Index J

 Jabir ibn Hayyan

Jabir ibn Hayyan (Jabir) (Geber) (Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān al Azdi) (Jabir ibn Haiyan) (b. c. 721 in Tous – d. c. 815 in Kufa).  Greatest alchemist of Islam, Jabir is regarded as the father of Arabian chemistry.  His many works considerably influenced later Arabian and European chemists, and his alchemical ideas and recipes helped advance chemical theory and experimentation.

It must be said at the outset that many scholars, some from as long ago as the tenth century, have believed that Jabir ibn Hayyan did not exist at all, but belief in his existence has always had its defenders.  Those accepting his authenticity think that his family came from the southern Arabian Azd tribe that had settled, during the rise of Islam, in Al-Kufa, then a rapidly growing city on the Euphrates just south of the ruins of Babylon.  Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, Jabir’s father, was a Shi‘a apothecary in Khorasan in eastern Persia, and he supported the powerful ‘Abbasid family, who hoped to overthrow the Umayyad caliph.  (The Umayyad dynasty had ruled the Muslim Empire since 661.)  The ‘Abbasids sent Abu Musa throughout Persia to prepare the way for a revolution.  In the course of this political mission he visited Tus, near the modern Mashhad in northeast Iran, and there, around 721, his son was born and named for him.  Unfortunately, while the younger Jabir was still a child, his father was captured by the caliph’s agents and beheaded.

Jabir was sent to southern Arabia, where he studied all branches of Eastern learning, including alchemy and medicine.  Some scholars say that he was taught by Ja‘far al-Sadiq, the sixth Shi‘a imam, who was a descendant of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.  In his later writings, Jabir often stated that he was nothing but a spokesman for Ja‘far’s doctrines.  Besides being a Shi‘a, Jabir was also a Sufi, a mystic Muslim, and illustrators have depicted him with high forehead and curly hair and beard, and dressed in woolen Sufic robes.  The Sufis taught Jabir a doctrine ascribing hidden meanings to numbers and letters, which had a great influence on his alchemical theories.

Because the Umayyads remained in power until Jabir was in his late twenties, he lived a life of concealment, roaming through various countries without settling in one place because he feared that the caliph would have him executed.  Around 750, when the ‘Abbasids succeeded in their revolution, he became associated with the viziers of the ‘Abbasids, the powerful Barmakids.  He earned the grand vizier’s gratitude by curing one of his mortally ill harem girls.  The Barmakid family became patrons of Jabir and obtained a position for him at the court of Harun al-Rashid, the famous caliph of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.  Jabir, for his part, deemed it an honor to compose works for this caliph.

In some lists, the writings that bear Jabir’s name number more than three thousand.  According to many scholars, these works are sufficiently different in style, vocabulary, approach, and content to establish separate authorship for many of them.  For example, in some of the works certain terms from late ninth century Greek translations are used, indicating that they were written long after Jabir’s death.  Many historians of science now regard as probable the thesis that, though some of these works may have been written by Jabir, most were composed by members of the Isma‘iliyya, a Shi‘a sect which believed that Muhammad ibn Isma‘il was the seventh imam and which was particularly interested in mysticism, numerology, alchemy, and astrology.  Although some recent scholars are more willing than their earlier colleagues were to grant historical reality to Jabir and his works, all agree that many of the surviving writings contain later Isma‘ili modifications and additions.

To complicate matters further, several alchemical texts that appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with Jabir’s name have no Arabic equivalents, and their style and content reveal that they were written by a Western, most likely Spanish, alchemist who lived in the later Middle Ages.  This anonymous Spanish alchemist adopted Jabir’s name to add authority to his work.  Scholars therefore completely disregard the Latin texts by Jabir and exclusively consider the Arabic texts when discussing Jabir ibn Hayyan.

The majority of the Arabic Jabirian texts are alchemical, but others concern medicine, cosmology, astrology, mathematics, magic, music, and philosophy.  The most important books include the Kitab al-sabin (the seventy books) and the Kitab al-mizan (the book of the balance).  Unfortunately, the bulk of the Jabirian writings remain unstudied, even though they constitute the most significant body of alchemical works in Arabic and a principal source of Latin alchemy.

To appreciate Jabir’s achievements, one must understand his relationship to Greek philosophy and early alchemy.  In his theory of matter he derived many of his basic ideas from Aristotle, but not without modification.  For example, Aristotle regarded the four principles, heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, as accidental qualities, whereas Jabir saw them as material natures that could be separated and combined in definite proportions to form new substances.  Other Jabirian ideas can be traced to the Greek alchemists of Alexandria.  These early alchemical writings, however, are often confusing and superstitious, so when Jabir used these ideas, he justified them both rationally and empirically.

In Jabir’s scheme of things, science was divided into two interdependent halves, the religious and the secular.  He then divided secular knowledge into alchemy and techniques.  The task of the alchemist was to use various techniques to isolate pure natures, determine the proportion in which they entered into substances, and then combine them in proper amounts to give desired products.  Ideally, the practice of alchemy should raise the alchemist to a higher level of knowledge where both his soul and the world will be transformed.  Practically, alchemy centered on the transmutation of metals, notably the changing of base metals such as lead and iron into the valuable metals such as silver and gold.

Jabir’s system of alchemy was logical and precise.  For example, his classification of substances shows great clarity of thought.  He divided minerals into three groups, each having certain specific qualities based on the pre-dominance of one of the pure natures: first, spirits, or substances that completely evaporate in fire (for example, sulfur, mercury, and camphor); second, metals, or meltable and malleable substances that shine and ring when hammered (such as lead, copper and gold); and third, pulverizable substances that, meltable or not, are not malleable and that shatter into powder when hammered (malachite, turquoise, mica, and the like).

Jabir was a firm believer in the possibility of transmutation, since this was a logical conclusion from his sulfur-mercury theory of metals.  This theory suggested that all metals were composed of different proportions of idealized sulfur and idealized mercury.  These idealized, or pristine, substances bore some resemblance to common sulfur and mercury, but the idealized substances were much purer than anything that could be produced alchemically.  Jabir’s theory probably derived from Aristotle’s Meteorologica (335-323 B.C.T.), where the process of exhalations from the earth forming minerals and metals is discussed.  For Aristotle, earthy smoke consisted of earth in the process of changing into fire, and watery vapor was water undergoing conversion into air.  Difficult-to-melt minerals consisted mainly of the earthy smoke, while easy-to-melt metals were formed from the watery vapor.  In Jabir’s view, sulfur and mercury were formed under planetary influence in the interior of the earth as intermediaries between the exhalations and the minerals and metals. 

To explain the existence of different kinds of metals, Jabir assumed that the sulfurous and mercurial principles were not always pure and that they did not always unite in the same proportions.  If they were perfectly pure and combined in the most perfect manner, then the product was the perfect metal, gold.  Defects in proportion or purity resulted in the formation of other metals.  Since all metals were composed of the same constituents as gold, the transmutation of less valuable metals into gold could be effected by means of an elixir.

For the alchemists, the elixir, also called the philosopher’s stone, was a substance that brought about the rapid transmutation of base metals into gold.  The term was initially used for a substance that cured human illnesses (the Arabic al-iksir was derived from a Greek word for medicinal powder).  In an analogous fashion, an elixir might “perfect,” or cure, imperfect metals.  A peculiarity of Jabir’s system was its emphasis on the use of vegetable and animal substances in the preparation of the elixir (earlier alchemists used inorganic materials).  In his search for materials from which the elixir could be extracted, Jabir investigated bone marrow, lion’s hair, jasmine, onions, ginger, pepper, mustard, anemones, and many other materials from the plant and animal kingdoms.

An essential part of Jabir’s sulfur-mercury theory was his numerological system, used to calculate the balance of the metals necessary to achieve transmutation.  Balance, or mizan, was the central concept used by Jabir to catalog and number the basic qualities of all substances.  Therefore all alchemical work involved establishing the correct proportion of the natures -- hot, cold, moist, and dry -- and then expressing this proportion in numbers.

In applying this idea of balance to metals, Jabir noted that each metal had two exterior and two interior qualities.  For example, gold was inwardly cold and dry, outwardly hot and moist.  He determined the nature of each metal by a complex number system whose key numbers, seventeen and twenty-eight, were derived from a magic square.  Its top row contained the numbers 4, 9, and 2; the middle row 3, 5, and 7; and the bottom row, 8, 1, and 6.  Adding the numbers of the top row to the bottom two numbers of the last vertical column yields twenty-eight.  The numbers of the remaining, smaller square add up to seventeen.  It is likely that twenty-eight, a number to which the Sufis attached great value, was astrological in origin, since it is the product of the number of planets (seven) and the number of Aristotelian elements (four).  Twenty-eight is also a perfect number in that it is equal to the sum of its divisors (1, 2, 4, 7, and 14).  In evaluating the nature of metals, Jabir used the numbers in the smaller square, 1, 3, 5, and 8.  Thus, in his system, the contrary natures, hot and cold, or moist and dry, could fuse only in the proportions 1 to 3 or 5 to 8.  The sum of these numbers is seventeen, and seventeen is the number of powers that Jabir attributed to the metals.  Each quality, moreover, had four degrees and seven subdivisions, or twenty-eight parts altogether.  He assigned each of these twenty-eight parts to one of the letters of the Arabic alphabet.  He then composed tables interrelating the values of the Arabic letters (which depended on the Arabic name for each metal) and the amounts of the four natures.

Beyond its purely alchemical meaning, the term mizan, or balance, was a basic principle of Jabir’s worldview.  Balance also meant the harmony of the various tendencies of the Neoplatonic world soul, the organizer of the basic qualities.  Balance was therefore related to Jabir’s monism, which opposed the dualistic worldview of Manichaeanism (the struggle against this religion was a chief concern of Islam at the time).  This religious side of Jabir’s thought was based on the appearance of the word mizan in the Qur’an, where it is used in the sense of a balance that weighs one’s good and bad deeds at the Last Judgment.

Astrology also played an important part in Jabir’s system.  The stars were not only constituents of the world but also influencers of earthly events.  All natural substances had specific properties that linked them to the upper world, and this link allowed talismans to be used effectively.  The talisman bore the power of the stars and, when used properly, could provide domination over events.  Thus, for Jabir, the same causality determined astrology and alchemy.  Both sciences imitated the Creator, since Creator and alchemist worked with the same materials and were governed by the same laws.

Despite his great fame as court astrologer and alchemist, Jabir fell out of favor in 803 because of his association with the Barmakids.  When these powerful ministers had been discovered plotting against the caliph, some were executed; others were expelled.  Jabir shared the banishment of the Barmakids, and he withdrew to Al-Kufa in eastern Persia.  One account states that he returned to court under the new caliph, al-Ma’mun (who reigned from 813 to 833); another states that he spent the rest of his life in obscurity.  The date of his death is uncertain, though it is usually given as 815 (although some sources report it as 803).  Two centuries after his death, during building operations in a quarter of Al-Kufa known as the Damascus Gate, Jabir’s cellar laboratory was discovered along with a golden mortar weighing two hundred pounds.

Jabir ibn Hayyan is important for both the history of alchemy and the development of Islamic culture.  Although from the vantage point of later centuries his scientific thought seems strange and superstitious, he did help to advance chemical theory and experiment.  In searching for the secret of transmutation, he mastered many basic chemical techniques, such as sublimation and distillation, and became familiar with the preparation and properties of many basic chemicals.  For example, he was fascinated with sal ammoniac (now called ammonium chloride), a substance unknown to the Greeks.  The volatility of this salt greatly impressed the Arabs.  Jabir was a skilled and ingenious experimenter, and he described for the first time how to prepare nitric acid.  More clearly than any other early chemist, he stated and recognized the importance of the experimental process.  In his work, he also described and suggested improvements in such chemical technological processes as dyeing and glass-making.

His work also belongs to the legacy of Islam.  The Shi‘a state that he is one of their great spiritual guides.  Scarcely a single later Arabic alchemical text exists in which he is not quoted.  When, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Islamic science was transmitted to Latin Christianity, the fame of Jabir went with it.  His sulfur-mercury theory persisted and was at last modified into the phlogiston theory of Johann Becher and George Stahl in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In the guise of Jabir’s works, Arabic alchemy exerted considerable influence on the development of modern chemistry.

 
Father of Arabian Chemistry see Jabir ibn Hayyan
Geber see Jabir ibn Hayyan
Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān al Azdi see Jabir ibn Hayyan
Father of Chemistry see Jabir ibn Hayyan
Jabir ibn Haiyan see Jabir ibn Hayyan
Jabir see Jabir ibn Hayyan