The Knowledge of Life: The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans and Their Relationship to the Sabians of the Qur'an and to the Harranians.

• Author: Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen

This is a reworked dissertation submitted to the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the Victoria University of Manchester. The book has eight chapters, reasonably divided between material pertaining to the Mandaeans and to the Harranians. But the parts on Mandaeism are, perhaps unavoidably, superficial compared to the meticulous data found in secondary sources on the Harranians. Precisely here lies a difficulty, for the primary Mandaic literature is vast (some of it still unknown in the West), while the information on the mysterious Harranians derives almost exclusively from Arabic, mostly Muslim, sources.

Two years before the publication of the author's book, Tamara M. Green's The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992) appeared, a work to which Gunduz makes no reference. This is a pity, for there is considerable overlap between the books, although the two authors have quite different views and agendas. For instance, Green diminishes the importance of the Calif al-Ma??mun's visit to the Harranians in 832 A.H., while for Gunduz this event plays a major role in his argument. Green stresses the connections between the Shi??a and the Harranians, and she sees the latter as generic Gnostics of a sort, characterized by the dualism she finds everywhere in the Near East (except in Judaism). Gunduz, for his part, argues that the pagan Harranians hid under the umbrella of the "Sabeans;' thus gaining protection under Muslim law only after al-Ma??mun's visit. Before that, he says, the term had multiple referents: it covered religions from Greece to China; Mohammed himself was called a "Sabean" ("one who has changed his religion") by his opponents; and, most pervasively, the term signified "baptizers," "dippers,' "dyers" and referred to the Mandaeans and perhaps to other baptizing groups as well.

Gunduz is insufficiently informed about Mandaeism on several counts. He might have been more careful about various ancient baptizers (e.g., p. 111) had he consulted K. Rudolph's "Antike Baptisten: Zu den Uberlieferungen fiber fruhjudische und -christliche Taufsekten," Sitzungsberichte der sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschafien zu Leipzig, pha.-hist. Kl., 121, no. 4 (1981): 1-37. Moreover, Gunduz has several wrong or misinformed statements on Mandaeism: it is incorrect that the Mandaean population and religion are dwindling (p. 1); he completely misunderstands the Mandaean copying traditions and their colophons (pp...