We consider the development of efficient and fast computational methods for parametrized electromagnetic scattering problems involving many scattering three dimensional bodies. The parametrization may describe the location, orientation, size, shape and number of scattering bodies as well as properties of the source field such as frequency, polarization and incident direction. The emphasis is on problems that need to be solved rapidly to accurately simulate the interaction of scattered fields under parametric variation, e. g., for design, detection, or uncertainty quantification. For such problems, the use of a brute force approach is often ruled out due to the computational cost associated with solving the problem for each parameter value. In this work, we propose an iterative reduced basis method based on a boundary element discretization of few reference scatterers to resolve the computationally challenging large scale problem. The approach includes (i) a computationally intensive offline procedure to create a selection of a set of snapshot parameters and the construction of an associated reduced basis for each reference scatterer and (ii) an inexpensive online algorithm to generate the surface current and scattered field of the parametrized configuration, for any choice of parameters within the parameter domains used in the offline procedure. Comparison of our numerical results with directly measured results for some benchmark configurations demonstrate the power of our method to rapidly simulate the interacting electromagnetic fields under parametric variation of the overall multiple particle configuration. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.