SABIANS. In three passages of the Koran Mohammed mentions between the Jews and the Christians a sect whom he calls Sabians (Sábi'úna). He distinguishes them from the Magians and polytheists (xxii. 17), and appears to say that they believed in God and in the day of resurrection and judgment. It has commonly been supposed that the sect referred to is the Mandaeans (q.v. ); but it is more probable that they were some obscure half-Christian body (Elkesaites?), which had representatives in Arabia itself (see Mohammedanism, vol. xvi. p. 547). The name is derived from the Aramaic with a softening of ע to א, such as took place in certain dialects of that speech, and means “Baptists.” The older Mohammedan theologians were agreed that the Sabians possessed a written revelation, and were entitled accordingly to enjoy a toleration not granted to mere heathen, and it appears that the Mandaeans got the benefit of this, whether they were the sect Mohammed had in view or not. But under Al-Mamún (830) a body that had certainly no claim to be deemed other than polytheists began to shield themselves under the same name, viz., the Harranians, or remnant of the old heathen of Mesopotamia. Star-worship had a chief place in the religion of the Harranians, as it had had in the older Babylonian and Syrian faiths, but they had partly disguised their polytheism in a fantastic philosophy, so that they were able on occasion to pose as people of enlightened beliefs. Accounts of these false Sabians reached the West through Maimonides, and then through Arabic sources, long before it was understood that, in this application, the name was only a disguise. Hence the greatest confusion prevailed in all European accounts of them till Chwolsohn published in 1856 his Ssabier und Ssabismus, in which ...