In most contemporary sources, Jabir ibn Hayyan is referred to as an Arab, but there has been some doubt whether or not that is his true ethnicity. According to ‘’’The History of Iran‘’’, very little is known about the life of Jabir ibn Hayyan and aside from the possibility of him being an Arab, he could have been a Persian or a Syrian. However, Eric John Holmyard wrote in Makers of Chemistry that "there is a significant collection of data of Jabir's life” to “reconstruct his figure with reasonable accuracy". Holmyard writes that Jabir was the son of Hayyan, an Arab from the tribe of Al-Azd that settled in the Arab garrison town of Al Kufa in the seventh century.
In the Makers of Chemistry, E.J. Holmyard gives an description of Jabir's background based on what is known of him, but declares that much of it is based on conjecture. Holmyard writes that Jabir was the son of Hayyan, a druggist who belonged to the southern Arab tribe of Al-Azd, one of the many Arab tribes that settled in Kufa, a town that was constructed by Caliph Umar to serve as a garrison for Arab soldiers. Holmyard asserts that Hayyan supported the cause of the Abbasid family, who were at the time attempting to overthrow the caliph of the Umayyad. The Abbasids sent Hayyan to Persia to rally support for their cause. It was in Tus, Khorasan, where he and his wife had Jabir. Hayyan was soon arrested and executed by agents of the Umayyad caliph. Young Jabir was then sent to Kufa perhaps to be cared of by the Azd tribesmen. In Kufa, he studied Islam, mathematics, and other subjects under the scholar Harbi al-Himyari.
In around 748 when the Abbasid overthrew the Umayyad, Jabir had acquired the friendship of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, a Shi'ite scholar. Holmyard speculates that because of his active support of the Abbasid and his connections with the Shi'as, who were also active supporters of Th Abbassid, Jabir was welcomed at the court of Harun ar-Rashid, the reigning Abbasid caliph of the time, in Baghdad. It was from this time that Jabir ....