad Askari, for a long time. He was one of the three men who greeted me when I arrived at Mehrabad airport in Tehran in 1996. A thoroughly modern man, he also keeps his traditional connection to his religion and is a singer (as already mentioned). Mr. Askari possesses an aptitude for a variety of styles of communication. I enjoy his letters—of which I have many. Almost all of them display the letterhead of the Red Sea Shipping Agency, with its Tehran street-address, and the letters combine a formal business style of writing with a warm and direct, personal tone. These years, we talk more on the phone,7 not engaging in letterwriting. Back in 1996, Mr. Askari advised me on what to say and 7

He has lived in Texas for several years.

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what not to say in my speech at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. For instance, “Professor Buckley, you must remember to thank the Iranian Government when you speak to audiences where Muslims are present.” This advice held also in one meeting in the mandi in Ahwaz, where a few Muslim friends of Mandaeans arrived for the occasion of my appearance there. On the other side of the world, in the U. S., Mr. Askari acted as our major advisor on how to plan for the visiting clergy and other Iranians at the 1999 Harvard University conference on the Mandaeans. In the fall of that year, I received a letter from the Ahwazi yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili, who told me that members of the Polish Jerzy Grotowski Theatre Company had visited the Mandaeans of Ahwaz, where the Mandaeans had helped the visitors and showed them Mandaean ceremonies.8 A film was made. Mr. Askari had met the Poles at the airport in Tehran, arranged travel for them to Ahwaz, and tickets involving ther return travels to ensure their safe arrival back home. Again, Mr. Askari’s capacity to act helpfully in international settings was proven. From August 2002 to March 2003 Mr. Askari and I had an especially focused correspondence. I had hoped to revisit my Mandaean friends in Iran, and to be able give a lecture on the Mandaeans at Ahwaz University. (That I had spoken at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University in 1996 had not been forgotten.) But this new plan for a speaking engagement in the south was a different matter. A Muslim friend of the local Mandaeans there contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs early on. What about the topic? I received a letter from the Chancellor at Shahid Chamran University in Ahwaz. He invited me to speak on Ancient Religions of Khuzistan. That had not been my intention, but it surely showed the limits of local tolerability of lecture topics. The chasm between “Mandaeans as an unprotected religion” and their status as “book possessors” became clear. Reference to the Mandaeans ought to be avoided. I told Mr. Askari that I could obtain a visa at the Iranian Embassy in Oslo, Norway—another oil-country, and not un8

See one of the Vignettes, above.

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friendly to Iran. He advised me on the amount of luggage to take to Iran, and that I should carry with me some copies of my books on Mandaeism. Would not these be confiscated at customs? Mr. Askari did not think so. December came, and with that, worry about war, because the Coalition forces seemed focused on going into Iraq. “Maybe just a diplomatic play,” Mr. Askari wrote, trying to calm my hesitation. A Christmas greeting soon followed. Five days before Christmas Shahid Chamran University’s Director of Scientific International Co-operation sent me an invitation to speak. On which subject? The same as above. The university had received my completed, filled-out form of Personal Data. My visa application from the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in Oslo, Norway, dated January 22, 2003. My answers to twentyseven questions were included in that application, of course. As early as August 2, 2002, I had contacted the UNHCR office in Amman, Jordan, asking for an appointment there, in connection with my planned visit to Iran. I did obtain a positive answer from UNHCR. In late February 2003, Shahid Chamran University sent the Iranian Embassy in Norway a copy of its formal request to invite me. But in March, the war began. From a phone booth in Oslo, I placed a call to my Mandaean friends in Iran, expressing my deep regrets that I had to cancel the visit.

CHAPTER 4. OTHER MANDAEAN CONTACTS Quite early on, I connected with many Mandaeans in the greater San Diego area. Years ago, one of them, Majid ‘Arabi Al-Khamisi (who later moved to Australia) presented a video of his recent visit to the old country, Iraq. He had not been back there for a long time and was excited when he showed us the video of his baptism there. The officiant was Sh. Abdullah, son of Sh. Negm. I followed the segments of the baptism in detail, and nodded at certain gestures, prayers, and elements in the ritual. Majid’s wife wondered why the proceedings took such a long time, and I said that the priest had to remove all the bad forces from her husband and invest him with good Light-world energies. She nodded, making a comment—-in jest—-to the effect that there must be a lot of bad powers on her husband. “No,” I corrected her, “it is the same for every Mandaean who is baptized.” Modern Mandaeans display a variety of reactions and relationships to the traditional baptism. Some are happy to be baptized, while others take a different—but not necessarily dismissive—attitude, saying “no thanks” to undergo the complex ritual. How can one be a modern Mandaean in exile, and still identify as Mandaean? I heard of a Mandaean couple in a midWest state of the U. S., who wanted to have a wedding online. A Mandaean priest happened to be nearby, in Canada, so the pair asked him to officiate. He declined. Generally, as far as I know, Iranian Mandaeans still want to be baptized in running rivers, while Iraqis may settle for jacuzzi-baptism, which does provide “living” water.

41

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1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS ********

In Vignettes, above, I have mentioned Mr. Abdelelah Khalaf alSebahi,1 owner of the pipe with its diamond-encircled head. Hailing from Iraq, he lives in Denmark with his family, and was educated as an engineer in the former Soviet Union. The first letter I have from him is a 2003 Christmas-and-New Year’s greeting, a response to a letter I had sent him. Almost three years later, we met at a Mandaean gathering in Canada. At Christmas time in 2006 he and his family enjoyed a special event: they watched the famous 1954 color film Mandaean Ceremony, which Lady Drower had commissioned in Iraq. I had sent Khalaf the film in VHF cassette format. Thanking me, he wrote in a July 2006 email, “It reminds me of the old beautiful days.” Khalaf sent me a somewhat faded photo, taken in 1980, in Baghdad during the Mandaean annual ceremony Dehwa d-mania (“the giving of clothes”). It shows many Mandaeans at the riverbank. I had a specialist re-do the image, so that the quality of the photo is much improved. Lady Drower’s chief informant and friend in southern Iraq had been the priest Sh. Negm, Khalaf’s uncle on his mother’s side. To me, this was very valuable, new information. I often pose a question to Mandaeans, “How are you related to person X?” Khalaf sent me a photo of his uncle Sh. Negm, who, in photos, seems to have a habit of tilting his head. He is seated, surrounded by his four brothers, all of whom are priests. Two of them were goldsmiths, present at the 1939 meeting in New York, where Mandaean jewelers exhibited their works.2 In the photo, tarmida Sh. Adam, the oldest, sits to the far left, and Sh. Yahia is seated between Sh. Yahia and Negm. To the right are Sh. Aumarah and Sh. Hamad. Behind the five brothers stand three brothers who are cousins of Sh. Negm.3

In what follows, I will call him simply “Khalaf.” See the photo of other Mandaeans at this event, Plate 11, in The Great Stem of Souls. 3 I thank Mr. Mamoon Aldulaimi for helping me to identify all but one of the men. 1 2

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As noted, unexpected connections appear. In another message, Khalaf mentioned a Sweden-residing Mandaean, an engineer named Yahia Sam.4 I had met him—and still have his business card! In Kräftriket, near Stockholm, it was Yahia Sam who showed us the film from Iran about how a mandelta is made. Also, the Kräftriket event marked something else important to me, for there I first met the Mandaean woman Eshtar Jawad and her teacher. “All Mandaeans (are) facing a systematic genocide by dark forces,” Khalaf wrote to me between Christmas and New Year 2006/7. “That’s why we organized a big demonstration in Copenhagen Center last month,” he said adding, “We sent a letter to all MPs asking for their support as well.” About seven years later, in August 2013, I met with Khalaf and his family in Copenhagen at an evening gathering at Cross-Cultural Center, where immigrants from many countries regularly met for information, support and contacts. Here is a special memory from Khalaf’s early life, When I was about 7 years old, I remember Lady Drower’s visit to our village (Litlata) in Kalaatsalah in the south of Iraq. All the people in the village celebrated and welcomed Lady Drower. And as a child we sat around her chair, which was woven of palm leaves. I remember seeing Lady Drower in the Mandaean temple, she was a beautiful, slim woman in her white dress and white hat. We saw her as an angel and studied her every move. She visited my uncle5 from time to time.

More recently, Khalaf told me that when Drower was visiting in the south of Iraq, the Mandaeans living across the river brought her milk daily, to make sure she got good milk to drink (I assume that the milk was produced by Mandaean cows). Khalaf ‘s own sister told him that Lady Drower and Sh. Negm spoke Arabic together, not neo-Mandaic. In the next paragraph of Khalaf’s email to me, he mentioned regretfully that his uncle and the other sheikhs spoke only Arabic, never Mandaic to the children. Also, Mr. Khalaf let me know a small detail about the 4 5

See Vignettes. I. e. Sh. Negm.

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Mandaic ratna (slang), “which is used for example in front of police or in certain situations.” Later in the same 2006 email, he referred to the Royal Athena metal scrolls6 “that were stolen from Iraq, after the fall of the Saddam regime; they are now for sale in Athena Kings auction. And there is a big scandal in Iraqi newspapers (Al Medda) about this.” At the end of his email, Khalaf asked me to establish contact for him with Charles Häberl (which I did, as I recall) and ended by wishing me “a good life and much success.” ******** On November 25, 1975, I wrote a letter to an internationally known Iraqi Mandaean scientist, Professor Abdul Jabbar Abdullah (b. 1911). I contacted him at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Among other things, I told him that I had studied his religion for several years and was now a PhD. student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A few lines about my trip to and stay in Iran formed part of the letter’s contents. Unfortunately, I did not know that Professor A. J. Abdullah had already passed away in the summer of 1969, in Albany, New York, where he had lived and worked at the local State University of New York. Meteorology was his special field. About ten years before he died, he had held the office of President of the University of Baghdad. In the mid-1990’s, I met one of his sons, Dr. Sinan A. J. Abdullah, a dentist in upstate New York. On January 3, 1995, he wrote me a short letter from his home in Albany, asking me to autograph his copy of one of my books. He signed his letter with his name, and the addition “Your Brother in Kushta.” Our friendship began then. Sinan and his twin-brother Haithem were the first Mandaeans to be born in the U. S. (in 1947). When Sinan was two-and-a-half years old, his parents returned to Iraq. His father was also, at one time, a professor of physics in Lebanon. An international life, indeed! When Sinan’s father died, the family

6

See Vignettes.

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travelled back to Iraq for the burial of the father’s remains. In 1979, Sinan and his wife Rand were married in Iraq, and his grandfather, the ganzibra Sh. Abdullah br Sh. Sam, performed the marriage ceremony. After that, they never returned to the old country. “Things became unbearable in Iraq,” as Sinan put it to me in a telephone conversation. Sinan is related to other Mandaeans I know (and have known); he belongs to the Manduias and he has well-known priests in his lineage. On his mother’s side, Sinan’s grandfather, ‘Inasy, held the position as jeweler to the King of Iraq.7 Among many of the Mandaean laypeople I know, Sinan maintains a notably strong commitment to his religion. Like Khalaf, Sinan, while growing up, had close familiarity with the rituals. In a 2004 letter to me, he tells me that a young Canadian Mandaean has written to him, asking about the religion. Now Sinan wants me to evaluate how he, Sinan, answered the young man. “We grew up with the belief that we have a god, haii, parallel to allah in Islam,” Sinan begins in his reply to the young man. Then, he says that Mandaeism has no founder, that the religion began when the world did. He lists the segments in the human being, mentions several of the main important figures, including John the Baptist, of course. In a scientific mode, Sinan adds, “Nouns and values explain the phenomena of nature, and philosophizing the nature of man.” I asked Sinan about the story I had heard from two separate Mandaean sources: that Sinan’s father had found a clay bowl with Mandaic inscription in Israel. In Lebanon, ca. 1959, a Mandaean I know had listened while two men had discussed this matter of the bowl. Added to the tale was a final comment, “Western scholars already have enough information about our religion, so let’s keep quiet about this find.” Sinan wrote me in December 2019 that there is no truth in this story at all. “It is yet another of the many myths being fabricated around my father’s image,” Sinan wrote to me.

Is he identical to the person named “Enisse” in one of the Vignettes, above? 7

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Sinan has answered many of my questions throughout the years. In June 2017 I had asked for information on how to reach the Finland-residing Mandaean Mr. Mouhammad Saba (Alfayadh), who evidently possesses a great number of old photographs related to Mandaeans and their religion in their home countries. A couple of Mandaeans gave me information (Sinan among them), but I regret to say that I never followed up. I hope that someone will seek out this Mandaean and research his collection of photos. ******** The engineer Mamoon Aldulaimi has been my most constant correspondent since 1994-95. We had met via Mr. Nasser Sobbi. From his home in Lake Grove, NY, Mamoon published the Al Mandi magazine, at his Mandaean Studies and Research Center. The first issue saw the light of day in February 1995. Mamoon had asked me to write an article for the magazine on my Mandaean studies and research, and I did. Emphasizing that his own focus is not on religious knowledge and information, Mamoon has nevertheless supplied me with a wealth of materials on Mandaean organizations and their leaders, important discussions on hotly debated issues on modernity vs. traditionalism, and on the outlook for the religion’s continued life. In October 1994, I had met with Mamoon, Zuhair Jenab (another Mandaean engineer) and Mr. Sobbi at a restaurant on Long Island, NY.8 I immediately noticed that Mr. Sobbi enjoyed a high reputation among the more secular and Westernized Iraqi Mandaeans in the area. Mr. Sobbi’s direct knowledge of and immersion in the religious tradition explained the Iraqi peoples’ high respect for him. Mamoon’s Center aimed to provide bridges between Mandaeism’s “old ways” and the religion’s modern questions and dilemmas. In 2005, Mamoon told me that an uncle of his, Naeem Badawi in Baghdad, had died, and that his uncle had owned many books and other historical and written materials For interactions with Mandaeans in the NY area, see chapter 10 in my 2002 book. 8

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on the religion. What would happen to that collection now? I did not hear anything further on the matter, but it reminded me of the Finland-residing photographer’s collection, mentioned just above. During the same year, 2005, Charles Häberl and I had gone with Mamoon and his wife Shafia to visit Mr. Sobbi and his family. Charles was already deeply into his Mandaean studies and had worked with Mr. Sobbi for several years. I have had many conversations with Mandaeans on the possibility of a Mandaean archive to be established in exile. As far as I know, no “center” of that kind exists, but individual Mandaeans and their families do—or did—possess materials for such a collection. I have often asked Mandaean friends, “Please sit down with your elderly relative(s) with a tape recorder—or make a video! Preserve the old knowledge, stories, and family history!” Five issues of Mamoon’s Al Mandi magazine were issued. He also sent me letters and cards, and sometimes a copy of next year’s Mandaean calendar. From my side, I asked Mamoon to translate Arabic terms in some Mandaean stories I had published,9 and to ensure that chapter 10 in my 2002 book did not contain terrible errors. He complied, quickly. On a different note, Mamoon informed me that he and the slightly older Issam Hermiz (in Sweden since the 1960s) had attended high school in Baghdad together. I did not know that. Further, the men in Issam’s family were famous engravers, Mamoon said. And, in relation to the “blue bead” anecdote10 I learned that Amjed Bahoor and his brothers, who were excellent craftsmen, ran the main business in Iraqi silver souvenirs. Back in 1997, Mamoon emailed me about the plan for the Harvard conference on Mandaeism. He expressed the hope that it might be possible to help two Mandaean priests to get out of Iraq and be allowed to stay in the U.S. One of the priests, Sh. Fawzi Masboob, succeeded, becoming the first Mandaean leader of a congregation in America (he died in 2022). In the years after the 1999 Harvard conference new Mandaean organizations were 9

Folk-Tales of Iraq and Iran, originally published by Lady Drower in 1931. Vignette 16, above.

10

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established, websites created, and newsletters published. As for his own Center, Mamoon kept gathering information on recent Mandaean history. A few years later, he told me that he had audiotaped interviews with several Mandaeans of his own generation. Early on, Mamoon began to tell me that he had little faith in the possibility for an improved life for Mandaeans in their home countries. Continued life will be in exile, in many countries—and it is already a reality. To me, he added a bit of information on the ongoing creation of Mandaean organizations, their programs and rules, their leaders and followers. Similar to other people in exile, Mandaeans ask questions on how to keep a collective identity, culturally and religiously. From Mamoon, I obtained clarification on the three events when Mandaean silversmiths exhibited their works, during the period 1935 to 1939, in France, Italy and the U.S. In 1939, in the U. S., only one of the silversmiths returned to Iraq after the exhibit (while the rest stayed abroad).11 A few years ago, I learned that the one who remained in the U. S. was the father of a Mandaean I have met several times, Mr. Ghazi Elmanahi. At the evangelical Liberty University, in Virginia, an MA thesis had been published on the topic: how to convert Mandaeans to Christianity. Mamoon told me this, in 2009. I already knew and had read the thesis. (Mormons, too, have been interested in making Mandaean converts). In attempts to cement a continuation of Mandaean loyalty, priests and congregants have increasingly formed alliances, and counter-groups. The Mandaean Medical Association was constituted in 2010. The chief initial topic was to study the genetics of Mandaeans. During the same year, Mandaean priests worked to create an International Spiritual Majlis (“Parliament”). Mamoon told me that he thinks a certain level of academic education should become part of a Mandaean priest’s training. A few Mandaean priests have academic degrees. Of them, I have had contact mostly with Sh. Brikha Naṣoraia, who remains actively involved internationally, and engaged in conversations with other religions. 11

See Plate 11 in The Great Stem of Souls.

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A Mandaean friend of mine, a layman I first met in 1973, puzzled me the last time I saw him, in 2018. I noticed a considerable collection of medium-sized smooth, round stones arranged along the foundation of his house. He smeared the stones with olive oil, and I asked: why? “To make them shine,” he replied. I didn’t ask anything more. Now, I tend to interpret this act as a religious gesture: to make the rocks pure, to honor them. ******** Among laypeople, leaders of organizations past and present, I have had connections to Drs. Suhaib Nashi and Wisam Breegi for a long time, but less so in recent years. Active in international work for Mandaeans, the men created their own organizations and made connections with other emerging groups. At times, splits and alliances have been declared. In 2010, Wisam told me that he is moving forward with his plan to help Mandaean refugees coming to Worcester, MA, to re-settle there. This worked well, and the community became the most rapidly growing Mandaean group in the U. S. Connections with the local city government, hospital, and schools were established. In 2016, the mayor of Worcester agreed to sign an official proclamation: April 30 is the “Mandaean Cultural Day.” Parallel to Mamoon’s activity, Wisam wanted to build a library focusing on Mandaeans matters. But increasingly, the tricky question gained traction: how interested are the young people in the traditional Mandaean culture and knowledge, and will the young people’s voices be heard? Should communications and newsletters be in English, and not in Arabic? A Mandaean couple in England had asked us scholars (during a scholarly conference in England) to help with the issue of how to keep the newer generation loyal to their heritage. In the late fall 2002, I met Suhaib for the first time, at Sinan’s home. Suhaib’s organization, The Mandaean Society of America, was created in 2002, and already the next year, an announcement was made: there will be a meeting in Sweden to form The

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Mandaean Associations Union.12 Regarding Suhaib’s organization, statements were published on various matters, such as how to work on international human rights for Mandaeans, and how will the priests continue in their traditional roles as the highest authority? Time will tell. Already in 2003, Suhaib voiced his dissatisfaction to the U. S. Department of State regarding its International Religious Freedom (IRF) report on the Mandaeans (annual IRF reports are easily found on the Internet). But the section on Mandaeans, in the 2003 report, contained very scant attention to the people. I agreed with Suhaib: expansions and improvements were sorely needed on that section.13 During the same year, the Coalition forces entered Iraq, and communications with Mandaeans in Iraq became difficult.

12 13

See the chapter titled Conferences and Priests, above. Consult Part II, below, for my work on human rights for Mandaeans.

CHAPTER 5. GLIMPSES OF A FEW SCRIBES AND THEIR WORK I NTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Let me clarify several things about the task of copying Mandaean texts and on writing scribal lineages. Texts may be copied for a specified, named client (often a family member), or for the scribe himself—-usually it is a male scribe. Copying is a laborious task, often taking many months. First, the scribe asks for a forgiver’s salvific action to erase the client’s sins. That is: a specific Lightworld agent is called upon to act in the role of forgiver. In copying a text, strict rules are followed, and a special ink is used. If the scribe forgets to transcribe a part of the text, he might add the omitted section in the margin of the paper. But if he commits an error in writing a word or even a whole sentence (or more!), the text cannot simply be erased. Instead, the scribe adds a line of dots under the affected, erroneous letters or words. Many times, during reading colophons, I have seen this rule being followed. I have also learned to recognize certain recurrent scribes’ characteristic handwriting. “Aha, here you are, again,” I say to myself. Centuries may intervene between a scribe’s work and the text he copies. Colophons of a large text can contain hundreds of names, and lineages sometimes flow—like river-systems—into a specific point of a particular scribe’s activities. From that connection point, I may follow “the river” as far back as the third century, finding a few scribes belonging to that time. Ginza manuscripts/books I have seen (so far, eleven in all) contain seven

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separate colophons. Most Mandaean texts also carry postscripts by the current scribe, who gives information on local history, political events, problems in the Mandaean community, persecutions, and sometimes even assesses the vices or virtues of contemporary Muslim rulers. The scribe always gives the exact time, day, month, year, and place of the completion of his work. A particular anti-Muslim curse, based on a wordplay, may be added. A special feature of the Ginza is this: when a reader has finished reading the Right Ginza (GR), it is necessary to turn the codex upside-down in order to read the left side (GL). Only in one Ginza I have seen is this model disobeyed. Why this dominating feature? Perhaps it is linked to the Mandaean inscribed magical clay bowls, which must be turned and turned, from right to left, to enable reading the circular-spiraling text.

L AMEA’S TEXTS

As noted, Lamea Abbas Amara owned Mandaean books and manuscripts. I now return to her two Ginza books (codices), with specific reference to the colophons, i.e., the scribal lineages, in these two large volumes. One Ginza dates to 1886, and the other one to 1935. The 1886 Ginza was copied by a brother of Lamea’s grandfather, Sh. Idan (=Adam), and the second one by Lamea’s uncle, Sh. Dakhil (d. June,1964). When Sheikh Dakhil of Amara lay near death, he told his family that he wanted to leave several of his Mandaean texts, including the Ginzas, to his sister’s daughter: Lamea. The two Ginzas are of similar size, the 1886 Ginza measuring 13 1/4” by 9 1/2”. Like the rest of Lamea’s Mandaean texts, they are kept in white cotton cloth bags containing grains of musk-—the scent of Life. Sheikh Idan (=Adam) writes that he copied the 1886 Ginza for a woman client, Hawa, daughter of Maliha (the woman’s maṣbuta name). Adam’s copy was based on a Ginza by Ram Zihrun, a famous copyist.1 He was present in Amara, Iraq in 1886, fifty-five years after he had copied another Ginza, in Qurna and

1

A bit later, I will return to him.

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in Basra, in 1831.2 Following the lineages downward in time, one sees that after seven lineages of copyists, the 1886 Ginza copyist lineage intersects with one of the Ginzas in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale, a text dating to ca. the year 1500. Seven lineages of copyists/book owners/benefactors further down in time, we find two women: Mamul Dihgan and Yasmin Bana. I know these two women, for they appear in other colophons, and they are bookowners and daughters of priests. The scribal point of Lamea’s 1886 Ginza’s confluence with the just-mentioned Paris Ginza is the ganzibra Zakia Bayan, son of Yahia Bihram, Šapuria. Like most all other Ginzas, these two begin with Zazai of Gawazta (for GR), ca. 270 CE, and a woman named Šlama, daughter of Qidra, ca. 200 (for GL). She is the earliest recorded copyist I have found; no humans precede her.3 Regarding Lamea’s second Ginza, the 1935 one written by her uncle Sh. Dakhil, son of Sheikh Idan. Sh. Dakhil copied it for the salvific benefit of a woman named Hawa, daughter of Simat. He offers a disturbing piece of information about the text he used. It was a maimed book, he says, owned by a yalufa named Zihrun. A section of the book had been cut off. Whether the omitted segment was a part of the main text, or the colophon is unclear. A “lying Mandaean,” as Sh. Dakhil put it, had committed this sinful deed, rendering the “powerful and great Ginza” incomplete. The “lying” yalufa also appears as a scribe in the 1886 Ginza. In that lineage, Zihrun depends on the well-known scribe, the 1831 cholera survivor Ram Zihrun. Had the book been mutilated sometime between 1831 and 1935? If so, had nobody else wanted to copy it because it was incomplete? I wonder about this, for it is rare to see a scribe not only mentioning a mutilated text, but also revealing the perpetrator’s name. Arranging the names of one line of priests through three generations in Lamea’s maternal family, I find the following:

That text is Drower Collection #22 (=DC 22), in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (see p. 326-27, in The Great Stem). DC 22 held that snakeskin I found missing, as told in Vignette #2, above. 3 Some scribes will state that the earliest copyist for a particular text was one of the Lightworld beings. 2

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1. Lamea’s mother’s brother: Mhatam Zihrun (=Sheikh Dakhil) copied the 1935 Ginza. 2. her grandfather’s brother: Adam (=Sheikh Idan) copied the 1886 Ginza; he is the father and initiator of Sheikh Dakhil. 3. her great-grandfather: Mhatam Yuhana (=Sheikh Damouk); he is the father and initiator of Sheikh Idan. One generation is usually assessed to be thirty years. Counting the names in the first lineage in the 1886 Ginza, I can trace Sh. Idan’s lineage fourteen generations back, which would yield a plausible date in the mid-fifteenth century for this particular lineage’s earliest priest. Sometimes, one finds what I call a “doubling of names.” This means that both a priestly name and a secular one is supplied for a copyist. For example, in one of Lamea’s Ginzas, in its seventh colophon, the priestly name Adam Yuhana is furnished for the craftsman named Paiad. Subsequent names in Paiad’s lineage are secular ones only, not priestly. The postscript to section 18 in GR in Sh. Dakhil’s 1935 Ginza states that he completed his copying at his own home in the town of Naṣoriyah, in the area belonging to the Muntafiq Beduin tribal confederacy, “by the waters of Light-Euphrates of Iraq.” King Ghazi, son of King Faisal, reigns,4 says Sh. Dakhil, and times are chaotic, with killings and confiscation of property. The scribe concludes his postscript with the familiar words: “And the copy was to here and there was nothing more. Life is victorious forever! And victorious be the people of the Naṣoraeans, who do not change any of what Life commanded!” As for the postscript to GL, it is short and mentions nothing new. GL was copied for a woman, named Riiasa, who is not identical to the woman for whom GR was copied. This may seem odd, but it is not at all unusual. In fact, sections of a Mandaean text may be copied for the benefit of different clients. In Lamea’s Ginzas, we find many testimonies to priests and beneficiaries belonging to three different clans. Along with other of Lamea’s relatives, the Manduias predominate only in the most recent lineages. But two relatively early Manduia brothers do show up:

4

A brief reign: 1933-39.

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the ganzibra Yahia Mhatam and Sam, both sons of Sam Adam, Manduia. Both are active around the year 1500.

M ARSH. 691

In January 1990, I sat in the Oriental Reading Room in Bodleian Library, Oxford University, studying original Mandaean texts and their colophons. A Jewish scholar in rabbinical attire came up behind me. He leaned forward, peering intensely over my shoulder, and asked, “What language is that? The script is unfamiliar to me.” I told him and explained why I was studying this material. He nodded and went off to continue his own investigations. Centuries before the existence of the Bodleian Library’s Drower Collection (=DC), the exquisite little leatherbound codex Marsh. 691 was copied in 1529 by Adam Zihrun, son of Bihram Šitlan. The little book contains prayers and is the oldest Mandaean manuscript in a European library. The English philologist Thomas Marshall (b. 1620/1621-d. 1685) owned many books, among them the little prayerbook. Marshall’s manservant gave the texts to the Bodleian Library in 1689-90. I know the copyist Adam Zihrun from at least two other Mandaean texts. Marsh. 619 measures ca. 4” x 5”. To my knowledge, no other scholars have studied the volume. The first of its three colophons offer an excellent historical source for calculating Mandaean scribal generations. We find Bainai, son of Zakia and Haiuna, living in the earliest Islamic period. Bainai was active as a scribe in 638. Before Bainai, we find the familiar series: Ramuia, Šganda, Zazai, with the latter copying from the First Life Itself, a non-human source. The third colophon states that the primordial copy of the text belonged to the “First Ancestors,” not to the First Life. At the end, Adam Zihrun names the local leader of the Mandaeans in Huwaiza. The reigning sultan of the city is Badran, son of Palah, son of Mihsan, son of Mahdia.5 Two Mandaean men put the collection of prayers in the proper order, writes Adam Zihrun, This information is very interesting, for it fits with documentation in Sheikh Abdullah Khaffagi’s tariq (postscript) from 1480, forty-nine years before Adam Zihrun copied Marsh. 691. See The Great Stem, p. 232-35). 5

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namely his own father Bihram Šitlan and “brother-in-Truth”, who is Bihram Bayan, son of Adam Qušmana, Manziana.6 “May the Light equip them and guard them and help them!” Adam Zihrun implores. The owner of the book from which Adam Zihrun copies, is Zakia Bayan, whom Adam Zihrun of course includes in his formulaic list of persons to be blessed and to be forgiven of their sins. Zakia Bayan’s mother and his three wives are all named. An unusual feature appears in this postscript: Adam Zihrun asks the First Life to protect the local sultan and his family. According to The Encyclopedia of Islam, this sultan, Badran—who came to power fifteen years before Adam Zihrun’s copied Marsh. 619—remained loyal to the Safawid Persian power. The Musha’sha’ Shi’ite extremists (ghulat) ruled in Khuzistan, and this group attempted to navigate between the Ottomans and the Persians.7 Blessings bestowed on a Muslim leader are rare in Mandaean colophons. But I have actually seen such a feature before. The scribe Ram Baktiar copied Paris’ Ms. A of the Ginza in 1560, in the village Maqdam belonging to Huwaiza, in Khuzistan. He, too, called on the Mandaean Light-forces to protect his temporal leader, Sayyid Sajjad, who belongs in the generation adjacent to Badran’s, in Adam Zihrun’s time. In contrast to Sayyid Badran, Sajjad steered closer to the Ottomans. In both cases, it seems that at least in part of the 16th century the Mandaeans of Huwaiza enjoyed tolerable conditions under the ghulat leaders. However, this conclusion must be tempered by Adam Zihrun’s previously noted statement: that he is persecuted by the seven sons of the evil age.

RAM ZIHRUN AND YAHIA BIHRAM

These two men, šgandas and sons of priests, have already been mentioned. They rescued the Mandaean religion in the immediate aftermath of the 1831 epidemic (usually identified as cholera), which began by the Black Sea’s southern shore and ravaged Iraq and Iran. All the Mandaean priests were killed, large populations died, and the two Mandaean men, Ram Zihrun and Yahia Bihram, 6 7

The latter element, Manziana, means: “big hair.” The Encylopedia of Islam, vol. vii, “Musha’sha’, 673a.

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canvassed their decimated communities in the attempt to revive the traumatized surviving religionists. The two recovered some religious texts, and even welcomed back into their folds Mandaeans who had been forcibly circumcised by Muslims. Yahia Bihram—who gives so much information in his postscripts—begs the Mandaean powers of Light for forgiveness for having to perform rituals in incorrect ways. He explains that he and Ram Zihrun had initiated one another as tarmidas, because there were no other priests. Lacking the correct ritual tools and facing other severe limitations, the two newly minted priests nevertheless persisted in their works. Yahia Bihram copied six texts now in the Bodleian’s DC, and I have studied all of them. His tariqs contain very important information, of course. On rare occasions, he pauses briefly in recording all the ongoing miseries to give a piece of news: the British have invented iron ships equipped with propellers! An eyewitness to such marvels, Yahia Bihram says that such a ship, which he has seen on the Tigris, can cover the distance from Basra to Baghdad in three days. Ram Zihrun travels mostly in the Mesopotamian area, while his cousin and brother-in-law ventures further, into Iran, seeking out starved, miserable Mandaeans. Among some of the survivors, Yahia Bihram encounters hostility, not glad reunions. There are even some Mandaeans who decline religious instructions, and they rely on texts different than those so dear and familiar to Yahia Bihram. Muslims demand bribes, rob him and try to stop him from meeting his own people. To put the two rescuers in a particular context I ask: was Bibia Mudalal, Yahia Bihram’s sister and Ram Zihrun’s wife, a priest herself? I have tried to argue that point elsewhere, for such women are mentioned, with names and titles, in colophons and in the sacred texts themselves, including in a large prayer of commemoration of illustrious priests of the past. Some Mandaeans are skeptical to the statement that there were women priests in Mandaeism in the past. And one of my former fellow-scholars in Mandaean studies called the idea “a bad joke.” I am not convinced, and further studies are needed in this respect.

PART II

PREFACE TO PART II A. HOW PERSECUTIONS OF THE MANDEANS OCCUR

If I had not been studying Mandaeism since the late 1960s, there would have been scant foundation for my political involvement in the human rights for the people of the religion. In 1995, I was certified as an expert witness on the Mandaeans by the U. S. Department of Justice, Office for Immigration Review. Even before that year, I had been involved in a very limited way with cases of Mandaeans seeking asylum on religious grounds. My work soon expanded into learning how to be an advocate for Mandaeans, nationally and internationally. Asylum-seeking Mandaeans, or their lawyers, sometimes found me on the Internet, or they already knew of me. Until the year 2000, the U. S. State Department’s Office for International Religious Freedom (IRF) omitted any mention of the Mandaeans in its annual reports on religious freedom in Iraq and Iran. With other people, I got involved in convincing IRF to include coverage on the Mandaeans. There are two levels on which I have appeared as an advocate for the Mandaeans: the first is U. S. Immigration Office Hearings, which do not involve a judge and a court setting. Such hearings feature an interview conducted by a legal authority, usually an attorney. If we (that is, our lawyer, the asylum-seeker, and me) lose on that level, the case may go to the next step: U. S. Immigration Court, a more serious and formal arena. Often, a case goes directly to the Immigration Court, where we face an INS lawyer as our opponent. No jury is present in either setting, as asylum cases are not criminal ones.1 INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) has in recent years been changed to CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services). 1

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It is important to have a variety of illustrative stories to draw on, namely, examples showing how Iraqi and Iranian Mandaean children are persecuted in school, youth discriminated against in the military and in higher education, and adults at work. Effective anecdotes in my repertoire should never repeat those used in our client’s own testimony. I must be able to show how discrimination in various “daily life” arenas often escalates into kidnappings, jail, torture, disappearances, forced conversions to Islam, or killings. I emphasize details describing religious-political-ethnic aspects of the persecution of Mandaean people, not primarily that they are limited to the category “economic refugees.” And I am prepared to explain why Mandaeans do not work in businesses such as hair salons, run dry-cleaning establishments, open food stores, sell fruit, or be gainfully employed in growing crops. Examples demonstrating the principle of “purity vs. impurity” in real-life action in Mandaean home countries must be made concrete in Immigration Court. The Court is not the place for airy theoretical-scholarly speculations. Through sheer practice in the courtroom, I learn gradually to become familiar with the formulations and styles of legal professionals. How much can I— educated in the professional rhetoric of a religion scholar—risk before the INS lawyer calls out to the judge, “Objection, Your Honor! The witness’ material is irrelevant!” Whose information counts? Bound by diplomatic rules and constraints, an embassy gathers intelligence. Certain European embassies operating in non-democratic countries know that they are being lied to, though this cannot be admitted publicly. Moreover, people trained for careers in diplomacy are often insufficiently informed on the role religion play in countries where a diplomat will be working. A nation having economic and political interests in a human rights-violating country may not wish to hear criticism of its business partner. Agencies such as government departments of foreign affairs will be reluctant to accept information offered outside of their traditional channels. To put it briefly, “If we don’t know about the problem, it doesn’t exist.” Religion scholars cannot easily compete on equal terms with politicians and government representatives.

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What often poses problems in the U. S. Immigration Court or in an INS Office Hearing is that American culture tends to differentiate sharply between religion and politics, the “private” vs. the “public” sphere. This is especially obvious in the American perception of Islam. In court, I have sometimes found myself in the odd situation of criticizing both Islam (the chief persecuting religion in the Mandaean cases) and the U. S. government’s culturally constricted—even provincial—ideas about religion.

B. TO W HOM IT M AY CONCERN

Here, I give parts of my To Whom It May Concern letter. This document has been revised several times, most recently in 2015, seventeen pages long. I request that serious consideration be given to all asylumseeking Mandaeans, regardless of social status, whether Iranian or Iraqi subjects. It is particularly important that Mandaean families, whose members are scattered in various countries, be allowed to obtain asylum together, to be reunited. Until very recently, Mandaeans have lacked organized international, publicly visible advocacy and they remain little known to most authorities outside of their traditional home countries. The UN High Commission for Refugees (=UNHCR), Amnesty International, The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (=HIAS), the International Rescue Committee, the German Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker, and other organizations are familiar with my work. Australia was notorious for incarcerating asylum-seeking Mandaeans in detention centers, sometimes for years. In the spring of 2011, all of the Mandaean detainees were freed, mainly as a result of publicity about their being mistreated by fellow-detainees in the camps. This is one of the rare positive news items about the Mandaean situation.2

In very recent times, Australia, which earlier had “outsourced” its detention centers to other nations, has now rethought that idea, and disallowed such actions. 2

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Specifics on the situation in Iraq

Despite official protection as a “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab) respected by the Qur’an, Mandaeans in Iraq have been persecuted as suspected enemies of the state—at times under the pretext of being “communists,” “Free Masons” or “Zionist agents.” They continue to be considered “dirty,” and Muslim Friday prayer services sometimes incite the Muslim population to harass, persecute, and kill Mandaeans. From a very young age, Mandaean children were forced to join the militia of the Baath party during the Saddam Hussein regime, and to take part in weapon training, in violation of the Mandaean pacifist tradition. Mandaean rituals, especially baptisms, were often disrupted by Muslim mobs, and the police offered no help. Stones and dirt were thrown on priests and on people being baptized, and many have been wounded. Mandaeans lost their homes, assets, and jobs; they were apprehended, jailed, tortured, “made to disappear,” or killed. Many Mandaeans died for reasons of political belief, for refusing to join the Baath party or for resisting military service. Family members of the disappeared were told to desist from making inquiries about those who were lost; they were told that if they did, they would “disappear” next. Survivors have been forced to pay the cost of the bullet used to kill a family member. Compulsory separation of families, pressure to spy on one’s family-members, and looting of Mandaean businesses had become common. Mandaeans experienced discrimination in education, employment and promotions. Those involved in democratic movements in Iraq were in danger of their lives. After the March 2003 U. S. and Coalition Forces’ occupation of Iraq, the situation for the Iraqi Mandaeans has become even more serious than under Saddam Hussein, threatening the very life of the community itself. As a result of the ongoing war in Iraq, with its political-religious violence, many Mandaeans are being kidnapped and killed. Muslim officials in Baghdad threatened to kill any Mandaeans who planned to partake in the great annual baptism-feast (Panja) in the river Tigris in April 2004. In 2006, the traditional baptism rituals during Panja could not be celebrated, as the Baghdad Mandaeans feared for their lives, hiding in their homes.

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Iraq-coverage in the media rarely includes information on the Mandaeans. When it happens, the results are mixed. A prominent New York Times article of Dec. 22, 2003, shows a shop-window in a Mandaean jewelry store in Baghdad, and the interviews with Mandaean jewelers give the impression that business is booming. This is certainly no longer the case. Much more informative is Nathaniel Deutsch’s “Save the Gnostics” op-ed in The New York Times, Oct. 6, 2007. But the article “Mandaeans” by Eliot Weinberger, in Harper’s Magazine of May 2007 caused extreme harm and grief. Harpers printed only two letters of protest in its July issue that year. Australian Mandaeans wanted to sue Harper’s; I counseled against such a plan. In June 2004, a young Mandaean woman in Iraq was kidnapped and raped, and her family had to come up with a large ransom sum for her release. But the captors killed her, cut the body in pieces, and placed the pieces on the doorstep of her home. In October 2006, a Mandaean family preparing to flee to Syria was killed as the members tried to abandon their home. Surahs 2:62, 5:69, and 22:17 in the Qur’an mention the Sabeans as a group whose religion is protected. Unfortunately, the text is ambiguous, and the implementation of religious freedom for the Mandaeans remains lacking in Iraq. It is now worse than ever, for no law is currently in effect to protect the Mandaeans there. Sectarian and religious enmity has created total anarchy. Mandaeans are now attacked and killed by their very own Muslim neighbors. Many Mandaeans have fled to Syria, Jordan, and even to Iraqi Kurdistan and to Iran. Sweden, The Netherlands, and other European countries admitted increasing numbers of Mandaeans from 2008 on. The U.S. seems to be more hesitant. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, section 243 (H), specifies that if an alien’s life or freedom is threatened “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” that alien shall not be deported. Taking this statement at its words, one may safely conclude that Iraqi Mandaeans should be given asylum. Primarily, the “religion, social and political group” arguments ought to be used for the Mandaeans in Iraq. The same holds for Iran.

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Specifics on the situation in Iran

In April 1996, I visited the Mandaean community in southwest Iran (Ahwaz, Khuzistan) and I presented a lecture about the Mandaeans at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. I gave a couple of public speeches to Muslim academic and intellectual audiences and met with a few politicians. Since the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the Mandaeans have lost their official support, even though the Qur’an theoretically grants them protection under Islamic law and rule. Despite a much-quoted official statement, to the effect that the Mandaeans seem to qualify for the rubric of being a legal religion, this fatwa by an Ayatollah has never been put into law, and it is not ratified by the Iranian Majlis (Parliament). It remains a fatwa, a legal opinion. Higher education is closed to Mandaeans, because one must be a member of a legal religion (Judaism, Christianity or Zoroastrianism) in order to take university exams. Until the policy of discrimination against Mandaeans is changed, Iranian Mandaeans are subject to government spying and discrimination. A marriage license, a driver’s license, and hopes for a government job require proof of completed military service in Iran. Some Mandaean families have begun to marry their very young daughters to fellow-Mandaeans in order to prevent the young women’s forced conversion to Islam, thus depriving the girls of the chance to finish their education. Marrying outside the religion technically implies loss of Mandaean identity. Mandaeism does not accept converts (and the death penalty is in force for Muslims converting to other religions). Having no legal recourse, Mandaeans cannot appeal to police or the law for protection. Blood-money for a dead Mandaean is $12, while for a Muslim it is $22.500. A dead Mandaean, such as a victim of a car accident, is sometimes tossed in the ditch like a dead animal, and garbage has been thrown into Mandaean yards, along with rotting animals. House searches are common, interrogations, and accusations of making and selling liquor (alcohol remains illegal in Iran). Job opportunities are disappearing, though many Mandaean men have, until recently, persisted in the traditional goldsmith profession.

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Among the refugees in Australia are many Iranian Mandaeans, but, via its embassy in Iran, Australia is informed that the Mandaeans are Christians and therefore not subject to discrimination. This is a political, pro-Christian ploy. The same happens in other embassies in Iran. Norway’s oil-business with Iran prevents the Norwegian authorities from taking seriously information about human rights abuses against Mandaeans in Iran. Other countries are still reluctant to admit that they are wrongly informed. Two books are potentially detrimental to the Mandaean cause: the first is by a political scientist, Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Her work does not mention the Mandaeans at all, which has led both Australian and British officials to conclude that the people do not exist. These authorities have used the book to invalidate Mandaean asylum requests. I informed the author that her book has been used as an anti-asylum argument, but she did not reply to me. A book that could not have been published now (and which is mostly unknown in the West) is The Baptists of Iran (Tehran: Key Press, 2001), an attractive photo book. It appeared in the “Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.” The book carries a foreword by then President Khatami, who carefully avoids any direct mention of the Mandaeans. An unsuspecting reader might conclude that the supreme Iranian authorities accept the religion’s legitimacy.

CHAPTER 6. “WE ARE BETWEEN TWO DEATHS” The attorney seemed skeptical. He had just won a locally famous case involving a major medical settlement. “I’m really an ambulance chaser,” he told me when I first met him. This was not quite true, as he (Samsun, I will call him) had worked with immigration cases but not for Mandaeans. Nobody did that, as far as anybody knew. A speaker of Arabic and originally from the Middle East himself, Samsun had been approached by an Iraqi Mandaean family. The problem was this: a visiting relative, Nadia, now needed to remain in the U. S. She had arrived in the U. S. soon after Iraq attacked Kuwait in August 1990. If she returned to Iraq she would be arrested, maybe killed. While in the U. S., at the very end of 1994, Nadia received a letter from one of her sisters, then in Jordan. Here, I give parts of the letter: Dear sister, I am writing to you from Amman because I did not have the ability to write to you openly when I was in Baghdad. Whenever you called us by phone, we used to tell you we are good, because we cannot say any more than that. The truth is, we are in our worst situation and what bothers us more than the hunger is the horror. Because every day a man or two come and knock on our door and saying they are from the government (we don’t know whether it is real or not) asking: where are your brother and your sister? Why are they out of Iraq? Do they work with the Iraqi opposition? These are endless abuses, plus the loss of security, because the burglars and the killers whom the government can’t control or protect one from. They (the government) does not listen to any

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1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS complaints, especially not from the Mandaeans. From one day to another we hear that one of our relatives have been killed; and the reasons for the killings are because they consider us infidels. They teach this in the official books for religious studies, even to A.’s granddaughter, who is not even 13 years old. Her religion teacher had forced her to change her religion to Islam and she took her in a tour of all the school classes, as if she was a criminal telling everyone about her crime. Her teacher asked her not to tell anybody of her family about what happened in school. But the child told her brother about it, who told us later, and we cannot do anything about it. Here I am in Jordan now, hanging on to any hope from any embassy here, asking for a visa or even asylum anywhere in the world. I am not the only one, but we all found the doors closed. No one is giving us a visa because we are Iraqis... as we are between two deaths, it’s either we die in Iraq, because of religious beliefs, or we find a safe haven, which seems impossible. Your sister....

I have copies of the letter, both in Arabic and in English translation. In 1994, the imposed U. N. sanctions on Iraq are taking countless lives. Saddam Hussein suddenly empties the Iraqi prisons in the summer of 1995, possibly in the hope that those sanctions would end (see, for instance, the Associated Press article of July 31, 1995, “Iraq grants sweeping amnesty, may be trying to end sanctions.”). His record of human rights abuses has piled up, and perhaps he thought that freeing the political prisoners would help. Our lawyer Samsun knew nothing about the Mandaeans, and he had asked whether the family could find a specialist on Mandaeism, someone willing to testify in Immigration Court. The family already knew me, called, and I agreed. Samsun and I would work together in two Mandaean immigration cases. He was one of the best to work with, eager to learn, dynamic, patient, and respectful. My credentials needed to be established, and this would take hours, because I had never testified in Court. We faced a serious arena: the United States Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review, Office of the Immigration Judge. I sent

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the necessary documents to Samsun, and we began to prepare the case some months in advance. Samsun explained to me that we had to convince the judge, of course, and that our opponent would be an INS lawyer, who would probably focus on arguing against us. An Arabic-speaking translator was appointed because our client’s first language was Arabic. This meant that the proceedings would take twice as long as normal. The city where the case was to take place had a reputation for harboring conservative views on immigration and asylum cases. Could Nadia avoid deportation? Samsun prepared me well. My deposition statement was clear, my academic credentials ready. I needed to have a rudimentary grasp of recent Iraqi history, political information, and some statistics. Still, I could not have known what was coming. Seeing a young man in the court room, I thought he was the translator, and I immediately worried: was he a pro-Saddam Hussein Arab? Would we all be killed in the parking lot after the case was over, no matter the outcome? No, it turned out that the man, a court clerk, was there to learn. His identity: an Egyptian Copt, a Christian. A Christian woman from another Near Eastern country served as translator. When the judge entered the room in his robes, and we all stood, I worried again, for this man looked very young, like a graduate student. Nadia’s written statement included this: As a strict follower and member of the Sabean Mandai religion living in Iraq, I was always discriminated against and harassed by the officials of the Iraqi government and the majority of the Iraqi Muslim people. Although the Sabean Mandais in Iraq used to number over 100.000, because of persecution, there are no more than 10.000 members remaining there. Many of our people, including my own husband, have been forced to change their religion and become Muslim in order to stop the abuse and to be able to survive in Iraq. Although my husband changed his religion and became Muslim, I refused to do the same, as my religion is the most important thing in my life. I have dedicated my life to practice and preserve my religion as it is facing extinction due to persecution.

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She described how Muslim onlookers threw rocks and mud at Mandaeans when they performed their baptisms in the river, and the police did nothing. Nadia’s own refusal to join the Baath party led to loss of her job. Partly because some men in her the family had been priests, Nadia knew quite a bit about her own Mandaean tradition, and she began to teach her own people about the religion. Her secret lessons had to be held at night, but the Mandaeans were discovered, and changed their meeting places. Still, the police and the military threatened Nadia, and harassed her; the Baath Party interrogated her four times. Having already lost her regular, official teaching position, Nadia saw her credentials taken away. Since 1984, all teachers had to be Baath Party members. In the courtroom, before we started, I overheard the INS lawyer commenting to Samsun, “Interesting expert witness you’ve got here in this case.” Samsun replied, “Yes, quite an impressive resumé, right?” “Yes, almost as good as mine,” was the retort. I was sworn in, and the audiotapes began functioning correctly, after some initial problems. Quite soon, the INS lawyer interrupted me, addressing the judge, “Objection, Your Honor! The witness has something in her hand! I believe the witness is reading from a prepared statement!” In fact, I had just read Surah 2:62 from the Qur’an. The surah is one of the three in the Qur’an stating that the Sabeans (mostly understood to mean the Mandaeans) constitute a legal religion under Islam. I looked up and said that, indeed, the surah text had been part of my prepared statements, included in the paper-pile of “Exhibits” distributed in advance. “I read it because I do not know the surah by heart,” I explained, glancing from the lawyer to the judge. “Objection overruled,” said the judge. He asked the INS lawyer to wait until the time for cross-examination. But at this stage, I was questioned for about an hour and a half. Still, the INS lawyer interrupted, telling the judge that Samsun was “leading the witness.” The judge looked at Samsun, who glanced at the INS lawyer and Samsun replied to both, “I can lead her all I want. She’s an expert witness. That’s why she is here.” Silence. Samsun continued, asking me questions.

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I made a blunder in statistics, under-estimating the population of Iraq. The questions then proceeded into safer territory such as: my education, how long have I studied Mandaeism, and what are my sources of information on the present-day situation of the Mandaeans? If my sources derive mostly from Mandaeans, doesn’t that imply bias? Why would I claim to know things that the Department of State in Washington does not know? My point that the U. S. media had exhibited a strongly favorable view of Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s was met with silence, neither agreement nor objections. I gave illustrative examples from the present day and from ancient times, I told of rituals, explained marriage rules and food regulations, and gave horrifying examples of persecutions and scapegoating. I offered to tell the judge some religious stories from Mandaean texts, but this was met with slight puzzlement. It was important, I realized, to keep talking, to allow virtually no pauses, and to keep my audience interested. Samsun knew that I had written several encyclopedia articles on Mandaeism, and he brought up a point: the Director of the Department of Justice, in his statement, had referred to one of these articles, and now Samsun asked me what I thought of the Department’s use of my work. He already knew that I disagreed, and, using my opportunity, I started criticizing the U. S Department of Justice for its own ideology, for minimizing the dangers to the Mandaeans in Iraq. The Director of the Department of Justice had been especially displeased on one issue: my encyclopedia article was almost entirely on religion and theology. Trying for a triumphant tone now, in court, I said that the context was indeed the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion,1 so what do you expect? But I had noted that during my argument against separating religion and politics the INS lawyer emitted a halfhidden smile. Many questions became repetitive, and I knew that I must not get impatient, sigh, or roll my eyes. I tried to respond to repeated questions with a new angle, a slightly different answer but avoiding contradiction with a previous statement of mine. 1

Edited by Mircea Eliade, The Free Press, 1987.

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Samsun argued with the judge and with the INS lawyer, so that their trialogues sometimes gave me a welcome break. At this point, I only answered if the judge told me I could do so if I wished—but I must never interrupt. During a five-minute break, one of Nadia’s relatives gave an encouraging high-five sign to the family member who had been closeted in the corridor. Next, the INS lawyer and the judge took turns questioning me. Furrowed brows, intense writing. Finally, I was dismissed and sat down. Next, a nervous but firm-voiced Nadia endured questions for forty minutes. Would there be serious discrepancies between her statements and mine? No. In terms of her own life and health, she revealed details of medical problems. The INS lawyer seemed sympathetic, actually trying to calm Nadia down. “Please, I am not the Iraqi government,” he said. Finally, the judge declares his inclination to grant Nadia asylum. Erroneously, I think that his words are merely preparatory to calling Nadia’s relative in from the corridor for questioning. But another relative has a more accurate understanding, and with gleaming eyes and squeezing my hand, whispers, “He’s granting it!” The judge does not need more evidence and informs Nadia that she will hear from her lawyer. Nadia, now crying and looking around in bewilderment, laments, “Where is my lawyer?” Then, as she understands what has happened, she calms down. Now, in court, among smiles and shaking of hands, the INS lawyer reveals that he himself once was a refugee from the old European East Block. He wishes Nadia good luck, and he vanishes after asking how you say: “Thank God” in the Mandaic language. The Christian interpreter is beaming. Samsun is satisfied, and about a year later it turns out that he and I will again work together. ******** Next case. Samsun tells me that the judge we will face already has a difficult reputation, because he has granted too many asylums lately. As a result, the legal specialists will watch our case, for the judge—who has recently ascended to that status—needs very

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soon to say “No.” Trying to sound hopeful, Samsun says to me, “Let us hope it won’t be us.” Samsun has agreed to work for Warka, a Mandaean Iraqi widow, partly due to our success in Nadia’s case. Giving me “inside information,” Samsun reveals that our opponent, the INS lawyer, is a young man eager to acquire attorney status, but he may not have what it takes. Further, the lawyer has probably never had the opportunity to cross-examine an expert witness, so he will be very excited to do so now. The next day, in Court, the judge at some point buries his head in his hands, complaining to the translator, “Now, I can’t understand you!” The Egyptian translator has some trouble with rendering Warka’s Iraqi Arabic into English. Warka weeps, is nervous, and prays to one of the Mandaean heavenly spirits. The INS lawyer is aggressive, having a good time. At the end, he protests against the judge’s verdict, which is in our favor. Deeply irritated, the judge swears silently (Samsun tells me this later), and Samsun knows that now all the papers will have to be sent to Washington to be re-examined. We have to wait a full year to obtain a final response. In short, we have just lost. Why? The INS asylum office in another city had written to Warka two years earlier: The purpose of this letter is to notify you of the intent to deny you request for asylum in the United States. In presenting your Request for Asylum in the United States, you stated that you are a (...) female native and citizen of Iraq who entered the United States on (...) as a visitor for pleasure. You testified that (...) your husband was killed by three men, one of which was a soldier. You believed they killed your husband because you smuggled one of your sons out of the country so that he would not have to fight in the war. Your other sons who served in the war told you that they were treated unfairly and were always sent to the front lines. They believed they were being treated unfairly because they are Christians. You left Iraq because the government continued to harass you about your sons’ whereabouts. You believe that if you return to Iraq, the government will hurt or kill you.

Obviously, the first problem here is the too-familiar equation between Christianity and Mandaeism. The letter finds that Warka

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lacks credibility regarding well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion (the set categories, as I have already noted). Warka has not been able to describe any act of direct persecution against herself, the INS says. Most importantly, she has left Iraq twice within a one-year period and returned home. To the INS, this means that she has no reason to fear the government. A month later, a Mandaean friend writes a letter to the Asylum Office for the purpose of clarifying several points on which the INS has misunderstood Warka’s situation. The Mandaean pacifism rule arrives in conflict with the duty to be active soldiers, but to refuse to be a soldier is, as we know, a sign of treason to the country. Warka had used as an illustration the example of a female animal whose children are being attacked: the mother will defend them, even at the risk of her own death. The Mandaean friend’s letter quotes Warka: This is the nature of mothers and my aim is to protect the maximum number of my children, but after I spent every penny I had I left Iraq to the United States and a safe haven and when age starts it effects on me I started to think about myself and how dangerous the game was that I was playing, although I am still thinking about those left behind in Iraq and wish I can help them.

She also said, …my son A. was arrested and kept in prison for six months; my other children were forced to call me and ask me to go back to Iraq because A. will stay in prison till I go back to Iraq. In the beginning I intended to go back, but a relative called from Amman —Jordan a few days later and told me that my children were forced to call me asking me to come back... If I return, I will be executed and killed because I asked for asylum to the U. S., plus the smuggling of my other children. I didn’t go back and didn’t call my children in Iraq asking about A. because I knew that all telephones were monitored.

That is the story of only one of her five children. Here is another one: when one of her sons was ordered to join the military, Warka and her husband bribed a Turkish ship captain to hide the son in an oil drum on the vessel, getting the son out. (He is now in

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northern Europe.) The part of the INS lawyer’s behavior in court I found most unbelievable was his scorn for Warka’s bravery in helping her children. He thought it was just stupid for Warka to leave Iraq and then to return in order to smuggle out another child. After our loss in Court and because Warka’s case was still pending, I asked the INS to reconsider, carefully, its position. But as we drove away from the Court House toward her home, Warka, from the back seat, complained unhappily in Arabic. Samsun threw her a glance now and then, but he remained convinced that our—and the judge’s—arguments would eventually prevail. And they did: Warka obtained asylum. ******** Do Mandaeans get deported? I once asked a lawyer this, and he replied, “Not really.” The threat remained, but he was not aware that any Iraqi Mandaeans had been deported from the U. S to Iraq. So where did they go? I was told that there are countries that will take anyone. Which ones? Algeria, for example, or Morocco or Cuba, somewhere not very dangerous, another lawyer said. Oh. ******** In 2001, an Iranian Mandaean woman wrote a long document about her testimony to the Immigration Service in a European country. I never met this woman, and I do not know what happened to her. But I have permission to use her document, and here follow slightly edited extracts from her testimony. When I arrived in Europe, I was referred to a lawyer’s office. I was given a date for interview by the Immigration Service, and they told me that they would represent me there, but they did not call me in for a meeting with them beforehand and did not take a statement from me. There are a number of mistakes in the interview record. It is now 18 months since the interview took place.

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1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS In school, I faced discrimination as a Mandaian from an early age. I was basically forced to tell everyone that I was Muslim to make it easier for myself. We had to do weekly prayers, and while I tried to make excuses, I was forced to join in. As much as possible I would say that I was ill or had my period—Muslim girls are not allowed to join prayers when they have their period—but obviously I could not use this excuse every week. My father had changed his surname before I was born, to hide the fact that we were Mandaian. However, when I was about 15 the other students discovered that I was Mandaian. The reason for this was that the other students and I had decided to have a party, and we were looking for somewhere to hold it. I suggested that we had the party at my house, as my parents would not mind. My parents confirmed that this was fine, and we started preparing for the party. It was only going to be attended by girls from my college, but we were going to arrange food etc. However, two days before the party our teacher told us that we had a very difficult exam on the day after the party. She told us that we would all have to get As or Bs, or she would talk to our parents about our performance. She was basically threatening us and told us that we should not have the party. We thought about it, and decided that we were able to have a party as well as do the exam. But no one turned up for the party. By this time the school had also told my friends that they were not allowed to eat food with a Mandaian, or certainly (not) from a Mandaian’s house. At this time my friend’s stopped coming to speak to me, and no-one would come and eat or drink with me during the break times. My friends obviously thought that they would get in trouble if they were seen with me. My father had become very stressed and decided that I should go to a private college. There was one lady at that college who used to teach us about the Koran, who had clearly been called by my old college and told that I was a bad person who caused problems. The private college was opposite my old school, so I have no doubt that this information was passed to them. During her classes she would tell everyone that she had to solve my problem, and that no one should be friends with me. At one point, at the end of the school day, I went with one of the college teachers to a huge mosque. It was a Thursday. She told me

CHAPTER 6. “WE ARE BETWEEN TWO DEATHS” that there was going to be a meeting, and she said that I should sign in, as if we were going to a conference. I therefore signed a piece of paper, which was headed paper but otherwise blank. Later, the mosque security people told me that I was being arrested, and that by signing the paper I had agreed to convert to Islam. After I signed the paper, my teacher left; it was about 6pm. I was left in a room with two old Muslim men, and then taken to an office where I was left alone. Every so often some men would come in and look at me, and I asked if I could ring my parents. They told me that I could not. At about 8pm the man that called Muslims to prayer came into the room, with three other men. He prayed, and then turned to me and said “congratulations”. I asked what the congratulations were for, and he told me that I was now a Muslim. He told me that I had been called there to change my religion. I started crying, I was very scared and shocked. Another man started talking to me telling me that I could not go back to my family, as I was now a Muslim and could not live with Mandaians. I was very worried thinking about my parents, and how they could find me. I told the men that I could not sleep there, and luckily I had the imagination to tell them that if I were now a Muslim I needed to be with girls rather than men. Two women came in two cars. They had guns and they took me with them. They were obviously the security guards for a detention center, but to start with I was sitting with them rather than being in a cell. After about 2 hours a man who seemed to be the manager of the center came in and spoke to them. He did not speak to them in front of me, but their attitude towards me changed, and I was put in a cell with six girls who were basically prostitutes. The room was very dirty, with a filthy communal toilet. We were brought food once a day on a communal plate, the food was also disgusting and inedible. I made it clear to the other girls that I was different from them, and they pushed me aside. They told me that I would face execution for my offence. I did not have any contact with my family until after I came here, when they rang me and sent me a letter. During the time I was kept at the detention centre I was taken for questioning on many occasions. Sometimes this would be 2 or 3 times a day, and sometimes they would not question me at all for a day. They would question me about whether I had become Muslim, or whether I still

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1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS wanted to go back to my parents. They told me that I had no choice but to accept Islam. They told me that I would have to marry a Muslim, and accept Islam, or face Court. They told me that the Court would order my execution. I would never accept becoming Muslim, as I am committed to my religion and my family. Everyone in the Mandaian community knew of Mandaians who had been forcibly converted to Islam, and about the way they were treated, for example by not letting them have any contact with their original family. I remember when I was about 10 or 11 a story about a Mandaian girl was taken from near the University. She was about 18 at the time, a similar age to me at the time of my interview, and this was why in the interview (I said) that she was about my age. After a couple of years her family discovered that she had been raped and killed. They managed to find her grave. Other similar stories were common in the Mandaian community, because we were a small community and people were very concerned about our safety, particularly girls. On three or four occasions I was taken to court. I was taken in two separate cars, with two women and five or six men accompanying me. I felt as though I had killed someone with all the security around me. The first time I went to court was about three days after I was taken to the detention center. I was there for two or three hours, and was called in front of the judge, who asked me whether I was a Muslim. I denied this. Another time, I was taken to a house on the way to court. At that house there was a female security guard who told me that she used to be Mandaian, and that I should follow her example and accept Islam. When I was taken to the court my parents were there. My father came over to hug me, and the men surrounding me pushed him away. My father is elderly, and this was very upsetting for me. They then took me into a secret room so that I could see my parents. They told me that if I wanted to go back to being a Mandaian they would have to kill me. On the fourth occasion I was introduced to a man who was about 30 or 35 years old and told that I was going to marry him. In order to buy some time, I said that I wanted to talk to him. He told me that I should not worry, that he was not a bad man. He then started to say that he would make love to me well, and that I would

CHAPTER 6. “WE ARE BETWEEN TWO DEATHS” have to accept him. I was very uncomfortable with this and had no intention of marrying him. When I was taken in front of the judge, the judge told me that the priest had written that I had converted to Islam. They were pushing me around, and I was treated very badly. The women were also very rude to me. After that fourth occasion at court, I developed a very severe pain in my stomach. For one night and two days I was in severe pain, and although I asked for painkillers and to see a doctor the women at the jail ignored me. I then fell unconscious, and woke in a bed in hospital, so they had obviously accepted that I was ill, eventually. When I woke up in the hospital, I was told that my appendix had been removed. I was in a hospital room on my own, and there was a man at the door to the hospital guarding me, to make sure I did not escape. Luckily my father managed to learn that I was in the hospital, presumably by bribing someone. There was a nurse there who helped me a lot. After four days the nurse told me that she would help take me to the bathroom. The male guard would normally come to the bathroom with me, but she told him on that occasion that he could not come and I needed some privacy. I then learnt that my dad had told the nurse everything, and she was going to help me. She gave me a chador to wear and helped me climb out of the window and told me that someone would be waiting for me. She told me to go to the front of the hospital, pretending to be a visitor. A man was waiting for me in a car—he recognized me as I think my father had given him my photo. He took me in the car out of town immediately. I spoke to my father on the man’s mobile telephone, and my father told me that I should trust the people I was with, and that they were going to help me. We drove straight to northern Iran, to town (X), by car. This took about three days. We drove all the time, and I slept when I could. I was still feeling very ill after my operation and needed to sleep. We crossed over the border, taking a very circuitous route to avoid the check-points on the border. After a few hours a Turkish car then came and took me to a village in Turkey where I waited for another couple of hours. Someone helped me cut my stitches out at this time, as they were hurting and clearly ready to come out. I was then put in a lorry, where I was for seven or nine days, and had no idea where I was. I was not allowed out of the lorry at all, and in any case, I was feeling so ill that I would not have been

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1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS able to move. We finally arrived at a place I now know to be (X), and I was let out of the lorry and told to claim asylum. I am in contact with my family in Iran, and I am concerned about the problems they are having. My father informs that he has had to go to the police station for questioning very frequently to be questioned about me. In relation to my legal advice here in country (X) now, I would like to clarify that after my interview I realized that I needed a different legal counsel. By the time I felt better, I was with my brothers and I started to feel better about my situation, at least to the extent that I was with my family. One of my brothers then took my case to the counseling service for refugees. I still feel that in the country where I am now I have not been able to present my asylum-claim fully. I know that if I return to Iran, I will not be safe. Mandaian girls are always at risk of being forcibly married to a Muslim, and I fear that I could be raped in detention. There is no way that the state would ever act to protect a Mandaian girl against the security forces or anyone else.

CHAPTER 7. “DON’T ASK THE TURKISH SMUGGLER ANY QUESTIONS” In the late 1990s, an Iraqi Mandaean teenager is held in a prison in a southern U. S. state. He has been moved from jail to jail for more than a year. He has arrived via an unusual route: from Iraq to Jordan to Cuba (no visa needed there) to another island nearby, where he arrived in jail. A U. S. -residing Mandaean woman pleads for him, writing to the UNHCR office in Washington after the young man has had an unsatisfying experience with a lawyer. The woman then asks me if I can write to the District Director of the INS. I do, knowing that her words— due to her Mandaean identity—may carry less weight than mine. Years later, I learn that the young man was successfully released into the custody of his uncles, legal residents in the U. S. I never meet the young man. ******** It is 1997, and the situation is tense. Four persons—our lawyer, an interviewing Immigration Office Hearing (INS) attorney, two Mandaean clients and I—are sitting in a too-small room at an INS Hearing. I have made the mistake of sneaking over to the table of the interviewing attorney as I try to determine the title of a dictionary of religion she has on her table. To see a dictionary of religion in an INS Hearing is an encouraging sign, in my opinion. But the attorney has noticed my moves, becomes suspicious, and 83

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asks, “What are you doing?” The atmosphere deteriorates later, when I roll my eyes and sigh in response to a stupid question from the interviewer. Our lawyer, Matthew, kicks my leg under the table and gives me a stern look. I have misbehaved, endangered the case of our clients, who are siblings, a brother and his sister. The brother weeps as he is forced to recall and describe to us in detail the tortures he endured in an Iraqi prison. I wish we could avoid this, but we cannot. Among the exhibits are photos of his wounds and scars. He says that in the overcrowded prison room, one of the guards was known for his sexual assaults. When that guard entered, the more than hundred jailed men moved like a wave toward the opposite wall. The sister presents complicated medical records. She had been interrogated and beaten in her face by the police in Iraq, but the official Iraqi record says that in her childhood, she fell from a tree. As a result, she has an artificial eye. Of course, the official record does not state what really happened. But a second medical report says that the official one is untrue. Which one will our stern attorney rely on, she who already appears less than positive to our case? Seemingly endless discussions ensue between the interviewer and our lawyer Matthew on the merits of the records. The brother is still sniffling. Suddenly, his sister does something dramatic: fixing her good eye on the interviewing attorney, she tears her artificial eye out of its socket, brandishes it, and shouts, “Do you see this?” The attorney, shocked, jerks backward in her chair, shields her own eyes and responds, “I do not need to see it; I do not need to see it!” Our lawyer and I are silent. We win. ******** Around the same time-period, a lawyer reputed to be “very good,” expresses absolutely no interest in learning anything about the Mandaean religion when he contacts me in advance of an Immigration Office Hearing. Our client is a young, unmarried Iraqi Mandaean jeweler. I appear at the Hearing, and we win, effortlessly. Impressed, the lawyer says to me, “I want to work with you again.” But I say to myself (not to him) that I surely never want to work with this lawyer again. I suspect the reason

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we won is that the client was merely fifteen years old when he travelled alone from Iraq. He first went to Italy, then elsewhere in southern Europe and to northern Africa, waiting and hoping for Saddam Hussein’s regime to fall. It did not. After September 11, 2001, single young male Near Eastern asylum-seekers were automatically suspected to be terrorists. But that was not yet the case in the late 1990’s. ******** We were in a park outside a large north-eastern city. I had been invited there to a gathering of mostly Iranian Mandaean recent immigrants. I knew only a few of the people and was introduced by a Mandaean friend. Before we sat down to a delicious meal of Near Eastern food, I greeted each person in the large circle of people. I had already been aware of one man gazing at me continuously, very seriously. When we shook hands and he told me his name, I held on to his hand, and almost wept. “You?!” How could it be? I had been involved, unsuccessfully, in his asylumapplication case in another country. And now here he was, in front of me, in the U. S., legally. I never learned the full story but knew that he had made the mistake of applying for asylum in a European country while his asylum-case in another nation was still pending. That is an error you must never commit. After calming down, I told the other Mandaeans why and how I already knew their fellow-religionist. Let me add here that there are times when I never find out what has happened in a specific asylumcase, and it is quite rare for me to meet the applicant, personally, months or years later. ******** The timing is as wrong as it can be. I tell the lawyer that if we go to Immigration Court on the set date, it would be as if you asked a Christian to show up in court on Christmas Day. But, in terms of value, it is a bad parallel, as we will be up against malevolent

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powers. According to the Mandaean calendar, all evil forces will be against us, for the court date is during the time of Dehwa Rabba. Then, the energies of darkness are very strong, and Mandaeans stay indoors, not venturing outside, eating only their own prepared foods, having covered trees in their yards in white gauze, and biding their time until the dangerous thirty-six hours have passed. We cannot possibly have any hope of winning an asylum case during Dehwa Rabba. My objections to the lawyer are ignored, and we are going to court. The client, Samir, a Mandaean Iraqi engineer, had come with his family to the U. S. years earlier, and requested asylum very soon. Denial followed, the decision being that they are Christians, and the Iraqi government does not persecute them. How many times do we have to endure this argument? Samir had stated, long before our court-date: After the Baath party came to power, I was frequently pressured to join the party. During the war between Iran and Iraq (198088) the pressure increased. One time I was ordered to report to the headquarters of the Baath party in Baghdad. I was kept there for three days and nights by uniformed members of the Baath party who carried pistols and who interrogated about why I had not joined the party. I was accused of being a traitor to Iraq because I had not joined. Eventually I was released. As a nervous reaction to this experience, I lost my voice and was unable to talk in louder than a whisper for several months.

Further, Shortly before Saddam Hussein ordered Iraqi troops into Kuwait, we sent our two oldest sons out of the country so that they would not be taken for military service. After the invasion I began to be questioned about where my sons were. I told them that I did not know where they were, even though this was not true. We knew they were out of the country, but we did not know for sure where they were. We had told them that they should not try to contact us by phone or by letter because such means of communication were being monitored.

Samir himself goes into hiding and calls in sick at work. He refuses to take part in the looting of the Kuwait airport when Iraq invades the country (August 1990). Later, his wife tells him that

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their house is kept under surveillance. Baath party members question her, and one of her children develops a medical problem. Then she goes to Jordan, securing visas to the U. S. The family escapes after Samir loses his job in Iraq. How the family has managed to remain in the U. S., avoiding deportation, I do not know. We go to court, despite the bad signs according to the Mandaean calendar. To my surprise, we win, without much effort. It turns out that the judge has experience with Kurdish asylumseekers and is well informed on Iraq’s politics and social conditions. Even if she knew nothing about the Mandaeans until Samir’s case, she is easily convinced of its merits. Everybody is happy, and the judge smiles. ******** An Iraqi Mandaean couple refused to become Ba’ath Party members. The husband was summoned to serve in the Iraq-Iran war (1980-88), and the family paid bribes to avoid this. About a decade after the end of the war, children were forced to do military training, and an Iraqi TV show depicted children subject to such “education.” The kids tore apart live animals and ate them raw, an illustration of supreme loyalty to the regime. On the day of Nahwa, in April 1998, all citizens were compelled to affirm their loyalty to Saddam Hussein and to promise to take part in military operations. The just-mentioned Mandaean family had moved north, trying to escape, but lacked enough money to pay the Turkish smuggler to take everybody across the border. Only three members of the family began the long journey: Layla, her son, and her brother-in-law Ghassam. They travelled by car and by plane, often at night. Layla arrives illegally in the U. S. She has no attorney and is told that she will be held in detention until a decision can be made. In her sworn statement, Layla had asked for assistance from a UN representative. At the end of her “Credible Fear” interview at the U. S. airport, the interviewer states that Layla has met the standards specified in that document. With her child, she is

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released from detention a few weeks later. Why? Due to danger of trauma, the U. S does not want to detain children. A worker at a human rights organization sends me Layla’s affidavit. The date for the hearing of Ghassam’s case, in the detention center, is set. Can I come to testify? Yes. The formal document giving the DECISION AND ORDER OF THE IMMIGRATION JUDGE is twelve pages long. That type of a document is familiar to me from previous asylum cases. Included in the papers are: Procedural History; Statement of Facts, with Respondent’s Testimony. Then, there are Ghassam’s testimony and mine; two segments on Legal Standards; Analysis (with two segments); the Asylum Claim, which contains information on Past and Future Persecution; a short Conclusion. The INS representative in the Court objects to my written testimony on two specific points, duly recorded. Nevertheless, the Court finds that Ghassam’s and my testimonies agree with Layla’s own. I am, of course, not allowed to know the contents of either of the two. Layla is granted asylum, as noted, but what about the still-detained Ghassam? Like his sister-in-law, he, too, had undergone a Credible Fear interview at the airport. A civil engineer, Ghassam is unmarried, and has refused military service. His interview includes this, Q: Has anyone ever harmed you because of your religious beliefs, or because of your refusal to serve in the military? A: I was beaten as a child by teachers and (by) other children because I was a Baptist. As an adult the confrontation with the citizenry decreased, while the abuse by the government became more systematic. I was denied numerous professional opportunities because I was a Baptist. The government also interferes with our practicing of our religion.

Jailed and beaten, in hiding during the Gulf War, arrested for ten days several years after the end of that war, Ghassam finally flees to the north and later escapes across the Turkish border. “How much money do you have?” the interviewer had asked at the U. S. airport. Sixty dollars, for the Turkish smuggler took the rest. On the same day that Ghassam’s Credible Fear testimony is taken at the airport, he is transferred to the detention center, where he spends months.

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Our lawyer and I are headed to the detention center. Entering the large, forbidding building, we are accompanied by a local Mandaean, as both he and I will testify for Ghassam. We go through several levels of security. There are no windows; we see no inmates; the massive steel doors—which lack handles—slam shut with a loud shudder. The guards carry batons, weapons. We spend long hours in the hermetically closed waiting room. It is almost a surprise to enter the courtroom, as if this is a regular court in the world of civilians. In his jail uniform, Ghassam enters; he is thin, gaunt, and pale, almost yellowskinned; he eyes me emptily, calmly, without interest. His affidavit amplifies much of the information found in his sister-inlaw Layla’s document. But his gender and profession add other aspects to his story. His father bribed the military authorities $3,000 to certify that Ghassam had finished his military service, which he had not. Ghassam tells of the compulsory posters for Saddam Hussein, and of the advertisements that everyone in Iraq must pay for in order to place “Happy Birthday” greetings in the newspapers to their leader. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Ghassam is in a military prison for ten days without trial. The soldiers told me that I was a coward for refusing to fight in their “great war” and accused me of being against the government. I was kept in a room crammed with approximately 250 other people. The soldiers would periodically take them out one by one and bring them back with bruised faces. I was also taken out twice every day and beaten, but my father paid the soldiers to reduce the severity of the beating. He also paid them money to allow me to use the bathroom, as there was none in our cell. During my interrogation and beatings, the soldiers threatened to impose the maximum penalty for my draft evasion, which was death. Fortunately, my father was again able to secure my release by paying a very large sum of money. Many other Mandaeans who did not have money were not so lucky and languished in prisons or were executed.

Our efforts in court meet with success and Ghassam is released. He sends me a “Happy Easter” card. After he got out of the detention center, he writes, he enjoys walking along freely in the

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streets, in the sun, buying fruit. His sister-in-law Layla obtains asylum later the same year. And after another couple of years, I learn from the same human rights organization (HIAS) that helped us, that Ghassam’s parents obtain a visa to come to the U.S. The New York Times, September 24, 2001 (section A21), publishes an article by Mirta Ojito, “A Familiar Anguish revisited.” It features interviews with several recent immigrants, who, after the tragedies of September 11, 2001, experience an upwelling of old fears. I recognize one of them! It is Ghassam, given the pseudonym “Adrian.” He expresses himself eloquently to the journalist, saying, “I left terrorism, and terrorism came after me.”

AFTERWORD In my human rights work for Mandaeans, I was involved with Australia for several years. The country has one of the largest populations of Mandaeans in exile. Twice, I have visited Mandaeans there, in 2007 and in 2017, and in the winter of 2017, I came to the Sydney area, particularly to take part in the Mandaean Cultural Day, February 9. Many people helped and fed me and took me around; I met some Mandaeans I had visited in other countries, on earlier occasions. Kenneth Kataneh had moved from Iran to Australia, and he gave me a hearty hug when we met again. At the baptism site, on the Nepean River—where boats and other watercraft whizzed by—the šganda Amin and I recognized one another. We had met in Iran in 1996. When I exclaimed, “You have changed!” he retorted that I had, too. His formerly black beard was now greyish-white, and I had also gotten older. Twisting the klilas for baptism, Amin, on a chair and no longer wearing his black cap, conversed with šganda Nameen who sat on the ground. Sh. Salah was getting ready to baptize his 45-dayold granddaughter, held by her father, Sh. Salah’s son. A screaming cockatoo flew over the river, and I wondered if it could it be a “white dove” sign? In the big mandi, I gave two different talks to Mandaeans, on separate days. The program for the Cultural Day also listed me. On that occasion, prominent Australian politicians sat, listening attentively, on the first row of the huge, sparsely populated auditorium. I could have given them some sharp words for the bad ways in which the government too often treated its immigrants, but I refrained. 91

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The truly striking participant on the Cultural Day1 was a well-known Australian aboriginal elder of the Wiradjuri people: the white-painted Uncle Steven, who happily arranged a group of Mandaean rasta-clad children in an orderly row just before their singing performance. Uncle Steven had done a smoke-cleansing by burning a big heap of leaves as an introduction to the program. This is a regular feature: a ritual to rid the arena of evil, and it must be done by an aborigine. On and off, Taif (“Tony”) Khamisi invited me to his coffeeshop, and Majid (whom I knew from California) joined us. I’m no coffee-drinker, but love hot chocolate, and I had a cold most of the time in Australia, so I appreciated the “medicine.” Most urgently, I wanted to swim, a hope fulfilled at night, after the Cultural Day’s work. Cheerful Sherrie Farhan drove me to a beach, reputedly in a beautiful landscape, but it was too dark to see it. Sh. Ala’a Nashmi—Sherrie’s good friend and sparringpartner in loud conversations—was there, too. At nearly 2:30am I got back to my guest-quarters, at a Mandaean family home. One of my good helpers in Australia was the President of the Sabian Mandaean Association in Australia, Yassmen Yahia, a niece of my friend in Sweden, Issam Hermiz. Reading my old notes from this 2017 Australia trip brought back so many memories for me. Also, on this visit I learned that the lead copy of The Book of John, which I saw and handled in 1973 in Ahwaz, remains there.

1

I still have the Program, which lacks the date.

WORKS CITED Bosworth, C. Edmund, Heinrichs Pellat, and E.J. van Dozel, eds. 1993. The Encylopedia of Islam. Leiden: Brill. Buckely, Jorunn J. 2002. The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People. Oxford: Oxford University Press/Scholars Press. ———. 2005. The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias (3rd ed. 2010). ———, ed. 2007. Drower’s Folk Tales of Iraq. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias. Drower, E. S. 1931. Folk-Tales of Iraq: Set Down and Translated from the Vernacular. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1937. The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran: Their Cults, Customs, Magic Legends, and Folklore. Oxford: Clarendon. Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1987. Encyclopedia of Religion. 16 vols. New York: Macmillan.

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Photo 1: Mr. Nasser Sobbi, as we remember him. Photo by Jesse Buckley.

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Photo 2: 2017 Nepean River, Liverpool, NSW, Australia. Sh. Salah preparing to baptize his 45-day old granddaughter, held by Sh. Salah’s son, father of the infant. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckely.

Photo 3: 2017, Nepean River, Liverpool, NSW, Australia. Šganda Amin Dorragi, making the klilas, with Šganda Nameen sitting on the ground. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

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Photo 4: Traditional cartonnage Mand. writing tablet; a present to me by Lady Drower’s daughter, Mrs. Margaret “Peggy” Hackforth-Jones. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

Photo 5: Inspecting the baptism site at Charles River, Alliston, Mass., in advance of the 1999 ARAM Harvard University conference. From left: Jorunn J. Buckley, Shukrieh Sobbi, Sada Breegi, and Nasser Sobbi. Photo: Mr. Wisam Breegi, used by permission.

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Photo 6: Lady E. S. Drower (1879-1972) and her daughter, the Egyptologist Margaret “Peggy” Hackforth-Jones (19132012), in Baghdad, early 1940s. Photo from the HackforthJones family album, used by permission.

Photo 7: An embroidery, given to the author in 1996 in Awaz, Iran, by Reema Choheili Sobbi. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

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Photo 8: Sh. Jabbar Tawoosie climbing the steps of the ziggurat at Choga Zambeel, 1996. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

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Photo 9: Sh. Salem Choheili and Cyrus Askari in the mountains north of Tehran, 1996. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

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Photo 10: Mr. Asad Askari. Photo: Steven Askari, used by permission.

Photo 11: Jorunn J. Buckley, Ganzibra Walid Ebadfardzadeh, Prof. Charles Häberl, and Yalufa Shahram Ebadfardzadeh in San Antonio, 2022. Photo: Matthew Busch, used by permission.

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Photo 12: Jorunn J. Buckley in a robe made for her by Mandaean women in Australia. Photo: Michael Klimov, used by permission.

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Photo 13: Sh. Abdullah Khaffagi. Photo from an Iranian newspaper, 1950s-1960s.

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Photo 14: June 2015, Södertälje, Sweden, near the mandi, after the conference: (from left) Jorunn J. Buckley, Diar al-Haidar (al-Sager), Ganzibra Walid Abdul Razzak, tarmida Salwan Shakir Khamas. Photo: Jorunn J. Buckley.

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Map 1: Mandaean sites in the Middle East. Design Jorunn J. Buckley, cartography by Robert Cronan. © 2005 Fortress Press, used by permission.

INDICES N.B. Some names and places are spelled as the author’s interlocutors spelled them.

I NDEX OF PERSONS Abdullah, Abdul Jabbar, Prof., 44 Abdullah, Haithem, 44 Abdullah, Sh. Khaffagi, 4-6, 89, 21, 55n5 Abdullah, Sh., son of Sh. Negm, 21, 41 Abdullah, Sh., son of Sh. Sam, 37, 45 Abdullah, Sinan A. J., Dr., 4446, 49 Abouzayd, Shafiq, Prof., 17 Adam Yuhana, 54 Adam Zihrun, 55, 55n5, 56 Ahwazi, Hamid, 20 Ahwazi, Shadan, 27 al-Haider, Sh. Bassam Fadhil, 27 al-Khamisi, Majid ‘Arabi, 41 al-Romi, Gherzban, 4 al-Roomi, Layla, Dr., xxxi al-Sebahi, Abdelelah Khalaf, xxix, 42

Alaa, Sh. (Yuhana Nashmi), 21 Aldulaimi, Mamoon, 42n3, 4649 Alkhamis, Sh. Salwan, 23 Allison, Christine, Dr., 20 Amanollahi, Eskandar, Prof., 16 Amara, Lamea Abbas, 10, 31, 31n2, 32-34, 37, 52-54 Amara, Shafia A., 28, 32 Amin, šganda, 91 Aran (goldsmith), 4, 9 Ardban III, ix Askari, Asad, xxv, 6-7, 17-20, 30, 37-39 Askari, Cyrus, 101 Askari, Suhrab, 7, 29 Aumarah, Sh., 42 Badawi, Naeem, 46 Badran, Sayyid, 56 Badran, son of Palah, 55-56 Bahur, Amjed, xxx

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Bainai, son of Zakia and Haiuna, 55 Baktiar, Ram, 56 Bana, Yasmin, 53 Bayan, Bihram, 56 Bayan, Zakia, 53, 56 Bihram, Yahia, 53, 56-57 Breegi, Wisam, Dr., 22, 49 Buckley, Jesse, 19, 33 Choheili, Nargess (Sh. Salah’s sister), 30 Choheili, yalufa Sh. Salem, xxiii, xxv, 5-6, 8, 18, 20, 38 Choheili, Sh. Salah, 7 Coakley, J. F. “Chip”, 17, 20 Dakhil, Sh., 32, 52-54 de Jong, Albert, Prof., 20-21 Deutsch, Nathaniel, 65 Dihgan, Mamul, 53 Doragi, Sh. Taleb, 18 Drower, Lady E. S., x-xi, xiv, xxi, xxiii, xxiii n1, xxiv, xxix, xxxi, 4-5, 9, 19, 23-24, 2930, 33, 42-43, 47n9 Ebadfardzadeh, Bita, 27-28 Ebadfardzadeh, Rezij, 28 Ebadfardzadeh, yalufa Shahram, 8n4, 27 Elmanahi, Ghazi, 36-37, 48 Faisal II (king of Iraq), xxxi, 54 Faraj, Sh., 33 Farhan, Ayar, Dr., xxviii Farhan, Sherrie, 92 Fayzi, Shaker, 4, 9

Fret, Jaroslaw, xxv Frouzandeh, Moussad, 6 Ghassam, 87-90 Ghazi (king of Iraq), xxxi, 54 Gordon, Cyrus, Prof., 19 Grant, Robert, Prof., xii Häberl, Charles, Prof., 19, 29, 31, 44, 47 Hackforth-Jones, Margaret (“Peggy”), xxi, xxiv, 19 Hamad, Sh., 42 Hawa (Iranian academic), 4, 8 Hawa, daughter of Maliha, 52 Hawa, daughter of Simat, 53 Hermiz br Anhar, xxiv, 4 Hermiz, Issam, xxiv-xxv, xxxxxxi, 4, 6, 47, 92 Hermiz, Neshet, xxiii-xxiv Hibil Ziwa, xxx-xxxi Hussein, Saddam, xxii, 44, 64, 70-71, 73, 85-87, 89 Idan (Adam), Sh., 52-54 ‘Inasy, 45 Jawad, Eshtar, 43 Jenab, Zuhair, 46 Jesus, 5, 13, 33-34 Joda, Sh., 33 John the Baptist, ix-x, xxxii, 5, 9, 33, 45 Kaplov, Michael I., xxxii Kataneh, Kenneth, 15, 91 Khamisi, Taif (“Tony”), 92 Khatami (President), 67

INDICES Khazal, Sh., 35 Khidr, Mulla, 33 Krämer, Mark, 3-4, 8 Kushrabi, M. H., 4 Lidzbarski, Prof., 37 Machinist, Peter, Prof., 17 Macuch, Rudolf, Prof., xxiv, 5, 7 Mahdia, 55 Mahmoud (photographer), 12 Mani, 35 Marshall, Thomas, 55 Masboob, Sh. Fawzi, 18, 47 Mhatam Yuhana (=Sheikh Damouk), 54 Mhatam, Yahia, 55 Mihsan, 55 Mirzaie, Muhammed, 3-4 Mohi, Sh., 33 Moradi, Abdolhamid, 8 Mudalal, Bibia, 57 Nadia, 69, 71-72, 74-75 Nameen, šganda, 91 Nashi, Suhaib, Dr., 49-50 Nashi, Zaidoun, 34 Nashi, Zakia, 34 Nashmi, Sh. Ala’a, 92 Naṣoraia, Sh. Brikha, 20-21, 48 Negm, Sh., xxix, 9, 9n5, 21, 4142-43, 43n5 Ojito, Mirta, 90 Paiad, 54 Queen Victoria, xxix

109 Qušmana, Adam, 56 Rafid, Sh., 21 Rafsanjani, A. Hashemi, 12 Ramuia, 55 Reza, Shah, 7, 35, 66 Riiasa, 54 Sa’ad, Mulla, 35 Saba, Mouhammad (Alfayadh), 46 Sachet, Lamia, 37 Safet, Hassan, 4 Sager, Diar (al-Haider), 22-24 Saif, A. R., xxviii Saif, Enisse, xxviii, 45n7 Sajjad, Sayyid, 56 Sam, son of Sam Adam, 55 Sam, Yahia, xxiii, 43 Samir, 86-87 “Samsun”, 69-75, 77 Sanasarian, Eliz, 67 Schütz, Gautier Henri, 5 Šganda, 55 Shooshtary, Dakhil, xxviii, xxxii, 19, 35 Šitlan, Bihram, 55-56 Šlama, daughter of Qidra, 53 Smith, Jonathan Z., Prof., xii Sobbi, Fouad, 22 Sobbi, Issa, 35 Sobbi, Nasser, 8, 24, 30, 34, 34n6, 35-37, 46-47 Sobbi, Shukriyeh, 34 Tawoosie (Choheili), Sh. Salah, 18 Tawoosie, Abdullah, 4, 8, 10, 14 Tawoosie, Sh. Jabbar, 8, 30, 35

110

1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS

Uncle Steven, 92 Vøøbus, Arthur, Prof., xii

Yahia Baliq Hiwia, 36 Yahia Halal, 36 Yahia, Yassmen, 92

Wallenberg, Raoul, xxv Warka, 75-77 Weinberger, Eliot, 65 Widengren, Geo, Prof., xi

Zazai of Gawazta, 53 Zihrun, Mhatam (Dakhil, Sh.), 54 Zihrun, Ram, 52, 56-57 Zihrun, Zakia, 36

I NDEX OF PLACES Abadan, 4, 6 Ahwaz, xxv, xxxiv, 4-7, 14-15, 22, 24, 27, 29-30, 35, 38, 66, 92 Albany, 44 Algeria, 77 Allston, 18 Amara, xxviii, 31-32, 52 Amman, 39, 69, 76 Australia, xxxiii, 12, 18, 21, 29, 41, 63, 65, 67, 91-92 Babylonia, ix-x Baghdad, xxiv, xxx, xxxiii, 4, 31-33, 42, 44, 46-47, 57, 64-65, 69, 86 Bahrein, 6 Basra, 53, 57 Belgium, xxii Berkeley, 33 Berlin, xxiii-xxv, 5, 7 Black Sea, 56 Boerne, 31 Boulder, 44 Brookline, 19

California, xxx, 27, 31-33, 92 Canada, 20, 41-42 Cape Cod, 20 Charles River, 18 Chicago, xii-xiv, 44 Copenhagen, xxx, 43 Cowles Mountain, 32 Cuba, 77, 83 Denmark, xxix-xxx, 42 Detroit, 18 Dubai, 18 Egypt, xxiv, xxviii, 34, 71 England, xi, xxi, xxiv, xxix, xxxi, 6-7, 12, 20, 28, 49 Exeter, 20 Finland, 46-47 Florida, 10, Flushing, NY, 24 France, 5, 48 Geneva, 5, Great Britain, see England

INDICES Haag, Den (The), 21 Hamadan, 28 Harvard University, xxxiv, 1619, 38, 47 Haute-Savoie, 5 Huwaiza, 9n5, 55-56 India, 37 Iran, ix, xi-xii, xxiii-xxvii, xxxiixxxiv, 3-9, 9n5, 11-13, 1617-18, 18n1, 19-20, 24-25, 27-28, 30-32, 34-39, 41, 43-44, 56-57, 61-63, 6567, 77, 81-82, 85-87, 91 Iraq, xxi-xxiv, xxvii-xxxi, xxxiii, 4, 7-8, 18, 21, 25, 28-29, 31-33, 33n4, 34-35, 37, 39, 41-48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 61-65, 69-71, 73-77, 8387, 89 Israel, 13, 45 Italy, 48, 85 JFK airport, 20 Jordan, xxii, 39, 65, 69-70, 76, 83, 87 Kalaatsalah, 43 Karun, 12 Kharaj, xxxiii Khorramshahr, 3-4, 31 Khuzistan, xxiii, 3, 8, 35, 38, 56, 66 Kräftriket, 43 Kurdistan, 3, 65 Kuwait, 9, 30, 69, 86, 89 La Mesa, 32

111 Lake Grove, 46 Lebanon, 44-45 Leiden, 20-21 Litlata, 43 Long Island, 35, 46 Los Angeles, 30 Lund, 23 Maqdam, 56 Massachusetts, xii, xxx Mecca, xxxi Mehrabad airport, 6, 12, 17, 37 Mesopotamia, xxx, 57 Minnesota (Institute of Arts), xxviii Morocco, 77 Moscow, xxix Naṣoriyah, 54 Nepean River, 91 Netherlands, the, xii, 3-4, 20, 65 New York, xxxiv, 8, 8n3, 18n1, 24, 34, 42, 44 Nijmegen, 21 North America, see United States; Canada Norway, xi, xiii, xxiv, xxxiii, 3, 38-39, 67 Oslo, xxiv, xxxiii, 38-39 Oxford, Ohio, xxi Oxford, UK, xxi, 17, 53n2, 55 Palestine, ix Paris, 53, 56 Persia, 28, 56 Persian Gulf, 12 Poland, xxv

112

1800 YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH MANDAEANS

Qurna, 52 Russia, xxvii, 34 San Antonio, 27-31 San Diego, 41 Saudi Arabia, xxxi Scandinavia, xxvii, xxxi Scotland, 15 Shahid Beheshti University, 16, 18, 38-39, 66 Silk Road, ix Södertälje, 22-25 Somalia, 34 Soviet Union, 42 Stockholm, xxiii, 6, 22-23, 25, 43 Šuštar, 36 Sweden, xi, xxiv, xxx, 22-23, 32, 43, 47, 49, 65, 92 Syria, 65

Tehran, xxxiii, 3, 5, 8, 11, 11n6, 12, 14, 17-18, 37-38, 66-67 Texas, 27-28, 31, 37n7 Tigris River, 57, 64 Turkey, 3, 10, 81 United States, xii-xiii, xxii, xxvxxvi, xxviii-xxix, xxxii, xxiv, 8n4, 10, 17-19, 31,34, 36, 38, 41, 44, 47-50, 61, 6365, 69-70, 73, 75-76, 83, 85-88, 90 Uppsala, xi Virginia, 48 Wadi Hauran, ix Washington, D.C., xiii, 73, 75, 83 Watertown, 18n1 Worcester, 49 Wroclaw, xxv-xxvi