Mu'ayyad al-Din Abu Isma‘il al-Husayn ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Samad al-Du'ali al-Kināni al-Tughra'i (Arabic: العميد فخر الكتاب مؤيد الدين أبو إسماعيل الحسين بن علي بن محمد بن عبد الصمد الدؤلي الكناني; fa, اسماعیل طغرایی اسپهانی) (1061 – c. 1121) was an 11th–12th century
Arab
The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia, ...
poet and alchemist.
Biography
Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Tughra'i was born in
Isfahan, Persia, and composed poems in the Arabic language. He was an administrative secretary (therefore the name ''Tughra'i). He ultimately became the second-most-senior official (after the
vizier
A vizier (; ar, وزير, wazīr; fa, وزیر, vazīr), or wazir, is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in the near east. The Abbasid caliphs gave the title ''wazir'' to a minister formerly called '' katib'' (secretary), who was ...
) in the civil administration of the
Seljuq Empire
The Great Seljuk Empire, or the Seljuk Empire was a high medieval, culturally Turko-Persian, Sunni Muslim empire, founded and ruled by the Qïnïq branch of Oghuz Turks. It spanned a total area of from Anatolia and the Levant in the west to t ...
.
Al-Tughra'i had been appointed vizir to Emir Ghiyat-ul-Din Mas'ud, and upon the death of the emir a power struggle ensued between Mas'ud's sons. Al-Tughra'i sided with the emir's elder son, but the younger prevailed. In retribution, the younger son accused al-Tughra'i of heresy and had him beheaded.
Writings
Al-Tughra'i was a well-known and prolific writer on
astrology
Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Di ...
and
alchemy
Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...
, and many of his poems (''
diwan'') are preserved today as well. In the field of alchemy, al-Tughra'i is best known for his large compendium titled ''Mafatih al-rahmah wa-masabih al-hikmah'', which incorporated extensive extracts from earlier Arabic alchemical writings, as well as
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
translations from
Zosimos of Panopolis
Zosimos of Panopolis ( el, Ζώσιμος ὁ Πανοπολίτης; also known by the Latin name Zosimus Alchemista, i.e. "Zosimus the Alchemist") was a Greco-Egyptian alchemist and Gnostic mystic who lived at the end of the 3rd and beginning ...
's old alchemy treatises written in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, which were until 1995 erroneously attributed to unknown alchemists by mistakes and inconsistencies in the transliteration and transcription of his name into Arabic.
In 1112 CE, al-Tughra'i also composed ''Kitab Haqa'iq al-istishhad'', a rebuttal of a refutation of the occult in alchemy written by
Ibn Sina.
See also
*
List of Iranian scientists
The following is a non-comprehensive list of Iranian scientists, engineers, and scholars who lived from antiquity up until the beginning of the modern age. For the modern era, see List of contemporary Iranian scientists, scholars, and engineer ...
*
List of Muslim scientists
References
Sources
*
*
*
Further reading
For his life, see:
* F. C. de Blois, 'al-Tughra'i' in ''The Encyclopaedia of Islam'', 2nd edition, ed. by H. A. R. Gibb, B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat, C. Bosworth et al., 11 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–2002), vol. 10, pp. 599–600.
For a list of his alchemical writings, see:
* Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, Handbuch der Orientalistik, Abteilung I, Ergänzungsband VI, Abschnitt 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), pp 229–231 and 252–3.
* For details about Zosimos of Panopolis translations, see:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tughrai
1061 births
1121 deaths
11th-century Arabs
12th-century Arabs
Arab scientists
Alchemists of the medieval Islamic world
Scientists from Isfahan
Arab chemists