Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber)

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (Arabic: ابو موسی جابربن حیان, Latin: "Geber" or "Geberus"; (al-Barigi tribe / al-Azdi / al-Kufi / al-Tusi / al-Sufi), (born: 721, Tus, Iran, Khurasan; died: 815, Kufa, Iraq), known in the West rather as Geber, was a versatile Persian scientist who lived during the Abbasid period and laid the foundations of the natural sciences in Islam; an alchemist, chemist, and pharmacist; a physicist, astronomer, and astrologer; a specialist in medicine and physical therapy; an engineer, geographer, philosopher, and Sufi.

Life

After receiving his education in Tus, Iran, he migrated to Kufa. Jabir ibn Hayyan is the first known practical scholar of alchemy. He greatly influenced the field of alchemy in medieval Europe and also formed the basis of chemistry. He was a student of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq.

Inventions

As the son of a father who was a chemist and pharmacist, Jabir was born in Khurasan and, after studying in Yemen, went to Kufa and served the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid as a court scholar.

Although he is said to have left more than 400 works across a broad range beyond chemistry—such as pharmacy, metallurgy, astrology, philosophy, physics, and music—only about 20 of his works have survived to the present.

It is thought that he discovered methods for refining and crystallizing nitric acid, hydrogen chloride, and sulfuric acid, invented aqua regia, and discovered diethyl ether, citric acid, acetic acid, and tartaric acid. He developed the "alembic" (الأنبيق al-inbiq) and, with the concept of the base that he introduced, contributed to the development of chemistry.

He is also the first person to have obtained the later-poisonous arsenic powder.

It is thought that he held Agathodaemon, Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, and Socrates in esteem and was influenced by ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, and Shia Sufism.

His work Kitab al-Kimya, which was translated into Latin in the 12th century, became the origin of the words "alchemy" and "chemistry."

He advocated the idea of "the spontaneous generation of living beings and the artificial production of living things." According to Jabir, God first created the four elements—air, water, fire, and earth—and then "willed" from them the formation and reproduction of mineral, plant, animal, and human beings. Jabir, who fundamentally accepted the idea of divine creation, went beyond accepting that some plant and animal species, and even the first human, came into being spontaneously, and even claimed that minerals, plants, animals, and humans could be produced artificially in the laboratory. Jabir explained spontaneous generation with the terms tawlid and tawallud, artificial generation with tawalud and takwin, and the idea of divine creation with the terms kawn and khalq.

Reference books

History of Analytical Chemistry By Ferenc Szabadváry, P 11, ISBN 2-88124-569-2.

The Historical Background of Chemistry By Henry Marshall Leicester, P 63.

Alchemy, Eric John Holmyard, P 68.

Dragon's Brain Perfume an Historical Geography of Camphor, Robin Arthur Donkin, P 137.

The Grand Contraption The World as Myth, Number, and Chance, David Allen Park, P 229.

Cosmology in Gauge Field Theory and String Theory, By David Bailin, Alexander Love, P 181.

The New Book of Knowledge, ISBN 0-7172-0517-7, Page 446.

The Biology of Alcoholism, By Benjamin Kissin, Henri Begleiter, P 576.

Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine, By Thomas F. Glick, Steven John Livesey, Faith Wallis, ISBN 0-415-96930-1, P 280

A History of Chemistry By Forris Jewett Moore, P 15.

E. J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936 By M. Th. Houtsma, E. van Donzel, ISBN 90-04-08265-4, P 989.

In Old Paris, by Robert W. Berger, P 164, ISBN 0-934977-66-6.

Chemical Essays By Richard Watson, P 68

Jabir, archived on the Wayback Machine on 9 April 2010, Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007.

Ahmad Y Hassan, Arabic Alchemy, archived on the Wayback Machine on 19 November 2008, or Persian

A Dictionary of the History of Science by Anton Sebastian - p. 241

The Alchemical Body By David Gordon - p. 366

The Structure and Properties of Matter by Herman Thompson Briscoe - p. 10

The Tincal Trail: A History of Borax by Edward John Cocks, Norman J. Travis - p. 4

William Royall Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1994. pg 94: "According to traditional bio-bibliography of Muslims, Jabir ibn Hayyan was a Persian alchemist who lived at some time in the eight century and wrote a wealth of books on virtually every aspect of natural philosophy"

Sources

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