Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Arabic: أَبو موسى جابِر بِن حَيّان, variously called al-Ṣūfī, al-Azdī, al-Kūfī, or al-Ṭūsī), died c. 806−816, is the purported author of a large number of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The c. 215 treatises that survive today mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope of the corpus was vast, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar. The works attributed to Jabir, which are tentatively dated to c. 850 – c. 950, contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, and the oldest known instructions for deriving an inorganic compound (sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride) from organic substances (such as plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means. His works also contain one of the earliest known versions of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that would remain dominant until the 18th century. A significant part of Jabir's writings deal with a philosophical theory known as "the science of the balance" (Arabic: ʿilm al-mīzān), which was aimed at reducing all phenomena (including material substances and their elements) to a system of measures and quantitative proportions. The Jabirian works also contain some of the earliest preserved Shi'ite imamological doctrines, which Jabir presented as deriving from his purported master, the Shi'ite Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (died 765). As early as the 10th century, the identity and exact corpus of works of Jabir was in dispute in Islamic scholarly circles. The authorship of all these works by a single figure, and even the existence of a historical Jabir, are also doubted by modern scholars. Instead, Jabir ibn Hayyan is generally thought to have been a pseudonym used by an anonymous school of Shi'ite alchemists writing in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. Some Arabic Jabirian works (e.g., The Great Book of Mercy, and The Book of Seventy) were translated into Latin under the Latinized name Geber, and in 13th-century Europe an anonymous writer, usually referred to as pseudo-Geber, started to produce alchemical and metallurgical writings under this name.
Biography
Historicity It is not clear whether Jabir ibn Hayyan ever existed as a historical person. He is purported to have lived in the 8th century, and to have been a disciple of the Shi'ite Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (died 765). However, he is not mentioned in any historical source before c. 900, and the first known author to write about Jabir from a biographical point of view was the Baghdadi bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm (c. 932–995). In his Fihrist ("The Book Catalogue", written in 987), Ibn al-Nadīm compiled a list of Jabir's works, adding a short notice on the various claims that were then circulating about Jabir. Already in Ibn al-Nadīm's time, there were some people who explicitly asserted that Jabir had never existed, although Ibn al-Nadīm himself disagreed with this claim. Jabir was often ignored by later medieval Islamic biographers and historians, but even early Shi'ite biographers such as Aḥmad al-Barqī (died c. 893), Abū ʿAmr al-Kashshī (first half of the 10th century), Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Najāshī (983–1058), and Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭūsī (995–1067), who wrote long volumes on the companions of the Shi'ite Imams (including the many companions of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq), did not mention Jabir at all.
Dating of the Jabirian corpus Apart from outright denying his existence, there were also some who, already in Ibn al-Nadīm's time, questioned whether the writings attributed to Jabir were really written by him. The authenticity of these writings was expressly denied by the Baghdadi philosopher Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī (c. 912–985) and his pupil Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (c. 932–1023), though this may have been related to the hostility of both these thinkers to alchemy in general. Modern scholarly analysis has tended to confirm the inauthenticity of the writings attributed to Jabir. Much of the philosophical terminology used in the Jabirian treatises was only coined around the middle of the 9th century, and some of the Greek philosophical texts cited in the Jabirian writings are known to have been translated into Arabic towards the end of the 9th century. Moreover, an important part of the corpus deals with early Shi'ite religious philosophy that is elsewhere only attested in late 9th-century and early 10th-century sources. As a result, the dating of the Jabirian corpus to c. 850–950 has been widely accepted in modern scholarship. However, it has also been noted that many Jabirian treatises show clear signs of having been redacted multiple times, and the writings as we now have them may well have been based on an earlier 8th-century core. Despite the obscurity involved, it is not impossible that some of these writings, in their earliest form, were written by a real Jabir ibn Hayyan. In any case, it is clear that Jabir's name was used as a pseudonym by one or more anonymous Shi'ite alchemists writing in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, who also redacted the corpus as we now know it.
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