JOHN C. REEVES
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE

This volume presents a series of interlocking studies whose overarching focus is a morass of dualist sectarian groups dwelling at the margins (both culturally and geographically) of the medieval Near Eastern world, an assemblage of religious fanatics and social misfits whom Ibn al-Nadīm, that remarkably industrious tenth-century archivist of Muslim intellectual life, termed ‘the sects of the Chaldean dualists.’ Among these ‘sects’ he included some relatively familiar but officially proscribed religious communities like the Manichaeans, the Mandaeans, and the eighth and ninth-century heirs of the Zoroastrian reformer Mazdak, as well as a roster of smaller and more obscure religious and social movements. Using the data supplied by an inter-religious variety of Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian language heresiographical and historical sources, I focus on the manifold conceptual and literary connections that can be discerned between the distinctive ideas and doctrines attested among these so-called dualist or ‘gnostic’ groups and the larger Islamicate intellectual universe within which they manifested and flourished.

Chapter One initiates a broader discussion of these topics by rehearsing and refining the primary issues surrounding the oft-debated question of the genealogical relationship of late antique Near Eastern and Mediterranean ‘gnosticism’ to religions like Zoroastrianism or Judaism. I concur with one stream of recent scholarship which views the scholarly quest for the ‘origins’ of gnosticism as methodologically flawed and hopelessly mired in apologetic presumptions and claims. Yet I seek to progress beyond the present impasse in this debate by showing that categorical labels like ‘gnostic’ continue to have heuristic utility in controlled discursive arenas where the parameters of study and the semantic fields of meaning can be precisely delineated. A successful rehabilitation of the adjective ‘gnostic’ is in my view intimately linked with the advent of a book culture and the new structures of authority which this technology creates, along with a dawning awareness that the religious mentalités of the late antique Near East are grounded in a common koine of scripturally based characters and institutions.

Chapter Two collects a select group of testimonies about the ‘Chaldean dualists’ primarily (but not exclusively) from two invaluable indigenous sources: (1) the Syriac Scholion of Theodore bar Konai, the late eighth-century Nestorian Christian bishop of the city of Kashkar in southern Mesopotamia; and (2) the aforementioned Arabic language Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, an encyclopaedic compendium of literary and quasi-scientific lore compiled in Baghdad near the end of the tenth century. Each passage drawn from these sources is freshly rendered into English and copiously annotated upon the basis of parallels gathered from other primary and secondary sources. While heresiological literature is notoriously mimetic and often derivative in character, the accounts provided by these two writers about these sects feature elements which are not attested in earlier accounts, or which at least with regard to their respective reports about Mani and Manichaeism, exhibit an unusual fidelity to Manichaean primary sources. It is therefore likely that their singular testimonia about other ‘dualist’ groups may preserve snippets of authentic information that has been gleaned from a perusal of authoritative writings or individual interaction with and observation of contemporary sympathizers.

Chapter Three, entitled ‘A World of Prophets and Messiahs,’ unpacks a characteristic doctrine which can serve as a marker for identifying an ideological affinity with the proscribed beliefs and/or practices of the ‘dualists.’ Near Eastern constructions of the phenomenon of prophecy and the figure of the prophet are subjected to a close examination, and especial attention is devoted to the cyclical patterns of prophetic revelation as they are depicted and predicted in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and ‘gnostic’ literatures from late antiquity until roughly the end of the ‘Abbāsid period. Included in this discussion is the role played in some of these prophetologies by non-Abrahamic figures like Zoroaster, Buddha, or Hermes. I also engage in a thorough inter-religious re-examination of the contested meaning and implications of the qur’ānic locution ‘seal of the prophets’ (Q 33:40).

Chapter Four augments the preceding narrative about prophets by devoting attention to the increasing authority granted to ‘written scriptures’ by the various religious communities, both large and small, who were resident in the Near East of late antiquity. An initial case study focusing upon Manichaeism and its hypothetical candidacy for attracting notice as an ahl al-kitāb, or ‘People of the Book,’ argues that some of our commonly held assumptions about the content and scope of the canonical scriptures in Byzantine-era forms of Judaism and Christianity require a drastic revision and reformulation. Extensive portrayal and discussion of the scriptural polemics waged both within and across religious boundaries highlights the remainder of this chapter, and I strive to show that the kinds of criticisms first raised among the adherents of a ‘dualist’ religiosity play the catalytic role in the final textual codification of monotheistic canons of scripture.

Chapter Five attempts to reconstruct some of the historical and social currents associated with the spread of Manichaeism in the pre-Islamic Near East and the initial centuries of Islamic hegemony in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The contentious issue of the religious identity of the group which the Qur’ān calls ‘Sābians’ (2:62; 5:69; 22:17) and which some scholars argue encodes ‘Manichaeans’ is re-examined in the light of the wider religious history of the region, and some attention is also devoted to the presence of Graeco-Egyptian hermetism and its characteristic ideology in the northern Mesopotamian city of Harrān. The prevalent confusion (or deliberate conflation?) in both Syriac and Arabic language sources between ‘Manichaeans’ (zanādiqa) and ‘Sābians’ is exemplified by an exposition of a gruesome ritual of human sacrifice that I have termed the ‘Manichaean blood-libel.’ Some attention is also devoted to the enigmatic religio-historical background of the Mandaeans and to some recent proposals that address the disputed question of their possible western origin in first-century Syria-Palestine.

Concluding the volume is Chapter Six, wherein I present a short series of thematic studies that illustrate the thoroughly interlaced nature of a select group of late antique and early medieval writings and testimonia emanating primarily from Babylonian Jewish and ‘Chaldean dualist’ scribal circles. Herein I explore some intriguing specimens of speculative literature concerned with cosmogonic and cosmological traditions, some shared affinities in angelology and demonology, and the evidence for a survival of certain classical ‘gnostic’ topoi in Jewish esoteric literature like that of the Hekhalot genre, Re’uyot Yehezqel, Sefer Yesirah, and Sefer ha-Bahir. I also pursue the exegetical task of expounding a ‘Chaldean dualist’ background for the conceptual and ideological substructure of the medieval Isma‘īlī tract known as the Umm al-Kitāb.

There are unfortunately relatively few works with which the present book might be compared in terms of its scope and interests. The ‘Chaldean dualist’ sects in their Islamicate context have attracted only sporadic scholarly attention since the fundamental studies of Israel Friedlaender, which are now almost a century old. The sections of Theodore bar Konai’s Scholion concerned with these sects have never even been completely translated into English. Most work of more recent vintage concentrates on certain facets of the topics outlined above, usually circumscribing its critical gaze within the boundaries of a single religious community, almost always either Judaism or Islam. Steve Wasserstrom’s magnificent Between Muslim and Jew is however a remarkable exception: his work illustrates the variety of new insights that can be gained into the Islamicate social milieu when we juxtapose and analyze the conceptual structures and hermeneutic interests of at least two geographically contiguous and contemporaneous religious communities. The present volume is designed to supplement and extend the foundational labors of scholars like Friedlaender and Wasserstrom by adding further ‘ingredients’ to this cultural mix; namely, groups like Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and other members of Ibn al-Nadīm’s list of ‘Chaldean dualists.’ As a result, we will be in a better position to understand the dynamics behind the complex network of intellectual and literary interactions linking Jews, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and ‘gnostics’ in the medieval Islamic world. The book should also make a small contribution to the growing conversation surrounding the transmission of ancient literary tales and motifs into the cultural life of medieval Islam.

1. Late Antique Gnosis, Judaism, and a Syro-Mesopotamian ‘Crucible of Religions’

2. A Profile of the Chaldean Dualist Milieu

i. Bardaisan and his school

ii. Mani and Manichaeism

iii. ‘Audians

iv. Quqites

v. Hewyāyē (Ophites or Naasenes)

vi. Kantaeans

vii. Battai and his sect

viii. Mandaeans

ix. Janjayūn

x. Khusraw al-Az-Rūmaqān

xi. Dashtīn

xii. Mughtasila

3. A World of Prophets and Messiahs

a. Manichaean prophetology

b. Seth, Zoroaster, and Jesus

c. Zoroaster and Chaldean lore

d. Jewish echoes: Abū ‘Īsā al-Isfahānī and Yudghan

e. Echoes among other Islamicate sectarian movements

f. ‘Seal of the prophets’: The significance of a trope

4. Manichaeans as Ahl al-Kitāb: Studies in scriptures and scripturalism

a. Scriptures and scripturalism in the Near East of late antiquity

b. A Manichaean counter-version of Genesis 1-6?

c. Two powers in heaven

d. Hīwī al-Balkhī: Marcionite or crypto-Manichaean?

5. Reconstructing the contours of Islamicate Manichaeism

a. Assessing the evidence: Manichaeism in Roman Arabia

b. The disputed identity of the qur’ānic Sāb’iūn

c. The Manichaean ‘blood-libel’

d. The ‘marshland’ Sāb’iūn: Mandaeism and the west

6. Dualist gnosis and Islamicate Judaism

a. The demiurgic angel and the Tree of Knowledge

b. An origin for Barbēlō?

c. The Daysāniyya and Sefer Yesirah

d. A textual collection of dualist cosmic imagery

e. The Umm al-Kitāb and its sources

Back to index page