The Arabic word Al-kīmiyā can apply to chemistry or to alchemy, but it would be an unrewarding task to attempt to make a clear distinction between the two. A more meaningful division is between scholarly investigations into the behaviour of substances when subjected to various processes, and industrial chemistry which is concerned solely with the manufacture of economically valuable products. The first we shall designate as Alchemy and the second as Industrial Chemistry.

ALCHEMY

Despite the attention given to alchemy by modern scholars, many obscurities still hamper the serious student of the subject. These obscurities include the actual definition of the term 'alchemy', its origins in East and West, the authorship of many of the extant texts, the methods used by the alchemists, and the identification of many of their materials. Much of the obscurity of the subject is also due to its esoteric nature and the consequent use made by many of its practitioners of analogy, allusion and cryptic utterances. Indeed, the very nature of an occult system precludes any clear, rational presentation of its tenets. Alchemistic authors often imply that they preserve the secrets of alchemy by the use of allegory and simile in order to keep unqualified persons at a distance. Another technique was the dispersion of esoteric instruction among technical writings, so that only the initiated would grasp the meaning of the apparently irrelevant interpolations. Moreover, it was held that true alchemy could only be passed on from a master to a pupil, not learned from books. Another difficulty, particularly for the student of Islamic alchemy, is the large mass of manuscript material that has yet to be edited and studied.

Despite these difficulties – and they are formidable – it is possible to attempt a general survey of Islamic alchemy. Much of the difficulty in alchemical writings arises from its occult, esoteric aspects, 'the art of the transformation of the soul'.