I have seen people giving themselves over to the search for the art of transmuting gold and silver, in ignorance and without consideration, and I have seen that they are of two types, the deceivers and the deceived. I am filled with feelings of mercy and compassion because they waste their money and weary their bodies in a fruitless search.4
It is unclear here whether he is critical of any attempts to transmute metals into gold and silver or just of those who did not have his knowledge of the mystical art and were therefore frauds. What we do know from his writings, however, is that he was far less interested in transmutation than in the even grander quest for the creation of artificial life in the laboratory – what was known as takwīn – and fancied himself as a medieval Dr Frankenstein.
Despite this, Jābir did much to free up chemistry from its origins in superstition and turn it into an experimental science. In his own words: ‘The first essential in chemistry is that thou should perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery.’5
He was closely associated with Ja’far al-Sādiq (d. 765), the sixth Imam of Shi’ism, who tutored him on theology. And many Shi’a today still proclaim Jābir himself as a spiritual leader and one of the great figures of Islam because of his association with the Imam. Jābir himself, out of respect for his mentor, claimed that his scientific theories were no more than the knowledge passed down to him from Imam Ja’far, which had been transmitted all the way from the Prophet via his son-in-law Ali.
Intriguingly, a number of Muslim alchemists who came after Jābir and who studied his work seem to have tried hard to keep his status and work secret. The tenth-century Baghdadi historian Ibn al-Nadīm, who had no doubts about Jābir’s important place in history, wrote that one group of scholars had told him Jābir had never even existed, and that even if he had he would have written only one book (The Great Book of Mercy); the rest were written by other, later scholars. Al-Nadīm finds this conspiracy to rewrite history hard to believe:
But I assert that if an excellent man sits down and toils to compile a book which comprises two thousand leaves, fatiguing his genius and intelligence in producing it, while wearying his hand and body in transcribing it, and then attributes it to someone else, whether existent or non-existent, it is a form of folly … What profit would there be in this, or what advantage?6
That Jābir is regarded in the West as having been ‘just an alchemist’ probably has more to do with the prejudices of the early European translators of his work than with his own scientific leanings. Some of his most influential books were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, at a time when alchemy was still considered a respectable pursuit in Europe (it would continue to be so, well into the Renaissance). Even Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist later in life and is sometimes referred to as the last of the magicians rather than the first scientist of the age of reason – and he lived nine hundred years after Jābir.
One distinction that was made between the two disciplines is that while chemistry was regarded as the science of matter, alchemy involved the philosophy of matter. But where was this line in the sand between science and philosophy, especially as alchemy also involved scientific notions of experimentation, observation and theory? Perhaps, since Jābir was far more interested in this empiricism than in philosophy, he should be regarded more as a chemist than an alchemist.
Of course, one cannot deny that much of the work of Jābir ibn Hayyān was firmly rooted in superstition and magic, which was not uncommon during those times, and many bizarre and colourful notions can be found in his writing: that impregnating a woman with bird sperm would produce a human child with wings; that putrefied hair generates serpents; and that statues can be used to trap demons within them. But it is the pompous certainty with which some authors have laid claim to their arguments, either denying Jābir’s very existence or simply belittling the impact of his and other medieval chemists’ work, regarding it as mere alchemy, that I wish to address. So, let us explore how this split between alchemy and chemistry first came about.
Unlike its sister science, physics, which arose from natural philosophy, chemistry is a much older discipline and has its origins in practical applications like metallurgy. Indeed, the Greek word chymeia probably came from the word cheein, to smelt metals.7 This chymeia was passed on to become the transliterated Arabic word kīmiyā’. It was used to denote all laboratory operations with materials – in fact, what we would still regard as experimental chemistry today. Another intriguing possible origin of the word (suggested to me by an Iraqi colleague and professor of chemical engineering, Adel Sharif) is that kīmiyā’ originated with the work of Jābir himself, who may not have been familiar with the Greek chymeia, but instead called it ‘the science of quantities’ (’ilm al-kammiya) because of the importance he placed on the precision of measuring the various amounts of substances he mixed together.
The desire to transmute base metals into gold was not seen as a separate field and so there was no need for a different word to define it – although it was often referred to in ancient times simply as the ‘Art’. In Arabic, the definite article al was attached to the word kīmiyā’ to make it al-kīmiyā’. To this day, the Arabic word for ‘chemistry’ is either kīmiyā’ or al-kīmiyā’ and there is no distinction between them other than a grammatical one. It is the latter that then became the Latin word alchymia (or alchemia and alchimia), which appears frequently in medieval Latin. Some Europeans, however, understanding its origin, stripped off the al to return closer to the original Greek and referred to it simply as chymia. The important point is that, even in Latin, both words were used interchangeably. Thus Jābir’s seminal book Kitab al-Kīmiyā’ (The Book of Chemistry) was originally translated from Arabic into Latin by the Englishman Robert of Chester in 1144 as Liber de compositione alchimiae. But as we shall see shortly, it was six hundred years before the word alchimia became ‘alchemy’ and came to have its modern meaning of transmutation.
A number of historians have until recently been lazy in pinpointing the origin of this distinction. Their mistake has been to push the notion that there was a clear and well-understood difference between alchemy and chemistry all the way back to the Islamic golden age. However, even after Europeans began using two different words, ‘chemistry’ and ‘alchemy’, they still did not distinguish between the two. A practitioner was referred to either as a ‘chemist’ or an ‘alchemist’ (the prefix ‘al’ being the only difference, even in modern English, between the two words). Sometimes their meanings were even reversed: before the seventeenth century, transmutation was often referred to as ‘chemistry’ and those who practised laboratory chemistry were referred to as ‘alchemists’. For example, the book Alchemia by Andreas Libavius in 1597 describes many of the standard chemical techniques such as distillation, crystallization and the production of salts and acids, but makes no mention of transmutation of metals into gold.
It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that authors began to apply separate meanings to the two words. Thus, the entry in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (first published in 1751 and one of the great works of the Enlightenment) defines alchimie as ‘the art of transmuting metals’, whereas chimie is ‘the science which concerns separation and unifications of the principles making up bodies’.8 It is this distinction that has reached us today.
Some historians of science, sympathetic to the achievements of early Muslim chemists such as Jābir or the great al-Rāzi (who was better known as a physician), argue that these men knew the distinction between chemistry and alchemy and that they, and other enlightened Islamic rationalists such as the philosophers al-Kindi and Ibn Sīna, even dismissed alchemy, much as they shunned astrological beliefs in favour of serious astronomical observations. While this is true for some of these later Islamic scholars,9 it is not quite so clear in the case of Jābir. In any case, I do not see that such a stance is necessary in order to legitimize the ac
hievements of Jābir in chemistry. After all, was Aristotle a fool for believing in the four elements theory of matter? Was Plato any less of a genius for his adherence to the intromission theory of vision (that claimed we see objects by emitting light from our eyes)? Indeed, was Isaac Newton less worthy of the mantle of the greatest scientist who ever lived for his own obsession with alchemy? Hindsight is wonderful, but we should not project back our modern scientific ideas and values onto a very different time. Referring to Jābir ibn Hayyān as an alchemist rather than a chemist (according to our modern definitions of the two words) is rather like referring to the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy as an astrologer.
To take one example, Jābir believed that all metals are composed of sulphur and mercury in different proportions. While every schoolchild now knows this notion to be quite wrong, Jābir’s motives for studying the nature of matter, as well as many of the experimental techniques he perfected, are still just as valid today. Similarly, Ptolemy believed in the geocentric model of the universe with the stars and planets fixed to rotating spheres around a central earth, which we today know to be a completely discredited notion. This does not diminish Ptolemy’s place in history. Science advances, and Jābir’s rudimentary chemistry evolved, just as Ptolemy’s astronomy did.
Chemistry and alchemy were therefore not separate disciplines during the time of Jābir. One did not evolve into the other – they did not even run in parallel. Part of chemistry dealt with the occult and mysticism, other parts dealt with practical applications in industry, and yet others with a genuine attempt to understand, categorize and classify substances based on careful experimentation. All were present in the early work of Jābir ibn Hayyān. While the final shift from the occult to a real experimental science took place a little after Jābir, he was without doubt the first scientist to go beyond the theories of the Greeks, and he revolutionized the way science was carried out. He stressed careful observation, controlled experiments and accurate records, in contrast with much of Greek chemistry that was either based on hypotheses and metaphysical notions or scientifically sterile practical applications.10
Jābir’s writing covered a vast range of subjects. He was interested not only in the theory and practice of chemical processes and the classification of substances, but in pharmacology, medicine, philosophy, cosmology, logic, music and numerology – in a way very similar to the broad interests of many of the Greek philosophers a thousand years before him. Much of his writing was of a religious character, and his work on alchemy does tend to be shrouded in secrecy, with warnings from his mentor and religious master Imam Ja’far that it should not fall into the hands of the unworthy. Much later, when the work had been translated into Latin, European scholars managed to wrap it up in even more mystery and confusion. Historians have even questioned whether this labyrinth of chemical and alchemical writing (known as the Jabirian Corpus) is completely authentic.
And there is a more serious problem than simply one of provenance. The French historian Paul Kraus showed in the 1940s that the almost three thousand works attributed to Jābir ibn Hayyān could not possibly have been written by one man, for they contain too much disparity in both style and content. This issue has been subject to conflicting opinion and speculation by historians over the past century and is referred to in academic circles as the ‘Jābir Problem’. The issue is not so much the obscurity of the writing as whether Jābir was in fact the true author of this huge body of work. For instance, it is argued that the Jabirian Corpus displays numerous indications linking it to the much later Isma’īli movement of Fātimid times, implying that most of the works attributed to Jābir in the eighth century were probably written between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Other parts of the Corpus survive only in Latin and no evidence has been found of any earlier Arabic versions, possibly implying that there never were any, and that they were first composed by European scholars in Latin in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Even during early Islamic times, controversies raged. A philosopher by the name of al-Mantiqī wrote in 970 CE, less than two centuries after Jābir’s death, that the Jabirian works were apocryphal and that the true author was a personal friend of his by the name of al-Hassan al-Mawsilī (not a view many take seriously).
However, the sheer volume and breadth of the Corpus that has reached us has convinced scholars that there had to be at least one other much later author, who is referred to as Pseudo-Geber. The most famous work attributed to this mysterious scholar is the Summa perfectionis magisterii, an alchemical treatise probably written in the thirteenth century. For many years, Pseudo-Geber could not be associated with any historical personality, although it was commonly agreed that he was probably Italian. Relatively recently,11 it has been suggested that he was a Franciscan monk named Paul of Taranto, who lectured in the monastery of the Friars Minor in Assisi during the second half of the thirteenth century. Even if this is true, it is nevertheless quite likely that Paul of Taranto relied in his Summa on a Latin version of a work originally composed in Arabic by al-Rāzi as well as on the Latin translation, Liber de septuaginta, of Jābir’s The Book of Seventy (Kitab al-Sab’īn). So while much of the Jabirian Corpus may not have been directly written by Jābir himself, he certainly influenced these later scholars.
It was in the 1920s that the debate really raged about the credibility of Jābir and his achievements in chemistry. While I am mindful I must not allow this discussion to sink too far into the intellectual quicksands of academic debate, I have to admit that I have found it fascinating to explore the way historians of science have argued both for and against Jābir’s place in history. Below is an extract from a typical scholarly paper written in 1922 that argues that Jābir ibn Hayyān’s chemistry was so advanced that it could not possibly be credited to him:
A notable perversion of history was the appearance in about 1300 A.D. of certain writings important in the history of chemistry purporting to be the work of the Arabian Geber, which was the Latinized name of Djaber [Jābir ibn Hayyān]. The real Djaber lived probably about the eighth century, and little is known of his personality. He is, however, considered by later Arabian alchemists as of high repute in the art … The works appearing under the name of Geber were very notable, and made a great impression in the fourteenth century. They were manifestly the work of an experienced and capable chemist familiar with and describing well the methods of distillation, sublimation and the preparation and purification of many metallic salts and solutions. They contained our first definite information concerning the preparation and use of mineral acids – or corrosive ‘waters’. The credulous Middle Ages accepted generally without question the authenticity of these works as being by the eighth-century Geber, and the early historians of chemistry accepted this interpretation … It remained for M. Berthelot to establish beyond doubt the pseudonymous character of these writings. In the libraries of Europe he located and had translated a number of works, manuscripts in Arabic credited to the original Geber. None of these works bore any resemblance in style or contents to the work of the Pseudo-Geber. They are indeed much more like the early Greek alchemical writings upon which they are manifestly based. The acceptance of these thirteenth- or fourteenth-century writings as of Arabian origin in the eighth century up to very recent times has had the result of early Arabian chemists receiving credit for an advanced knowledge of chemistry which has not been evidenced by any Arabian literature known at the present time. This advanced knowledge is rather to be credited to some European chemists, probably both Muhammedans and Christians, of the latter part of the thirteenth century, and the Pseudo-Geber was probably not himself Arabian but a Latin-writing Spaniard or at any rate from some other country of southern Europe conversant with the development of Spanish-Arabian chemistry of that period.12
Here is the problem with this viewpoint: the historian Berthelot referred to in the quote was a chemist and not an Arabist. Indeed, he spoke no Arabic and had to rely on a translator, who was not a chemist. Unfortunately, this division of la
bour led to a number of misinterpretations and many mistranslations of technical terms, rendering the whole study discredited.13
Despite such misgivings over the reliability of certain analyses of the Jabirian Corpus, there still remains the serious issue of its sheer size and the mysterious circumstances under which some of it purported to have been written. The primary reason for many historians’ belief in the later dating of the Corpus and its multiple authorship is that there were simply too many treatises for one man to have written. But in fact the huge figure of three thousand separate works in the Corpus is exaggerated and there are actually fewer than one thousand.14 Many ‘books’ are really just one-page manuscripts, and there are gaps in the numbering of the catalogue. Of course, even a conservative estimate of five hundred books is still a huge legacy for one man.
In a sense, the authenticity of the entirety of the Corpus is not really a problem. Just because later authors attributed their work to Jābir does not invalidate or diminish his own contribution. The consensus today is that it is safe to assume the existence of an authentic core of writing dating back to Jābir in the eighth century, but that much of the Corpus grew around this core and was added later. It seems that a large number of texts appeared originally in Latin and have no Arabic origin, but were falsely attributed to Jābir to lend credibility to their authors.15
What is more interesting is the quite separate issue of the constant reference to Greek texts in parts of the Corpus. It has been argued that this is proof that it could not have been the work of Jābir. The translations from Greek into Arabic, and hence an appreciation of the work of Aristotle and others, did not really take place until after Jābir’s death. But we have seen how these translations, either first into Syriac and then Arabic, or directly into Arabic, were made several times, each version correcting errors in previous translations with a better understanding of the content. A nice example is Aristotle’s Categories, a hugely important philosophical work, which was thought to have been first translated into Arabic by Ishāq ibn Hunayn, son of the more famous Hunayn ibn Ishāq, in the mid-ninth century. But an account of this text in the Jabirian Corpus is very different from Ishāq’s version. There is good reason to believe, from the archaic style of the language, terminology and structure, that it could have initially been translated before Ishāq’s time, and that Jābir could therefore have been aware of it.16 If true, this hints not only at the impressive extent of Jābir’s knowledge, but at an earlier date for the first translations of many more of the Greek texts than is commonly thought.
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