In the Koran, the holy book venerated by the Muslims, there is a group called The Sabians. According to the Catholic encyclopedia which is about a century, old this is the same group as the Mandeans. That is a group in the Middle East, an ethnoreligious group that considers Jesus Christ a false messiah and that venerates Saint John the Baptist. I am curious to hear people’s takes on this and what they think.
Sabians are mentioned 3 times in the Quran, always together with Jews and Christians as people of the book (and nothing else). There is no mention about them in the immediate post-mohammad islamic writings other than a few hadiths but later Muslim writers indicate that they received the Zabur. In Islam, there are 4 Messengers of Allah (a higher category of prophets who transmitted written revelations) - Moses (Torah), David (Zabur, which we normally interpret as the Psalms), Jesus (Gospel - note the singular) and Mohammad (Quran).
We are not sure if there is evidence to link Sabians with David or merely that under Muslim thinking: if Jews & Christians received their scriptures from Moses and Jesus respectively, it is merely neatness to link Sabians (the only group mentioned in the Quran without a clear scripture) with the David/Zabur, the only scripture without a clear religious group.
Not having a clear identification of who the Sabians were has helped some minority groups in the history of Muslim conquests. There have been groups that called themselves Sabians to avoid death. Sabians, being listed as the people of the Book, would be tolerated under Muslim rule in the same way as Jews and Christians were.
It is likely in this context that the Mandeans came to be associated with the Sabians in around the 9th century, even until today. In fact, some nomenclature lists them as Mandeans-Sabians. I think that if the Sabians were really the recipient of the Zabur, it would be unlikely that the Mandeans are the Sabians as David lived 1000 years before Christ while Mandeans were a post-Christian religious group. Even the oldest Mandean claims would take them back to the immediate pre-Christian era. Mandeans today claim descent from Noah but that again could be an later adaptation as Muslims believe the Sabians to be descendants of the prophet Nuh (=Noah). Mandeans are a Jewish offshoot with some Christian-Gnostic influence (but rejectIng both Torah and the Gospels) and neither Jewish nor Christians refer to Noah as a prophet - only Muslims do.
Another group claiming to be Sabians were the pagans of Harran, a city in Byzantine Asia (today in south Turkey) who also claimed to be Sabians when threatened with death by their 9th century Muslim conqueror. That group is now extinct.
I guess the truth is we will never know who the Sabians really were, or whether they even existed at all. The only group claiming to be Sabians today are Mandeans but we don’t really know. Also, whether some of the beliefs of the Mandeans are truly organic or later adaptations according to what Muslims believe Sabians to be. Whatever the real history was, I think it is best to leave Mandeans with the label of Sabians as it accords then some level of protection against some Muslim potentate with funny ideas than would otherwise have been.
