Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān

Arabian chemist and alchemist Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān[Jabir ibn Hayyan, Abu Musa]>

• Born: 721
• Birthplace: Tūs (now in Iran)
• Died: 815
• Place of death: Al-Kūfa (now in Iraq)

The greatest alchemist of Islam, Jābir is regarded as the father of Arabian chemistry. His many works influenced later Arabian and European chemists considerably, and his alchemical ideas and recipes helped advance chemical theory and experimentation.

Early Life

It must be said at the outset that many scholars, some from as long ago as the tenth century, have believed that Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (JAHB-IHR ihb-ehn hi-YAHN) 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-Kūfa, then a rapidly growing city on the Euphrates River just south of the ruins of Babylon. Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Jābir’s father (with whom he shares his name), was a Shīՙite apothecary in Khorāsān in eastern Persia, and he supported the powerful ՙAbbāsid family, who hoped to overthrow the Umayyad caliph. (The Umayyad Dynasty had ruled the Muslim Empire since 661.) The ՙAbbāsids sent Abū Mūsā throughout Persia to prepare the way for a revolution. In the course of this political mission he visited Ṭūs, near what is now Mashhad in northeast Iran, and there, around 721, his son was born and named for him. While the younger Jābir was still a child, his father was captured by the caliph’s agents and beheaded.

Jābir 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 Jaՙfar ibn Muḥammad (699/700 or 702/703-765), the sixth Shīՙite imam, who was a descendant of ՙAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of Muḥammad. In his later writings, Jābir often stated that he was nothing but a spokesperson for Jaՙfar’s doctrines. Besides being a Shīՙite, Jābir 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 Jābir 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 Jābir 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 ՙAbbāsids succeeded in their revolution, he became associated with the viziers of the ՙAbbāsids, the powerful Barmakids. He had earned the grand-vizier’s gratitude by curing one of his mortally ill harem girls. The Barmakid family became patrons of Jābir and obtained a position for him at the court of Hārūn al-Rashīd, the famous caliph of the legendary collection of tales about Central Asia, Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708; also known as The Thousand and One Nights), which is of uncertain authorship and date. Jābir, for his part, deemed it an honor to compose works for this caliph.

Life’s Work

In some lists, the writings that bear Jābir’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 Jābir’s death. Many historians of science now regard as probable the thesis that, though some of these works may have been written by Jābir, most were composed by members of the Ismālīs, a Shīՙite sect that believed that Muḥammad ibn Ismāil 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 to grant historical reality to Jābir and his works, all agree that many of the surviving writings contain later Ismālī modifications and additions.

To complicate matters further, several alchemical texts that appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with Jābir’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 Jābir’s name to add authority to his work. Scholars therefore completely disregard the Latin texts by Jābir and exclusively consider the Arabic texts when discussing Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.

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 {I}Kitāb al-sabՙīn{/I} (c. late ninth century; the seventy books) and the Kitāb al-mawāzīn (early tenth century; the book of balances). 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 Jābir’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 Jābir 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 Jābir used these ideas, he justified them both rationally and empirically.

In Jābir’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.

Jābir’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 predominance 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).

Jābir 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. Jābir’s theory probably derived from Aristotle’s Meteorologica (335-323 b.c.e.; English translation, 1812), 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 Jābir’s view, sulfur and mercury were formed under planetary influence in the interior of the earth as intermediates between the exhalations and the minerals and metals.

To explain the existence of different kinds of metals, Jābir 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. Because 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 Jābir’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, Jābir 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 Jābir’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 Jābir 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, Jābir 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, 17 and 28, 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 28. The numbers of the remaining, smaller square add up to 17. It is likely that 28, a number to which the Sufis attached great value, was astrological in origin, since it is the product of the number of known planets (7) and the number of Aristotelian elements (4). 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, Jābir 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 17, and 17 is the number of powers that Jābir attributed to the metals. Each quality, moreover, had 4 degrees and 7 subdivisions, or 28 parts altogether. He assigned each of these 28 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 4 natures.

Beyond its purely alchemical meaning, the term mizan, or balance, was a basic principle of Jābir’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 Jābir’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 Jābir’s thought was based on the appearance of the word mizan in the Qur՚ān, 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 Jābir’s system. The stars were not only constituents of the world but they also influenced 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 Jābir, 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, Jābir 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. Jābir shared the banishment of the Barmakids, and he withdrew to Al-Kūfa in eastern Persia. One account states that he returned to court under the new caliph, al-Ma՚mūn (r. 813-833); 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. Two centuries after his death, during building operations in a quarter of Al-Kūfa known as the Damascus Gate, Jābir’s cellar laboratory was discovered along with a golden mortar weighing two hundred pounds.

Significance

Jābir ibn Ḥayyān 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. Jābir 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 Shīՙites 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 Jābir 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 Jābir’s works, Arabic alchemy exerted considerable influence on the development of modern chemistry.

Bibliography

Federmann, Reinhard. The Royal Art of Alchemy. Translated by Richard H. Weber. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1969. This book, originally published in 1964, is a popular account of the history of alchemy. It also includes a chapter specifically devoted to Jābir’s life and work. Bibliography.

Haq, Syed Nomanul. Names, Natures and Things: The Alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān and His Kitāb al-Ahjar (Book of Stones). Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994. Explores Jābir’s alchemical work, especially its focus on taxonomy (the naming of things) and materialism. Part of the Studies in the Philosophy of Science series. Extensive bibliography and an index.

Holmyard, E. J. Alchemy. 1957. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1990. The author, who has published extensively on Jābir’s writings, presents a good general survey of alchemy. He accepts Jābir’s existence and presents a detailed reconstruction of his life. Bibliography, index.

Leicester, Henry M. The Historical Background of Chemistry. 1956. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1971. The author follows the evolution of chemistry through the ideas of chemists rather than their lives. His chapter on Arabic alchemy contains an insightful account of the body of writings associated with Jābir. Bibliography.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study. Westerham, England: World of Islam Festival, 1976. The first illustrated account of Islamic science ever undertaken. Using traditional Islamic concepts, the author discusses various branches of science, including alchemy, and places Jābir’s work in its Islamic setting.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Science and Civilization in Islam. New York: New American Library, 1968. This book is the first one-volume work in English to deal with Islamic science from the Muslim rather than the Western point of view. Its approach is encyclopedic rather than analytic, but it does contain a discussion of Jābir’s life and work in its Muslim context.

Rashed, Roshdi, ed. Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 1996. Vol. 1 surveys the history of technology, alchemy, and the life sciences in Arabic science. Bibliography, index.

Read, John. Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy, Its Literature and Relationships. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966. First published in 1936, this book offers a bird’-eye view of alchemy from its origins in Egypt and India to the era of the phlogiston theory. Its emphasis is on the relationship of alchemy to literature. Bibliography, notes.

Schacht, Joseph, and C. E. Bosworth, eds. The Legacy of Islam. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. This version of a work edited in 1931 by Thomas Arnold and Alfred Guillaume analyzes the contributions of Islamic civilization to the world. The chapter “The Natural Sciences and Medicine” contains brief remarks on Jābir. Bibliography, index.

Taylor, F. Sherwood. The Alchemists. 1949. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Still the best of the general works on alchemy. It clearly and sympathetically surveys the field from ancient to modern times. Bibliography.

Turner, Howard R. Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Explores the world of science, including alchemy, in medieval Islam. Good for those interested in an introduction to the topic. Maps, bibliography, and index.