Sabians - in Later Islamic Sources

In Later Islamic Sources

According to Muslim authors, Sabians followed the fourth book of Abrahamic tradition, the Zabur, which was given to the prophet King David of Ancient Israel according to the Qur'an. The "Zabur" is identified by many modern scholars as the biblical Book of Psalms. Most of what is known of them comes from Ibn Wahshiyya's The Nabatean Agriculture, and the translation of this by Maimonides.

Other classical Arabic sources include the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, (c. 987), who mentions the Mogtasilah ("Mughtasila," or "self-ablutionists"), a sect of Sabians in southern Mesopotamia who counted El-Hasaih as their founder and academics agree that they are probably the enigmatic "Sobiai" to whom Elchasai preached in Parthia. According to Daniel Chwolsohn (1856) they appear to have gravitated around the original pro-Jewish Hanputa of Elchasai out of which the miso-Judaic prophet Mani seceded and are identified therefore as the pro-Torah Sampsaeans but also less accurately with the anti-Torah Mandaeans. They were said by Khalil Ibn Ahmad (d.786) to believe that they "belonged" to the prophet Noah.

Some supposed that they influenced the practices of the Hellenic Godfearers (theosebeis Greek: Θεοσεβεῖς) while their angelology (based around the movements of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn) found its greatest development in the community which was based in the Harran region of south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria. Ibn al-Qayyim distinguished them as the Sabians of Harran from the south Mesopotamian Sābi'ūna Hunafā.