Jabir ibn Hayyan

For the 12th century astronomer, see Jabir ibn Aflah. For the anonymous 14th century Spanish alchemist, see Pseudo-Geber. For the crater, see Geber (crater).

Jabir ibn Hayyan
Title	Geber
Personal life
Era	Islamic Golden Age
Main interest(s)	Alchemy and Chemistry, Astronomy, Astrology, Medicine and Pharmacy, Philosophy, Physics
Notable work(s)	Kitab al-Kimya, Kitab al-Sab'een, Book of the Kingdom, Book of the Balances , Book of Eastern Mercury, etc.
Jurisprudence	Shī‘ah Sufi
Senior posting
Influenced by Alchemy, Harbi al-Himyari, Ja'far al-Sadiq
Influenced Alchemy, Chemistry

Geber is an unknown author of several books in Alchemy. The name, a Latinized form of "Jabir," was adopted because of the great reputation of a supposed 8th-century alchemist by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan. About this historical figure, however, there is considerable uncertainty.

Traditionally he is identified as Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān (Persian/Arabic جابر ابن حیان) (born c. 721 in Tus, Iran–died c. 815 in Kufa), a prominent Muslim polymath: a chemist and alchemist, astronomer and astrologer, engineer, geologist, philosopher, physicist, and pharmacist and physician. He is considered by many to be one of the "fathers of chemistry." His ethnic background is not clear; although some sources state that he was an Arab

other sources introduce him as Persian.

As early as the tenth century, the identity and legitimacy of Jabir appear to have been disputed. Some scholars and historians have maintained that Jabir is a pen name of a group of Ismaili propagandists writing in the ninth and tenth centuries, and that he died—if indeed he ever lived—a century before the writings attributed to him were composed.

The historical figure

An artistic depiction of Geber

According to tradition, Jabir was an alchemist who lived mostly in the 8th century, born in Tus, Khorasan, in Iran , then ruled by the Umayyad Caliphate. In some sources, he is reported to have been the son of Hayyan al-Azdi, a pharmacist of the Arabian Azd tribe who emigrated from Yemen to Kufa (in present-day Iraq) during the Umayyad Caliphate. Hayyan had supported the Abbasid revolt against the Umayyads, and was sent by them to the province of Khorasan (in present Iran) to gather support for their cause. He was eventually caught by the Ummayads and executed. His family fled back to Yemen, where Jabir grew up and studied the Koran, mathematics and other subjects under a scholar named Harbi al-Himyari. Jabir's father's profession may have contributed greatly to his interest in alchemy.

After the Abbasids took power, Jabir went back to Kufa. He began his career practising medicine, under the patronage of the Barmakid Vizir of Caliph Haroun al-Rashid.

Jabir is claimed to have been a student of the celebrated Islamic teacher and sixth Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq. However, some historians have maintained that the relationship between Jabir and Ja'far should be dismissed as legend.

His connections to the Barmakid cost him dearly in the end. When that family fell from grace in 803, Jabir was placed under house arrest in Kufa, where he remained until his death.

The Geber Problem

As early as the tenth century, the identity and legitimacy of Jabir appear to have been disputed . In 1942, Paul Kraus argued that anonymous members of the Muslim sect known as the Brethren of Purity were the true authors of works attributed to Jabir, and that they were writing in the ninth and tenth centuries. Syed Haq offers evidence for possible 8^th century origin of one text.

The writings in Latin authored by "Geber", now generally referred to as Pseudo-Geber, were almost certainly original works by an anonymous author or authors of the late middle ages. This was first independently suggested, on textual and other grounds, by the nineteenth-century historians Hermann Kopp and Marcelin Berthelot. Holmyard argues for at least some Arabic origin but not 8^th century. Newman showed a distant relationship to the Arabic work of Razi. He argued that the true author of the most famous book by the Latin "Geber" was the little-known Paul of Taranto, writing around the year 1300.

Writings by Jabir

In total, nearly 3,000 treatises and articles are credited to Jabir ibn Hayyan. Following the pioneering work of Paul Kraus, who demonstrated that a corpus of some several hundred works ascribed to Jabir were probably a medley from different hands, mostly dating to the late ninth and early tenth centuries, many scholars believe that many of these works consist of commentaries and additions by his followers, particularly of a Ismaili persuasion.

The Arabic corpus of Jabir Ibn Hayyan can be divided into four categories:

• The 112 Books dedicated to the Barmakids, viziers of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. This group includes the Arabic version of the Emerald Tablet, an ancient work that proved a recurring foundation of and source for alchemical operations. In the Middle Ages it was translated into Latin (Tabula Smaragdina) and widely diffused among European alchemists.
• The Seventy Books, most of which were translated into Latin during the Middle Ages. This group includes the Kitab al-Zuhra ("Book of Venus") and the Kitab Al-Ahjar ("Book of Stones").
• The Ten Books on Rectification, containing descriptions of "alchemists" such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
• The Books on Balance; this group includes his most famous 'Theory of the balance in Nature'.

The Latin corpus, dating from about 1310.

• Summa perfectionis magisterii ("The Height of the Perfection of Mastery").
• Liber fornacum ("Book of Stills"),
• De investigatione perfectionis ("On the Investigation of Perfection"), and
• De inventione veritatis ("On the Discovery of Truth").
• Testamentum gerberi

English Translations of Jabir

• E. J. Holmyard (ed.) The Arabic Works of Jabir ibn Hayyan, translated by Richard Russel in 1678. New York, E. P. Dutton (1928); Also Paris, P. Geuther.
• Syed Nomanul Haq, Names, Natures and Things: The Alchemists Jabir ibn Hayyan and his Kitab al-Ahjar (Book of Stones), [Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science p. 158] (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).
• Donald R. Hill, 'The Literature of Arabic Alchemy' in Religion: Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period, ed. by M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant (Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 328-341, esp. pp 333-5.
• William Newman, New Light on the Identity of Geber, Sudhoffs Archiv, 1985, Vol.69, pp. 76-90.
• Geber and William Newman The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study ISBN 9004094664

Contributions

Chemistry

Jabir is mostly renowned for his contributions to chemistry. The writings attributed to Jabir emphasise systematic experimentation, . He is credited with the developing of over twenty types of instruments still in use today, such as the alembic and with the discovery and description of many now-commonplace chemical substances and processes – such as the citric, acetic, hydrochloric, tartaric and nitric acids, distillation, and crystallisation.

Alchemy

Jabir became an alchemist at the court of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, for whom he wrote the Kitab al-Zuhra ("The Book of Venus", on "the noble art of alchemy").

Jabir states in his Book of Stones (4:12) that "The purpose is to baffle and lead into error everyone except those whom God loves and provides for". His works seem to have been deliberately written in highly esoteric code (see steganography), so that only those who had been initiated into his alchemical school could understand them. It is therefore difficult at best for the modern reader to discern which aspects of Jabir's work are to be read as symbols (and what those symbols mean), and what is to be taken literally. Because his works rarely made overt sense, the term gibberish is believed to have originally referred to his writings (Hauck, p. 19).

Jabir's alchemical investigations ostensibly revolved around the ultimate goal of takwin — the artificial creation of life. The Book of Stones includes several recipes for creating creatures such as scorpions, snakes, and even humans in a laboratory environment, which are subject to the control of their creator. What Jabir meant by these recipes is today unknown.

Jabir's interest in alchemy was probably inspired by his teacher Ja'far al-Sadiq. Ibn Hayyan was deeply religious, and repeatedly emphasizes in his works that alchemy is possible only by subjugating oneself completely to the will of Allah and becoming a literal instrument of Allah on Earth, since the manipulation of reality is possible only for Allah. The Book of Stones prescribes long and elaborate sequences of specific prayers that must be performed without error alone in the desert before one can even consider alchemical experimentation.

In his writings, Jabir pays tribute to Egyptian and Greek alchemists Hermes Trismegistus, Agathodaimon, Pythagoras, and Socrates. He emphasises the long history of alchemy, "whose origin is Arius ... the first man who applied the first experiment on the [philosopher's] stone... and he declares that man possesses the ability to imitate the workings of Nature" (Nasr, Seyyed Hussein, Science and Civilization of Islam).

Jabir's alchemical investigations were theoretically grounded in an elaborate numerology related to Pythagorean and Neoplatonic systems. The nature and properties of elements was defined through numeric values assigned the Arabic consonants present in their name, ultimately culminating in the number 17.

To Aristotelian physics, Jabir added the four properties of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness (Burkhardt, p. 29). Each Aristotelian element was characterised by these qualities: Fire was both hot and dry, earth cold and dry, water cold and moist, and air hot and moist. This came from the elementary qualities which are theoretical in nature plus substance. In metals two of these qualities were interior and two were exterior. For example, lead was cold and dry and gold was hot and moist. Thus, Jabir theorised, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, based on their sulfur/mercury content, a different metal would result. (Burckhardt, p. 29) This theory appears to have originated the search for al-iksir, the elusive elixir that would make this transformation possible — which in European alchemy became known as the philosopher's stone.

The elemental system used in medieval alchemy was developed by Jabir. His original system consisted of seven elements, which included the five classical elements found in the ancient Greek and Indian traditions (aether, air, earth, fire and water), in addition to two chemical elements representing the metals: sulphur, ‘the stone which burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. Shortly thereafter, this evolved into eight elements, with the Arabic concept of the three metallic principles: sulphur giving flammability or combustion, mercury giving volatility and stability, and salt giving solidity.

Jabir also made important contributions to medicine, astronomy/astrology, and other sciences. Only a few of his books have been edited and published, and fewer still are available in translation. The crater Geber on the Moon is named after him.

He also paved the way for most of the later Islamic alchemists, including al-Kindi, al-Razi, al-Tughrai and al-Iraqi, who lived in the 9th-13th centuries. His books strongly influenced the medieval European alchemists and justified their search for the philosopher's stone.

Legacy

Max Meyerhoff states the following on Jabir ibn Hayyan: "His influence may be traced throughout the whole historic course of European alchemy and chemistry."

The historian of chemistry Erick John Holmyard gives credit to Jabir for developing alchemy into an experimental science and he writes that Jabir's importance to the history of chemistry is equal to that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier.

The historian Paul Kraus, who had studied most of Jabir's extant works in Arabic and Latin, summarized the importance of Jabir ibn Hayyan to the history of chemistry by comparing his experimental and systematic works in chemistry with that of the allegorical and unintelligble works of the ancient Greek alchemists.

Popular culture

• The word gibberish is theorized to be derived from Jabir's name, in reference to the incomprehensible technical jargon often used by alchemists, the most famous of whom was Jabir. Other sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary suggest the term stems from gibber; however, the first known recorded use of the term "gibberish" was before the first known recorded use of the word "gibber" (see Gibberish).

• Geber is mentioned in Paulo Coelho's 1993 bestseller, The Alchemist.

• There is a villain in the Japanese manga and anime series Bio Booster Armor Guyver by the name of Jearvill bun Hiyern (translated in various ways), who is most likely named after ibn Hayyan.

• Jabbir is said to be the creator of a (fictional) mystical chess set in Katherine Neville's novels The Eight and The Fire

Quote

• "My wealth let sons and brethren part. Some things they cannot share: my work well done, my noble heart — these are mine own to wear."

See also

• Alchemy
• Alchemy and chemistry in medieval Islam
• Chemistry
• Al-Kindi
• List of Arab scientists and scholars
• List of Iranian scientists and scholars
• Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi
• Science in medieval Islam

External links

• Britannica
• Encarta Encyclopedia
• Columbia Encyclopedia
• Chemical Heritage
• Article at Islam Online
• Article at Famous Muslims
• Article at Islam Online
• Article at Al Shindagah (includes an extract of Jabir's The Discovery of secrets)
• The Time of Jabir ibn Haiyan section from "History of Islamic Science"