Alchemy (Islam)

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Alchemy in Islam differs from the general alchemy in certain ways, one of which is that Muslim alchemists didn't believe in the creation of life in the laboratory. In Islam, alchemy means the early chemical investigation of nature in general, much like chemistry. The word alchemy itself was derived from the Arabic word الكيمياء al-kimia.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Islamic World. Much more is known about Islamic alchemy because it was better documented: indeed, most of the earlier writings that have come down through the years were preserved as Islamic translations. (Burckhardt p. 46)

The Islamic world was a melting pot for alchemy. Platonic and Aristotelian thought, which had already been somewhat appropriated into hermetical science, continued to be assimilated. Islamic alchemists such as al-Razi (Latin Rasis or Rhazes) and Jabir ibn Hayyan (Latin Geber) contributed key chemical discoveries of their own, such as the technique of distillation (the words alembic and alcohol are of Arabic origin), the muriatic(hydrochloric), sulfuric, and nitric acids, soda, potash, and more. (From the Arabic names of the last two substances, al-natrun and al-qalīy, Latinized into Natrium and Kalium, come the modern symbols for sodium and potassium.) The discovery that aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, could dissolve the noblest metal; gold, was to fuel the imagination of alchemists for the next millennium.

Islamic philosophers also made great contributions to alchemical hermeticism. The most influential author in this regard was arguably Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Arabic جابر إبن حيان, Latin Geberus; usually rendered in English as Geber). He analyzed each Aristotelian element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness. (Burkhardt, p. 29) According to Geber, in each metal two of these qualities were interior and two were exterior. For example, lead was externally cold and dry, while gold was hot and moist. Thus, Jabir theorized, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, a different metal would result. (Burckhardt, p. 29) By this reasoning, the search for the philosopher's stone was introduced to Western alchemy. Jabir developed an elaborate numerology whereby the root letters of a substance's name in Arabic, when treated with various transformations, held correspondences to the element's physical properties.