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There are sources in Farsi, which say al-Azdi (as nisba of Jabir) means Yazdi (belonging to Yazd city in Iran), so Jaber is directly a Persian. Other variants of the word Yazd are Ayzd and Izad.
If any one could find a reliable source which denotes this, please add it to the article. Perscience (talk) 14:31, 2 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Al-Azd is attributed to the Arab tribe only. The person is attributed to the origins, not to the country of birth, and Iran is not only Persian Muhsin97233 (talk) 21:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There is no source for that! He was Persian, and his father was also Persian, literally called Attar! During that period, everyone in Iran had to speak Arabic besides Persian, so it is not surprising that he has books in Arabic and Persian. Persiangreat (talk) 06:49, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
His ethnicity is well covered in Jabir ibn Hayyan#Biography. Please review the sources cited there, especially Kraus 1942–1943 vol. I, pp. xvii–lxv (the most authoritative account of Jabir's biography to date) and Delva 2017 (a recent paper reviewing all the evidence on Jabir's biography, affirming Kraus' position that ethnicity is uncertain). ☿ Apaugasma (talk☉)13:41, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to Ibn al-Nadīm in his Kitāb al-Fihrist (Flügel ed., Leipzig 1871–72, p. 355:18), Jābir ibn Hayyān bears the nisba al-Azdī because he was a mawlā—that is, a non-Arab convert attached as a client to the Azd tribe. In early Islamic usage mawlā was a DEROGATORY label for non-Arab Muslims, marking them as second-class citizens rather than true tribal members, which confirms that Jābir was not ethnically Arab. Paul Kraus likewise observes that al-Azdī signifies clientage (mawlā) rather than blood descent (Essai sur l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. I, p. xli n. 3), and Henry Corbin notes that in this milieu “mawālī” functioned pejoratively to denote non-Arab affiliation, underlining Jābir’s non-Arab origin (Le Livre du Glorieux de Jâbir ibn Hayyân, p. 50).
The idea that he may have been a mawla comes from Kraus (1942–1943, vol. I, p. xli, note 1 - not note 3!), but it is not mentioned by Ibn al-Nadim or any other primary source. The full quote of Kraus pp. xl-xli is "Ibn Wahshiyya déduit de son nom al-Azdi qu'il a dû être d'origine arabe" and note 1 "Ce qui n'est point nécessaire, Jabir ayant pu être un client (mawla) de la tribu Azd établie à Kufa".
This is modern speculation on Kraus' part, probably as a gesture to his teacher Ruska, who at the time was defending the now-abandoned theory that alchemy originated in Iran rather than in Egypt, and who for this reason was convinced that Jabir must have been Iranian (contraHolmyard, who was convinced that he was an Arab).
Ever since Kraus (1942–1943) showed that the corpus was written by anonymous 9th-century authors, scholars have stopped speculating on Jabir's ethnicity, which is now regarded as fundamentally uncertain (see Delva 2017, p. 36). This is all covered in the article (Jabir ibn Hayyan#Biographical clues and legend). ☿ Apaugasma (talk☉)09:12, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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