Was Jabir Ibn Hayyan The Founder of Modern Chemistry?

Executive Summary

• Muslims have created yet another story of how some intellectual achievement is actually based upon the previous work of a Muslim.
• In this article, we review the claims that Jabir Ibn Hayyan was the founder of modern chemistry.

Introduction

This article covers yet another Muslim claim that one Muslim founded something that has been generally accepted to have been founded by Europeans.

Muslim Video on Jabir Ibn Hayyan

However, even after the analysis of the development of chemistry shows a European origin of science, Muslims have another video claiming that the actual inventors of chemistry were Muslims.

What Were the Major Discoveries and Contributions of Alchemy?

This is explained in the following quotation from the article How did alchemy influence chemistry?

Alchemists invented experimental techniques (distillation, for example) and laboratory tools (funnels, flasks, cupels, etc.) still used by chemists today. They were also the first to isolate certain metals we now know to be elements, including antimony, arsenic and zinc.

The earliest practical knowledge of chemistry was concerned with metallurgy, pottery, and dyes; these crafts were developed with considerable skill, but with no understanding of the principles involved, as early as 3500 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

These discoveries are presented as substantial. They certainly are nothing. However, the problem is that alchemy was practiced in many different places around the world for many, many hundreds of years. As you can see from this quote, the practice may have begun roughly 5,500 years ago. The collective contributions of alchemy are incredibly small, and when one considers the amount of effort invested and the many centuries over which it was exercised, alchemy must be viewed as providing a very poor return on these investments.

This video explains that the claims by Muslims of being foundational to European science are not true. The works of Aristotle, for example, were not translated from Arabic until the 12th century, by which time Europeans had been studying them for over 200 years from their own sources. 

Muslims and Their Contributions to Alchemy and Chemistry

The Muslims brought alchemy to Europe in the 12th century, having studied it for 400 years. This was a translation from Greek that, unlike the earlier described Greek texts, the Europeans did not possess.

However, the problem with viewing this as a basis for later developments in chemistry was that alchemy was a dead end that consumed an enormous number of years and even became an obsession of one of the great scientific minds — Issac Newton.

Alchemy is a form of false knowledge, but some foundational ideas used in alchemy testing proved beneficial not for alchemy (which is not possible) but for other purposes. Western alchemists had to depart from the ideas of the Arabic alchemists.

However, the standard narrative seems to interpret everything as being “based on something else.” That would be true if Arabic alchemy were true, but it was not. Alchemy was a pipe dream, and the only beneficial thing that persisted from it was the testing approach and the tools used to try to make it work. However, this video points out that this testing approach existed in Europe.

The testing approach or “experimentalism” developed by Arabic alchemists was not necessary for Europeans to develop chemistry. That is, it was not a “unique contribution.”

Furthermore, the concept of 7 elements of matter, aether, water, fire, earth, wind, mercury, and sulfur, which greatly influenced medical alchemy, is also a false insight. The acceptance of the 7-element hypothesis held back the development of chemistry, which did not occur until the 17th century, but in Europe.

Alchemy almost seems to have appealed to scholars with marginal mental stability, as the following quote suggests.

Esoteric systems developed that blended alchemy into a broader occult Hermeticism, fusing it with magic, astrology, and Christian cabala.

A key figure in this development was German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), who received his Hermetic education in Italy in the schools of the humanists. In his De Occulta Philosophia, he attempted to merge Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy. – Wikipedia

This type of quote makes one wonder how much productive work was being done in all of these alchemy studies. When you search for ways to transmute materials into precious metals, it ends up entangling you in Kabbalah; this is a problem. And it certainly was a repeated problem with alchemy. See the following quote.

Although most of these appointments were legitimate, the trend of pseudo-alchemical fraud continued through the Renaissance. Betrüger would use sleight of hand, or claims of secret knowledge to make money or secure patronage. Legitimate mystical and medical alchemists such as Michael Maier and Heinrich Khunrath wrote about fraudulent transmutations, distinguishing themselves from the con artists.[92] False alchemists were sometimes prosecuted for fraud. – Wikipedia

One might wonder why, after 400 years, the Muslim scholars did not begin to think that the entire practice was not valid.

How Much Time Did Europe Waste on Alchemy?

If one considers the time wasted alone by Issac Newton wasted on alchemy and what he might have discovered if he had realized that Alchemy was an impossibility, one comes to some idea of the negative impact of Muslim scholarship on Europe. However, many European scholars devoted time to alchemy, which could have been spent on more productive endeavors.

Did this compensate for the small number of tools or instruments that Muslim alchemists provided to Europe? I would say no. However, what is curious is that the question is never asked.

Furthermore, let us remember that the time lag between Muslim scholars communicating alchemy to Europe and the development of chemistry was 500 years. That is 500 years of largely wasted effort, although the effort invested in alchemy varied over those centuries. Before Muslims communicated alchemy to Europe, they had worked on it for 400 years. That is 900 years of effort that ended in a dead end.

To this day, no one has converted other materials into gold. This must rank as one of the, if not the worst, investments of intellectual effort in human history. In fact, the investment of time into alchemy is a testament to a lack of understanding of material science.

Based on this feeble evidence, modern Muslims take credit for both the development of chemistry in Europe and the development of the scientific method, a claim made by this video by Al Jazeera.

Chemistry Explained by Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera produced this video. Al Jazeera is 100% funded by Qatar’s government, a country with no freedom of speech protections, and which has the slick production values of Western media, but is really a propaganda channel that promotes Islam around the world and undermines white societies. 

Al Jazeera claims that all chemistry is based on the discoveries of Islamic scholars. The video claims that Islamic scholars invented empirical testing that later drove the development of chemistry. However, these contributions were communicated to Europe in the 12th century, but chemistry did not emerge as a field until the 18th century.

How Much Progress Did Muslim Scientists Make in 400 Years of Alchemy?

Something else pointed out in the video undercuts the argument of Muslim intellectual property in alchemy. At the 42-minute mark of the video, it is noted that by the middle of the 13th century, European scholars were no longer reading Islamic alchemy texts. Instead, they were writing their own books on alchemy. See this quote.

And that around this time, the recovery of the rest of the classical canon was completed, and European scholars were turning their attention from Arabic sources, and turning to the newly available Greek sources, which in many cases they considered to be superior.  – Veritas et Caritas

So, the question arises. If Muslim scholars had 400 years to improve alchemy, and yet once the European scholars became available, they turned back to the original Greek texts on alchemy, what does that tell us about the progress made by Muslim scholars in that 400-year period?

When Did Alchemy Peter Out in Europe?

Observe this quote for when European scholars moved away from alchemy.

The decline of European alchemy was brought about by the rise of modern science with its emphasis on rigorous quantitative experimentation and its disdain for “ancient wisdom”.

Although the seeds of these events were planted as early as the 17th century, alchemy still flourished for some two hundred years, and in fact may have reached its peak in the 18th century. As late as 1781 James Price claimed to have produced a powder that could transmute mercury into silver or gold. – Wikipedia

Yes, European scientists moved away from alchemy when experimentation became stronger and more quantitative, and when they turned away or broke from more traditional ideas. This is consistent because the more you understand about materials and materials science, the less potential there appears to be for alchemy.

The Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, and Greeks thought alchemy was an opportunity because they knew so little about material science.

Let us take one quote from Indian alchemy.

The goals of alchemy in India included the creation of a divine body (Sanskrit divya-deham) and immortality while still embodied (Sanskrit jīvan-mukti). Sanskrit alchemical texts include much material on the manipulation of mercury and sulphur, that are homologized with the semen of the god Śiva and the menstrual blood of the goddess Devī. – Wikipedia

That is religious or mystical and has nothing to do with science. And science and mysticism — considered essential bedfellows in ancient times– are incompatible with one another.

Understanding How Alchemy Was Different Than Chemistry

A major part of the inaccuracy in the Islamic presentation of their place in the world and their scientific and related contributions. When Muslims take something from another group, they tend not to emphasize that fact. For example, Muslims took alchemy from other cultures. As with other cultures, they never made much progress with it, as alchemy focuses on chemical interactions, when the only way to produce actual alchemy is to engage in nuclear fusion (combining lighter elements into heavier elements like gold).

However, when Muslims then claim that their work inspired chemistry, there is first an exaggeration of this contribution, but also the Muslims then tend to minimize the fact that they did not originate alchemy, and alchemy was being practiced in many parts of the world at the same time both before Muslim societies began experimenting with it, and for a long period of time while Muslims were experiment with it. Muslims have no more of a legitimate claim to have inspired European chemistry than the Chinese, Indians, or Greeks, who also experimented with alchemy. Alchemy was introduced into Latin Europe in roughly 1150. This included the dissemination of Arabic alchemy works. 1150 is roughly 300 years after Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s works were published — which, if the claims about the importance of Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s works in contributing to the development of chemistry are true, should have given Muslim societies a massive advantage in developing chemistry.

Chemistry did not originate in the Muslim world; it first rose in Europe.

Let us review the pioneers in chemistry.

Who Were the Pioneers of Chemistry?

Pioneers in the area included Jan Baptist van Helmont (a Dutchman) and Robert Boyle (an English/Irishman). Robert Boyle is credited with separating chemistry from alchemy. (see this source), Although Boyle was doing his work in the mid-1600s, it was still a very experimental version of what would later come to be called chemistry.

Contemplating the Bizarreness of Alchemy

It’s hard to imagine how ridiculous alchemy was, but for context, one of its foundational hypotheses was that there were four “elements” — Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. Obviously, chemistry does not accept these as elements today. Boyle proposed the atomic hypothesis. In fact, if you look back at alchemists, nothing they hypothesized is accepted today, and alchemy can be viewed as a lot of dead ends and crazy hypotheses, along with some ancillary benefits that came from spending many centuries investigating matter.

The entire history of alchemy is filled with loony beliefs and offshoots into entirely surprising areas of thought, as the quote from this article Alchemy explains.

During the Renaissance, Hermetic and Platonic foundations were restored to European alchemy.

The dawn of medical, pharmaceutical, occult, and entrepreneurial branches of alchemy followed.

In the late 15th century, Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum and the works of Plato into Latin. These were previously unavailable to Europeans who for the first time had a full picture of the alchemical theory that Bacon had declared absent. Renaissance Humanism and Renaissance Neoplatonism guided alchemists away from physics to refocus on mankind as the alchemical vessel.

I actually don’t even understand the sentence “guided away from physics to refocus on mankind as the alchemical vessel.”

I think it is just difficult for a modern person to understand how bizarre alchemy was — but it is widely known to have combined the analysis of physical phenomena with mystical aspects. A synopsis of alchemy (no easy feat) is found in the following quotation from the article How did alchemy influence chemistry?

The field that had the most direct impact on the birth of modern chemistry was alchemy. Alchemy was a combination of philosophy, religion, and primitive science whose chief goal was the perfection of matter. This goal included the conversion of metals into gold and the discovery of a potion that would cure all disease.

Therefore, the same area of study that attempted to transmute metals also focused on developing healing potions.

In general, alchemists sought to manipulate the properties of matter in order to prepare more valuable substances. Their most familiar quest was to find the philosopher’s stone, a magical substance that would transmute ordinary metals such as copper, tin, iron, or lead into silver or gold. Simplified, the aims of the alchemists were threefold: to find the Stone of Knowledge (The Philosophers’ Stone), to discover the medium of Eternal Youth and Health, and to discover the transmutation of metals.

Alchemy was based more on experimentation and had little basis in science. Chemistry utilizes both experimentation and scientific practices. Many chemists believe chemistry became a proper science in the eighteenth century.

To give you an idea of the strange ideas held by Jābir ibn Hayyān, see this quote from the article Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān.

Astrology also played an important part in Jābir’s system. The stars were not only constituents of the world but they also influenced earthly events. All natural substances had specific properties that linked them to the upper world, and this link allowed talismans to be used effectively. The talisman bore the power of the stars and, when used properly, could provide domination over events.

Thus, for Jābir, the same causality determined astrology and alchemy. Both sciences imitated the Creator, since Creator and alchemist worked with the same materials and were governed by the same laws.

Obviously, this interaction between astrology and materials on earth is known to be incorrect.

Jābir ibn Ḥayyān is important for both the history of alchemy and the development of Islamic culture. Although from the vantage point of later centuries his scientific thought seems strange and superstitious, he did help to advance chemical theory and experiment. In searching for the secret of transmutation, he mastered many basic chemical techniques, such as sublimation and distillation, and became familiar with the preparation and properties of many basic chemicals.

Jābir was a skilled and ingenious experimenter, and he described for the first time how to prepare nitric acid. More clearly than any other early chemist, he stated and recognized the importance of the experimental process. In his work he also described and suggested improvements in such chemical technological processes as dyeing and glass-making.

His sulfur-mercury theory persisted and was at last modified into the phlogiston theory of Johann Becher and George Stahl in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the guise of Jābir’s works, Arabic alchemy exerted considerable influence on the development of modern chemistry.

That is good that some things were used from his work — however, this does not make a person the “father of chemistry.” It seems impossible that a man could be called the father of chemistry when roughly 950 years passed between the publication of Hayyan’s works and chemistry being considered established as a science.

Getting Back to Prominent Early Chemists

Other prominent early chemists include Carl Whilhem Scheele (a German/Swede), Joseph Black (a Scot), Joseph Priestley (an Englishman ), and Henry Cavendish (an Englishman).

Towards the more applied phase of chemistry, we have men like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta (both Italians) developing electrochemistry and the first batteries, and Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier and Claude Louis Berthollet, Pierre-Simon Laplace  (all Frenchmen).

I am not going to list all the prominent chemists, but my list goes up to the turn of the 19th century. However, the 1800s also contained even more European men and no Muslim men. In fact, it’s very difficult to find any Muslims names among the most prominent early chemists. Muslims argue that although Muslim, European, Chinese, and Indian cultures investigated alchemy for hundreds of years, the European breakthroughs that eventually led to modern chemistry, such as those by Robert Boyle, rejected nearly all alchemical principles and hypotheses. Furthermore, it appears that Muslims were working on alchemy hundreds of years earlier than Europeans, which should have given them a major advantage (following their logic that alchemy leads to chemistry) in the development of chemistry.

Who is Generally Thought to be the Father of Modern Chemistry?

Well, outside of Muslims, it is not Jabir Ibn Hayyan. The following quote is from the article How did alchemy influence chemistry?.

Lavoisier has been considered by many scholars to be the “father of chemistry”. Chemists continued to discover new compounds in the 1800s. The science also began to develop a more theoretical foundation. John Dalton (1766-1844) put forth his atomic theory in 1807.

Conclusion

Jabir Ibn Hayyan lived in the 8th century. The claims are that Hayyan founded chemistry. He appears to have written impressive works on alchemy, the best of their time, and it is disputed whether the works were his. See this quote from the article Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān.

In some lists, the writings that bear Jābir’s name number more than three thousand. According to many scholars, these works are sufficiently different in style, vocabulary, approach, and content to establish separate authorship for many of them.

For example, in some of the works certain terms from late ninth century Greek translations are used, indicating that they were written long after Jābir’s death. Many historians of science now regard as probable the thesis that, though some of these works may have been written by Jābir, most were composed by members of the Ismālīs, a Shīՙite sect that believed that Muḥammad ibn Ismāil was the seventh imam and which was particularly interested in mysticism, numerology, alchemy, and astrology. Although some recent scholars are more willing than their earlier colleagues to grant historical reality to Jābir and his works, all agree that many of the surviving writings contain later Ismālī modifications and additions.

To complicate matters further, several alchemical texts that appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with Jābir’s name have no Arabic equivalents, and their style and content reveal that they were written by a Western, most likely Spanish, alchemist who lived in the later Middle Ages. This anonymous Spanish alchemist adopted Jābir’s name to add authority to his work. Scholars therefore completely disregard the Latin texts by Jābir and exclusively consider the Arabic texts when discussing Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the Jabirian writings remain unstudied, even though they constitute the most significant body of alchemical works in Arabic and a principal source of Latin alchemy.

For simplicity’s sake, let us just allocate the credit to Muslims for doing the work that is attributed to a person who may or may not have lived, named Jabir Ibn Hayyan. Although it is a problem that Muslims are proposing that a man named Jābir ibn Hayyān had an enormous number of works attributed to him, many of which he certainly did not write.

Anyway, if these works were highly contributory to the development of chemistry, some interesting questions arise.

Natural Questions for Those That Propose Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s Work as Being Foundational to the Development of Chemistry

1. The earliest movement away from alchemy toward rudimentary chemistry would have been in the mid-1600s. That is roughly 800 years after Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s work was published. If his work was so instrumental to the development of chemistry, why did the earliest chemistry develop 800 years after his work appeared, and 950 years pass until chemistry was considered an actual mature area of science? Wouldn’t Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s work have given a significant advantage to Muslims who had access to his writings in the development of chemistry? And this leads to the second point.
2.  Jabir Ibn Hayyan lived in Iran, or perhaps a number of Shiite men whose work was attributed to him did. However, chemistry was developed in Europe. If Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s works are foundational to chemistry, why was chemistry not developed in either Iran or another Muslim country? Why did all the developments in chemistry occur outside the Islamic world?

The most straightforward answer is that Jabir Ibn Hayyan’s work is not as instrumental as Muslims claim, and it did not move other Muslims who followed Hayyan toward developing chemistry.

All of this is consistent with the false claims about discoveries in the Golden Age of Islam, which I cover in the article “How Accurate is the Standard Presentation of the Islamic Golden Age?“