Sabians

I will sell your sons and daughters to the people of Judah.

They will sell them to the Sabians, a nation far away.

Indeed, the Lord has spoken.

Proclaim this among the nations.

3.

Gnosticism Though little direct evidence is available, the conspicuous place occupied by the theory of gnosis in early Sufi speculation suggests contact with Christian Gnosticism, and it is worth noting that the parents of Maruf al-Karkhi, whose definition of Sufism as the apprehension of divine realities was quoted on the first page of this introduction, are said to have been Sabians, i.e. Mandaeans, dwelling in the Babylonian fenland between Basra and Wasit.

Other Muslim saints had learned the mystery of the great name.

It was communicated to Ibrahim ibn Adham by a man whom he met while traveling in the desert, and as soon as he pronounced it, he saw the prophet Qadir, Elias.

I think it goes, it goes very underground, and it disappears back up, I think, to the northern Euphrates.

I think that's where it ends up, you know, in a place like Harran, where the Sabians were.

They were very well-known alchemists and so forth.

And, and that knowledge just ticks along in that, um, hidden part of the world in, in southern Turkey, northern Syria, up, up there, only to be really rediscovered in some senses by the Knights Templars-

Oh, well, no, we're not.

We're Sabians.

And, you know, we're from Planet Risk.

All right.

And then of course you had the many Persian and Iranian scholars, some of which we have already mentioned, and who could be both Muslim and Zoroastrian, that also contributed in significant ways to this environment.

Not to mention someone like Thabit ibn Qurra, the great mathematician and astronomer who was employed directly by the Abbasids and who came from the North Syrian city of Harran and followed the native religion in that city, a group that was usually referred to as the Sabians.

In other words, this wasn't something that was exclusively associated with a single social class, any particular ethnicity or religious affiliation, but a shared community of knowledge-seeking.

And it is on the shoulders of some of these giants that later major Islamic philosophers and scholars would stand, not to mention the influence it would have on European and Christian scholasticism and figures like Thomas Aquinas, and later the role that it would play in the Renaissance.