User:Inahet/Holmyard

Taken from E.J. Holmyard's Makers of Chemistry pp. 49 - pp. 50

pp. 49

§18. Jabir ibn Hayyan

The greatest chemist of Islam has long been familiar to Western readers under the name of Geber, which is the medieval render­ing of the Arabic Jabir. For our knowledge of Jabir's life, we now have a not insignificant collection of data, and can recon­struct his figure with reasonable accuracy. Although much is conjectural, the following may be taken to represent, in brief, what we know of him.

In A.D. 638 the Caliph Omar was visited at Medina by a deputation of Arabs from Al-Meda'in, a town on the Tigris that they had recently conquered. The Caliph was startled by their sallow and unwholesome look, and asked the cause. They replied that the air of the town did not suit the Arab tempera­ment, and the Caliph therefore ordered inquiry for some more healthy and congenial spot. A plain on the banks of the western branch of the Euphrates was finally chosen, and there the city of Kufa was founded. The new town suited the Arabs well, and to it they accordingly migrated in great numbers. But the dwellings were at first made of reeds, and fires were frequent, so after a particularly disastrous conflagra­tion the city was rebuilt with less inflammable material, and the streets were laid out in regular lines. In orderly fashion, be­fitting a military station, the various Arab tribes were settled in particular quarters of the town—no doubt with a view to the prevention of civil commotion.

One of the tribes whose members were present at Kufa in sufficient numbers to be assigned a definite quarter was that known as Al-Azd, a celebrated tribe of South Arabia. From this tribe there sprang, towards the end of the seventh century A.D., a man named Hayyan, who carried on the business of a druggist

pp. 50

at Kufa. His life would appear to have been uneventful until the early years of the eighth century, when we find that he espoused the cause of the powerful 'Abbasid family, who were trying to overthrow the reigning Caliph of the house of Umayya in order to usurp his place. To further their plans, the 'Abbasids engaged in extensive political propaganda, and Hayyan was sent as an emissary to Persia on this business. It was while he and his wife were at the town of Tus, in Khorasan, near the modern Meshed, that his son Jabir was born, probably in the year a.d. 721 or 722. Shortly afterwards, Hayyan was arrested by agents of the Caliph and was subsequently executed.

The now fatherless Jabir ibn [son of] Hayyan was sent to Arabia, perhaps to his kinsmen of the Azd tribe, to be cared for until he was old enough to fend for himself. Whilst in Arabia, he studied the Koran, mathematics and other subjects under a scholar named Harbi al-Himyari, of whom unfortunately we have no record. Meanwhile the 'Abbasids, in whose service Jabir's father had lost his life, succeeded in achieving their object. In A.D. 748 they overthrew the Umayyads and themselves assumed the Caliphate, so that Hayyan had not died in vain. It was under the 'Abbasid caliphs, the most famous of whom was Harun al-Rashid, that Islamic civilization reached its zenith.

During the period in which these political changes were taking place, Jabir appears to have won the friendship of the Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, one of whose disciples he became. Ja'far was a man held in very high esteem by a section of Muslims known as the Shi'ites, and the Shi'ites themselves had been active in support of the 'Abbasid cause. These facts, coupled with the recollection of Hayyan's activity in the same direction, enable us to understand how Jabir in middle life came to be welcomed at the Court of Harun al-Rashid at Baghdad. He does not seem to have had much personal contact with the sovereign himself, but he was on intimate terms with the Caliph's all-powerful ministers the Barmecides, some of whom figure in The Thousand and One Nights.

On one occasion we find him accompanying his patrons to the