Jabir ibn Hayyan: The founder of chemistry
Jabir ibn Hayyan was born in 721 CE in Khorasan, straddling Iran and Central Asia, towards the northeastern frontier of the Islamic world. Under the leadership of the Umayyad dynasty, the Muslim empire had recently reached its remarkable peak, stretching all the way from Spain to China, via North Africa – all managed by a staggeringly efficient bureaucracy, inherited from the Sassanids and Byzantines. Trouble, however, was brewing.
As discontent spread amongst non-Arabs, a subgroup of Mohammed’s Hashemite clan, known as the Abbasids, emerged in Khorasan, rustling up support for their own dynasty. Among their early supporters was Jabir’s father, Hayyan, a Yemeni druggist who left his home in Kufa, Iraq, to stoke the flames of revolution. When the Umayyads caught wind of the emerging coup, Hayyan was captured and executed, forcing his family to flee to their homeland of
