Person · Khwarazmian polymath
Al-Biruni
Also known as Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Alberuni, Al-Beruni, Alberonius, Biruni
A Khwarazmian polymath taken to Ghazni after Mahmud seized his homeland in 1017, who turned a conqueror's campaigns in the subcontinent into fieldwork. He learned Sanskrit, travelled in Punjab and Sindh, and finished the Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind, the Kitab al-Hind, around 1030: a survey of Indian religion, astronomy, measurement and festivals that set out Hindu views, by his own account, as Hindus stated them. Annemarie Schimmel called it the first objective book on the history of religion.
- Date
- 973–1048 (or c. 1050)
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
At Nandana in the Salt Range he worked out the radius of the earth from a single hilltop, by measuring how far the horizon dipped below him. He translated two books from Sanskrit into Arabic, one of them Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and one from Arabic into Sanskrit.
The accounts of his India years differ: one has him following Mahmud's campaigns from 1017, another has him brought to the Indus valley in 1022 and back in Ghazni by 1024. His death is given both as 9 December 1048 and as about 1050.
Connections (6)
- Worked atGhazni
In 1017 Mahmud of Ghazni invaded Khwarazm and took Kath; al-Biruni and most of the court scholars left with him, possibly as prisoners, and were brought to Ghazni, where al-Biruni spent most of the rest of his life as court astrologer. He collected Indian books and manuscripts there, and after Mahmud's 1025 attack on Somnath, Indian intellectuals sent back to Ghazni as prisoners helped him understand Indian civilisation. He died at Ghazni.
- Worked atNandana, the Salt Range
At Nandana, near Pind Dadan Khan in present-day Pakistan, al-Biruni tried a new way of measuring the earth. He measured the height of a hill and the dip of the horizon seen from its top, and used trigonometry to compute the earth's radius from those figures. It is the clearest case of his using Mahmud's Indian expeditions for science; on the same campaigns he improvised a quadrant to measure the height of the sun.
- Commented onBrahmagupta
In the Kitab al-Hind al-Biruni set out the achievements of Indian mathematics and astronomy, among them zero, negative numbers and sine tables, largely through the work of the seventh-century Brahmagupta, and judged Indian astronomers ahead of their Central Asian and Middle Eastern contemporaries. He was also scathing about Brahmagupta for conceding the religious explanation of solar eclipses, a severed divine head swallowing the sun, rather than standing by his own astronomy. It is a critical reading of Brahmagupta four centuries after him.
- Traveller routePrahladpuri & the Multan Sun Temple
Al-Biruni travelled independently in Sindh, including Multan, where he met Ismaili scholars, and visited the site of the Sun Temple early in the eleventh century, finding desolate ruins. He recorded that Muhammad bin Qasim had spared the temple once he learned its importance to the regional economy, though a piece of cow-flesh was hung round the idol's neck in mockery, and he held the Ismaili ruler Jalam responsible for its later destruction and the killing of its priests.
- TransmissionYoga
Among the Sanskrit works al-Biruni translated into Arabic in the eleventh century, with the help of Hindu scholars, was Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. His version kept many core themes but restated some sutras and commentaries to fit monotheistic Islamic theology, and it reached Persia and Arabia by about 1050. Mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam did not take up yoga, but Sufis in South Asia later adopted its postures and breath control, and the hatha text Amritakunda was translated in the sixteenth century.
- Historical linkDiwali
In his eleventh-century account of India al-Biruni recorded that Hindus celebrated Deepavali on the day of the new moon in the month of Kartika, among the festivals, fasts and pilgrimages his Kitab al-Hind describes in its closing chapters. He heads a line of foreign witnesses to the festival: Niccolò de' Conti in the early fifteenth century saw temples and roofs lit with countless oil lamps, and Domingo Paes in the sixteenth saw houses and temples illuminated at Vijayanagara in October.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Al-Biruni" and "India (Al-Biruni)". Edward Sachau (trans.), Alberuni's India (1910); C. Edmund Bosworth, "Bīrūnī, Abū Rayḥān", Encyclopædia Iranica (2000); S. Frederick Starr, The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment (2023).
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