March 1, 2008

Life has never been easy for the Mandaeans. In fact, it’s a miracle that they’re still around at all. It’s a tribute to their tenacity and resourcefulness that they’ve been able to maintain their traditions for thousands of years in an environment as hostile as the Middle East. They are the last surviving Gnostic religion and they are pacifists. They believe that you fight injustice with knowledge, not iron. Now they’re facing extinction.

The Muslims in Iraq and Iran generally consider the Mandaeans to be "unclean." At the market, they couldn’t pick up any of the produce because their Muslim neighbors wouldn’t buy anything that had been touched by them. If Muslims saw Mandaeans performing their ritual baptisms in a river, they would throw rocks at them.

But none of that can compare to the periodic massacres. Over the centuries, the Mandaeans have survived by not being a threat to anyone. Dr. Wisam Breegi, a Mandaean activist, says that as long as they lived in remote areas and had small populations, they were left alone. But as soon as a community started to prosper and grow, they would be attacked. The survivors would disappear into the marshy areas in southern Iraq and Iran.

Breegi says there were four massacres in the nineteenth century but people in the Mandaean community don’t want to talk about those events. He sees it as a defense mechanism. Talking about the past would consume their community and incite animosity which goes against their pacifist beliefs. But the problem facing them today is that there is no place left to hide. They are being systematically tracked down and given the choice of either forced conversion or death.

Many Mandaeans have fled to Jordan. Ilham, a refugee in Amman, comes out to greet us with a huge smile that dimples her cheeks and lights up her face. She leads us down the broken sidewalk and then up the narrow stairs that snake up the hill. Boxy apartment buildings in this part of Amman are packed together so tightly that weeds don’t have anyplace to grow.

When she opens the door to her apartment, Ilham’s children come out to greet us. She lives in three rooms with five children. The only heat comes from a kerosene heater that isn’t burning clean so the living room smells like the oil refineries that line the New Jersey Parkway.

She takes off her headscarf and explains that she hasn’t converted but in this neighborhood, she doesn’t feel safe walking around without one. The Muslim majority in Iraq tolerated the Mandaeans during the Saddam regime but only barely. After the Americans invasion, an Islamic government replaced the secular regime of Saddam Hussein. Ilham says that there were announcements in the Mosques that now Iraq is a Muslim country and everyone should convert.

Ranaa is Ilham’s teenage daughter. Ranaa’s teacher brought a headscarf into school shortly after the invasion and told Ranaa that now she had to wear the scarf and convert to Islam. When the girl refused the teacher told the other students that it was okay to stone her. The other kids did as they were told and Ranaa still has a scar on her forehead from the stitches.

On Dec 13, 2003 Ilham’s brother was kidnapped. His mutilated body was thrown on their doorstep. She has no idea who did it or why. All she knew was that her family was a target. They had to leave but getting out of Iraq wasn’t either easy or cheap. It would mean leaving behind family and friends. They’d put up with a lot under the Saddam regime; surely the Americans would bring in something better.

In 2004 her teenage son was kidnapped. This time they didn’t kill him. They just wanted money. Fifteen thousand dollars bought his freedom but it nearly wiped out Ilham’s family financially. When they got their son back, Ilham and her husband went to the police station to report the crime. The police did nothing but they got another threat in form of gunshots aimed at their home. After that, they left Baghdad with nothing more than their clothes.

The five hundred mile drive from Baghdad to Amman was treacherous. At one point gangs that ruled the roads shot at them. Their driver managed to speed away from the gunmen but the car right behind them wasn’t as lucky. They couldn’t believe it when they made it to the border.

Once they were in Jordan they began applying to the UN for refugee status. They would go anywhere that would take them. All they wanted was someplace safe where they could get on with their lives. Although they were safe in Jordan, they couldn’t work. They got money from international organizations like Care and Caritas but they didn’t want to live on charity.

They applied three times for immigration to Australia, which has a large Mandaean population but they were turned down.

In 2006, Ilham’s cousin had saved enough money to get his family safely to Jordan but before they could leave he was killed. The tragedy hit Ilham and her husband very hard. Ilham’s husband decided to go back to Baghdad for the funeral. It was a decision they’ve come to regret.

There aren’t many Mandaeans left in the world. When the US invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 in Iraq but by the end of 2007, there were fewer than 5,000 according to Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of religion at Swarthmore College. Breegi, the activist in Massachusetts estimates that the number is closer to 3,000. Many have fled but many have been killed.

When Ilham and her family first came to Jordan in 2004, the border was still open to all Iraqis. By 2006 Jordan was being overwhelmed by the number of people seeking refuge. No one knows exactly how many Iraqis fled to Jordan. Most of them haven’t registered with any governmental agencies. International relief organizations put the number as high as one million. That’s about eight percent of the pre-war population of Jordan.

Ilham’s husband wasn’t allowed to return to Jordan. He made it back to Baghdad and is in hiding in his family’s house. It’s expensive to call Baghdad so Ilham hasn’t talked to her husband in months.

And just recently Care announced that it would no longer be able to pay for her rent and electricity. The small amount of money she was getting for food is also going away. When we asked Ilham how she will get by, she turns her eyes toward heaven, "God will help us."


Her daughters want to go to America. Ranaa speaks English and wears her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. After everything she’s been through she still has the bouncy optimism of a high school cheerleader. She wants to go somewhere safe. She wants to go back to school. She wants to be reunited with her father and leave behind the memories of the killings and the kidnappings.

Breegi thinks that going to America is the best option for people like Ilham and her family and he would like to see the United States bring over as many as possible. He says that the Mandaeans quickly adapt to the American lifestyle. Most of them know English, since it was taught as a second language in Iraqi schools. Traditionally, they’ve been craftspeople, gold and silversmiths, and professionals. Entrepreneurship is part of their culture. Within six months of arriving, he says, most Mandaean immigrants are off welfare and self-supporting. Within two years, they are usually business owners who’ve created jobs in their new home.

They seem like the ideal candidates for immigration. They are usually well educated because the love of knowledge is basic to their culture and it goes back to their Gnostic beliefs. They are persecuted because of their religion in Iraq. Because they are pacifists they don’t pose the same security risk as other Iraqi’s might. There are no Mandaean suicide bombers. There are no Mandaean terrorists.

In 2004 the US government classified Iranian Mandaeans as refugees "of special concern." This means that they get priority when they apply for a US visa. The Iraqi Mandaeans and the Iranian Mandaeans are the same. Their culture existed before the Iran and Ira q borders were drawn and families were separated by the political boundaries. But while Mandaeans on the Iran side of the border can come to the US, those on the Iraqi side are not.

Ilham and her family are luckier than other Mandaeans. They live under impossible circumstances in Jordan but they are still alive. Shia religious leaders have put Fatwas on Mandaeans and other religious minorities. The general chaos in Iraq has made this minority population even more vulnerable.

Haifa is fifty years old and worked as a bookkeeper in a bank in Baghdad for over thirty years. She isn’t exactly the sort of person one would consider a threat to the social order, unless of course, you’re part of the new fundamentalist Islamic Iraq street patrols.

In January of 2007, Haifa was warned that she’d better start wearing a headscarf. She’s a Mandaean, not a Muslim and has never worn a headscarf. She didn’t see any reason to start wearing one.

A few days after the warning, she was stepping into a car when a gunman decided to enforce a fatwa. He shot point-blank into the side of her head. The bullet took out her left eye and shattered every bone in her face. The doctor who tried to patch her back together said that it was as if the bone had just dissolved.

A year and five operations later, she’d got an artificial jaw, an artificial nose and bone grafts from her hip to create cheekbones. She’s still facing three more major surgeries. She’s missing one eye and can only see light and shadow with the remaining eye.

When I asked Haifa’s friend, Najlaa, if the man who shot Haifa was caught, she laughed derisively. "What do you think?" she said, "There is no law in Iraq now, It’s just chaos."

The impact of that gunshot reached far beyond Haifa’s face. It’s rippled through her family. Because Haifa was incapacitated, she needed someone to help take care of her. So her sister, Muna, took an unpaid leave of absence from her job. She also had to take out a substantial loan to pay for living expenses while she was taking care of her sister.

Before Haifa was gunned down, Muna was taking care of their mother. She’s elderly and cannot walk. Someone needs to take care of her 24 hours a day. A nursing home is not an option in war-torn Iraq. So Muna passed the duty on to her sister-in-law but now almost a year has passed. The sister-in-law has her own family to take care of.

But Haifa isn’t the only one in her family that has problems caused by all this new freedom in Iraq. Their twenty-year-old nephew was walking down the street, minding his own business when he saw a man holding a two-year old child shot down in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. The gunmen left the man dead but the child was still alive.

So Haifa’s nephew did what anyone would have done. He picked up the wounded child and took him to the hospital. That was the beginning of his own nightmare. A few hours later, he got a phone call telling him that because he saved the child, he would be the next victim. He left for Syria almost immediately.

He couldn’t find work there and he couldn’t live there for any length of time. So he returned to Baghdad but he’s in hiding. That’s one more person to take care of in Haifa’s family.

This is the same sort of story that’s repeated over and over. Conditions are not good in Syria. They can’t go back to Iraq. They aren’t allowed to find work in Jordan. The Jordanian government made a deal with the UN. They would allow Iraqis to stay, as long as they didn’t compete for local jobs. If an Iraqi is found working, they are deported back to Iraq.

April DeConick is a professor and historian of early Jewish and Christian thought. She’s witnessed Mandaean baptisms and she’s certain the rituals are very old because of descriptions from early Gnostic texts she’s studied. The participants wear a very simple white garment and head covering that hasn’t changed style in over a thousand years.

The priest is consecrated and then he stands in the water. She said, "The belief is that he’s become like an angel, a being from the world of light and he’s inviting the person on the shore to join him to come into the world of light." There’s a ritual exchange back and forth between the priest and the person on the shore and then the one that’s being baptized comes into the water. The priest splashes water over their heads a number of times. She says, "It’s a remarkable ceremony and its done in flowing water in a river. I think it’s pretty ancient."

Wisam Breegi was over forty years old before he saw a Mandaean baptism practiced in the open, without fear. He said, "We were hiding a lot of the traditions, the culture and the language. People stopped speaking the language for fear of persecution."

They are baptized many times in their lives. It’s seen as purification and prayer rather than an initiation ritual. In their traditions, the baptism must take place in a clear running stream. For a long time their temple in Baghdad was downstream of the sewer system. "It was a very unpleasant experience but we didn’t have any other choices," Breegi said.

Today, there’s a large community in Texas and they’ve found clear, running streams that are perfect for their rituals. Breegi was overcome with emotion the first time he saw this group, clothed in white and drenched in pure water. A group of Americans came to the river with their canoes but waited patiently in their car for the ritual to end.

To Breegi it was an incredible experience because he’s never encountered such tolerance and respect before. This is the freedom that America promised and he believes that it is the greatest country in the world.

The Mandaeans were never able to build great cathedrals. Their contribution to humanity is a religion of non-violence that has preserved teachings for millennium. If they were a building instead of a belief system, surely they would be on list of world treasures. It will be one more tragedy of the Iraq war and invasion if these gentle people and their religion with an unbroken tradition going back to the dawn of Christianity are wiped off the face of the earth.

You can’t convert to the Mandaean faith. Only people born to parents that are both Mandaean are considered Mandaean. A priest must have an unbroken and unblemished family tree that goes back seven generations. There are only four Mandaean priests of the highest or Ganzevra level left in the world. When they go, the interpretations of their sacred texts will go with them.

"They preserve a whole cognitive world that Christian don’t have , that Jews don’t have, that Muslims don’t have but is very ancient." DeConick said, "We’re losing a piece of Humanity."