Jabbar Choheili
Mandaean priest in Iran
Sheikh (Rabbi) Ganzibra Jabbar Choheili (Persian: جبار چحیلی, also known as Sheikh Jabbar Ṭawūsī Al-Kuhaili, Arabic: جبار طاووس الكحيلي; born 1923, died December 27, 2014) was an Iranian Mandaean priest, the head of the Mandaean Council of Ahvaz, which presides over the Mandaean community of Iran.
Biography
Jabbar Choheili held the Mandaean clergical ranks of Ganzibra (head priest) and Rishama (patriarch), the highest Mandaean clergical rank. He was born in 1923 in the city of Ahvaz, Khuzestan Province, Iran into the Kuhailia (Persian pronunciation: Choheili) family. His malwasha (baptismal name) is Mhatam Yuhana (Classical Mandaic: ࡌࡄࡀࡕࡀࡌ ࡉࡅࡄࡀࡍࡀ; full name: Rabbi Ganzibra Mhatam Yuhana bar Sharat; also known as Mhatam Yuhana bar Yahya; or in Arabic: Shaikh Jabar (= Šabur), the son of Ṭawoos) (note: Mandaeans typically have both a birth name and a baptismal name).
Jabbar Choheili's father died in 1924 due to an armory explosion in Ahvaz during the Sheikh Khazal rebellion, a conflict between Reza Shah and Khazʽal Ibn Jabir. Mulla Sa’ad, his grandfather, raised him and his brothers during his childhood. Mulla Sa’ad was also a scribe and in 1930 had copied a version of the Haran Gawaita that was owned by Nasser Sobbi (1924–2018) in New York (Sobbi was the owner of the most extensive private collection of Mandaean manuscripts in the United States).
In 1948, he traveled from Iran to Qal'at Saleh, Iraq to become initiated as a tarmida by Sheikh Abdullah, son of Sh. Sam Sh. Jabbar (a ganzibra who was the father of physicist Abdul Jabbar Abdullah).
The public source identifies “Jabbar Choheili” as mandaean priest in Iran. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Jabbar, Choheili and Mandaean.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jabbar Choheili” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.