RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESthe "Greatest Name" of God. Bayan is said to have used it to get a
response from the planet Venus. Mughlra may have been one of the
first Muslim sorcerers. He is said to have learned magic from a Jewish
woman, claimed that he could use his knowledge of the "Greatest
Name" to raise the dead, and frequented cemeteries where he muttered
incantations over graves.^128
The combination of gnosticism with revolt in order to bring about
the millenium seems to be a new development. When the risings of
Mughira and Abii Man~iir failed, the followers who survived them
turned to terrorism by assassinating their opponents. The Mansiiriyya
stoned or strangled their victims and took their property. The fact that
they justified these murders as a meritorious act is an index of their
alienation.^129
CONCLUSIONS
Questions of continuity and change among Muslims in Iraq may
be organized around a few central themes. The Muslim Arab con-
querors, like the people who survived the conquest in Iraq, continued
to act and to believe in ways that were familiar to them, that is, they
experienced linear continuity among themselves in the form of direct
survivals they had brought with them from their own pre-Islamic past.
But in some cases this meant a real change for the rest of the people
in Iraq. The strength of pre-Islamic Arabian customs in early Islamic
Iraq is explained best by the Qur'an's tendency to sanction and rein-
force some of the tribal attitudes and practices. The Companions and
Followers preserved and developed a regional form of customary pre-
cedents (sunna) in the same way that shaykhs set and preserved tribal
sunna before Islam. The vocations of qiiri', qa$$, and qiirj"i to a certain
extent were Islamic forms of the pre-Islamic storyteller, poet, and
arbiter. The masjid was brought to Iraq as an Islamic form of the
tribal majlis and served as the center of the Islamic community for
worship and political life. Consequently, it was not originally a sacred
building in the same sense as a fire temple, synagogue, or church.
128 Tucker, "Bayan," pp. 242, 249-50; idem, "al-Mugira," pp. 34, 44. However, his
Kaysiini contemporary Abii Khalid Kabili had a greater reputation as a magician;
see L. Massignon, "The Juridical Consequences of the Doctrines of AI-I;Ialliij," tr.
H. Mason, in M. Swartz, ed., Studies on Islam (New York and Oxford, 1981), pp.
149,160.
129 Ja~i?-, Kitab al-J:Iayawan (Cairo, 1938), 11, 264-67; Tucker, "Abii Man~iir," p.
73; idem, "al-Mugira," pp. 33, 36, 45.