“A Womb of One's Own: Theorizing Artifice, Artificiality, and Takwīn in the Jābirian Corpus,” explores how categories of making are theorized within the Jābirian corpus, the most extensive Arabic collection of alchemical, pharmacological, philosophical, and occult-scientific treatises from the 8th-10th centuries attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. It does so by placing the use and appearance of two terms, ṣanʿa and takwīn, into cross-disciplinary conversation with a wide selection of early Arabo-Islamic texts on craft, artisanry, and creation.

Ṣanʿa refers to both artifice, broadly conceived, and the art of alchemy specifically. Situated within and around the corpus’ theorizations of ṣanʿa are key techniques, ingredients, and rituals necessary for practices that complicate and confuse clearly-delineated categories of human, natural, and divine making, including takwīn, the semi-religious production of new and unique lifeforms in an alchemical laboratory. Takwīn has customarily been translated as “artificial generation”. However, this translation carries assumptions and interpretations about the content of Jābirian writings that have become deeply and problematically naturalized. “A Womb of One’s Own” argues that understanding takwīn as “artificial generation” flattens the actual theorization of notions of artifice, artificiality, and takwīn that the Jabirian corpus undertakes.

Takwīn should be understood as a category of creative action that is included within an interdisciplinary theorization of artifice (ṣanʿa) in the 8th-10th centuries, found in not only alchemical texts but also works of craftsmanship, literary criticism, religious literature, philosophy, and more. Artifice in this broader cultural conceptualization is theorized as a particular type of careful, creative action that scales cosmologically. Furthermore, artifice perpetually participates in positive divine imitation by way of an aesthetics of wonder (ʿajab). Thus to translate and understand takwīn as “artificial generation” misses the way takwīn and, more broadly, human creative artifice, was understood as part of a larger and universal system of creative, devotional making.