The solitude of the Orphan: Ǧābir b. Ḥayyān and the Shiite heterodox milieu of the third/ninth–fourth/tenth centuries
The community of Shiite alchemists gathered under the pen name of Ǧābir
b. Ḥayyān produced an important corpus first studied by Paul Kraus, who
dated it between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. The religious,
doctrinal and political issues of the corpus – especially in the last two
collections – show that the Ǧābireans were a real sectarian trend unknown
to heresiographers. Kraus, along with some scholars after him, understood
the Ǧābirean community to be an expression of Ismaili thought. This paper