Hi there! As a PhD student getting her doctorate in medieval Islamic alchemy, I’m tremendously excited to share some resources with you and provide a general overview. As an initial note, I’ll use the terminology ‘Islamic alchemy’ over ‘Arab alchemy’ because the Islamic/Islamicate alchemical tradition included practitioners from a number of ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations, including but not limited to Arabs.

Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (d. 815?) is the most famous alchemist of the Islamic tradition. Highly contested is the veracity of his authorship: the question of whether or not Jābir existed and whether or not Jābir wrote all, most of, or any of the works attributed to him is termed the “Jābir problem”, and it remains one of the most debated controversies in the history and historiography of Islamic alchemy. Jābir’s precise historical provenance has in fact been the subject of debate as far back as Ibn al-Nadīm’s tenth century Fihrist, which mentions some collective skepticism around the existence of a single alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, though Ibn al-Nadīm himself believes Jābir to have existed. In 1942, Paul Kraus posited in his Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam that the Jābirian corpus--the collection of writings attributed to Jābir--should be dated to the late 9th or early 10th century, not the 8th, and also argued for the corpus’ plural authorship and Ismāʿīli provenance, due to the vastness of the corpus, the presence of Ismāʿīlī thought and ideas, and the cosmology based on Greek philosophy translated into Arabic only after the eighth century. However, following Kraus’ publication, Fuat Sezgin and S. N. Haq have argued for a single author, early composition, in works published in 1967 (Geschichte Des Arabischen Schrifttums, IV) and 1994 (Names, natures, and things), respectively. Sezgin felt in particular that Kraus underestimated the degree of circulation of Greek philosophy in the Arab world prior to the translation movement of the caliph al-Ma’mūn and overstated the Ismaʿīlī influence in the corpus. In 1994, Haq published Names, Natures, and Things, on the Jābirian Kitāb al-Aḥjār (Book of Stones), arguing also for an early and single Jābir on the basis of what he sees as an overstatement of the size of the corpus and the presence of archaic translations of Greek texts within the Jābirian corpus that could make an early dating possible.

Back to Jābir/the Jābirian corpus itself: it is vast. It is the largest Arabic collection of alchemical works, though it contains a vast number of talismanic, astrological, pharmacological, philosophical, and occult treatises as well as those that are specifically alchemical. Kraus organizes the corpus into six collections of books made up of individual treatises, a single early work (K. al-raḥma, The Book of Mercy), and a number of writings on themes, such as philosophy, pharmacology, and theurgy. If you’re interested in manuscripts, Kraus’ volume Le corpus des ecrits Jabiriens contains an organizational schema, Kraus’ thoughts on dating the corpus, and a list of extant manuscripts. Notable Jābirian innovations include the mercury-sulfur theory and the science of balance (a universal theory that posits every thing in the world is made up of measurable quantities, and the modification of the proportions of those quantities enables change. The ‘science of balance’ describes a cosmological system wherein natures, numbers, and letters are coordinated: just as words are composed of letters, so too are things in the world composed of natures).

For secondary scholarship on Jābir, I would recommend that you read Names, natures, and things by Syed Nomanul Haq, ‘The Literature of Arabic alchemy’ by Donald Hill, Manfred Ullmann’s Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, and Kraus’ volumes, mentioned above, if you want the foundations of Jābirian studies. Peter Zirnis’ 1979 dissertation and Kathleen Malone O’Connor’s 1994 dissertations are also worth your while. You will also find edited and translated versions of Jābirian texts by Henry Corbin and Pierre Lory (though both translated into French, not English) and by S. N. Haq and Zirnis (in the aforementioned book and dissertation).

Next is Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī (d. 313/925 or 323/935), who is better known as a physician and philosopher, but who also wrote alchemical works. The Kitāb al-asrār (“Book of secrets”) and Kitāb sirr al-asrār (“Book of the secret of secrets”) are his most important alchemical works. al-Razi’s alchemy embodies the proto-chemical side of the alchemical tradition more than the spiritual aspects, though I will underscore that the tradition of Islamic alchemy is religious as well as scientific/technological. Then, Muḥammad b. Umayl al-Tamīmī (also first half of the tenth century, likely) wrote an allegorical poem on alchemy, a prose commentary on that work, and another alchemical text (Kitāb al-māʾ al-waraqī wa-l-arḍ al-najmiyya, “The book of the silvery water and starry earth”). I would point you to the Encyclopedia of Islam III entry on alchemy for the sources connected to these authors; I myself don't know them as well.

Next, Muʾayyad al-Dīn Abū Ismāʿīl al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Ṭughrāʾī was a Seljuk civil servant executed in 1121. His most important work is the Mafātīh al-raḥma (“The keys of compassion”). See: Studies on the Works of al-Tughrā’ī by Faraj Razook (1963).

ʿAlī b. Mūsā, known as Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs (d. 593/1197), was a Moroccan preacher and alchemist. His collection of alchemical poems, Shudhūr al-dhahab (splinters of gold), is the subject of a Swiss National Science Foundation grant, led by Regula Forster of the University of Zurich. The grant is called “Between Religion and Alchemy. The scholar Ibn Arfa' Ra's (d. 1197) as a modell for an integrative Arabic literary and cultural history”. I would also recommend Richard Todd’s article on the Shudhūr, ‘Alchemical Poetry in Almohad Morocco: the Shudhūr al-dhahab of Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs’ (2016).

ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir al-Jildakī (d. circa 1342) is perhaps the largest name in medieval Islamic alchemy after Jābir. Writing from Mamluk Cairo, he produced original works and a number of important commentaries on older alchemical works, such as commentaries on Ibn Arfaʿ Ra’s’s Shudhūr, Ibn Umayl’s Risālat al-shams ilā l-hilāl, and the Jābirian corpus. Titles include Kitāb al-Burhān fī asrār ‘ilm al-mizān (“The Book of Proof for the Secrets of the Science of Balance”) and Kitāb Nihāyat aṭ- ṭalab fī sharḥ al-Muktasab (“The Book of the End of Search for the Explanation of [al-‘Irāqī’s book] al-Muktasab”. See Manuchehr Taslimi, “An Examination of the ‘Nihāyat al-Ṭalab’ and the Determination of its Place and Value in the History of Islamic Chemistry,” University of London, 1954. Nicholas Harris is also working on a dissertation titled Better Religion Through Chemistry on the topic of al-Jildaki and has an article regarding establishing details about Jildaki’s life and context.

We shouldn’t neglect the Ottomans, either: see Tuna Artun’s dissertation Hearts of gold and silver. The production of alchemical knowledge in the early modern Ottoman world, which focuses in particular on ʿAli Çelebi. In general, I would give a tremendous recommendation to Artun's work: the introduction of his dissertation is a great overview to Islamic alchemy in general.

This is by no means a complete list, but it is some basics. I would point you to the Encyclopedia of Islam articles about alchemy and these figures, alongside the work of all those scholars mentioned above. Happy reading!