al-Bīrūnī

al-Bīrūnī (born Sept. 4, 973 ce, Khwārezm, Khorāsān [now in Uzbekistan]—died c. 1052, Ghazna [now Ghaznī, Afg.) was a Muslim astronomer, mathematician, ethnographist, anthropologist, historian, and geographer. Al-Bīrūnī lived during a period of unusual political turmoil in the eastern Islamic world. He served more than six different princes, all of whom were known for their bellicose activities and a good number of whom met their ends in violent deaths. Nevertheless, he managed to become the most original polymath the Islamic world had ever known.

Life

Little is known of his early life. He was born in Khwārezm, in the region beyond the ancient Oxus River (the river now known as the Amu Darya), and he was educated by a Khwārezm-Shāh prince, Abū Naṣr Manṣūr ibn ʿIrāq, a member of the dynasty that ruled the area and possibly a patron of al-Bīrūnī. Some of the mathematical works of this prince were written especially for al-Bīrūnī and are at times easily confused with al-Bīrūnī’s own works.

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Of his own personal background even less is known. By his own admission, in a poem preserved in a medieval biographical dictionary, al-Bīrūnī claims that he did not know his own father, much less his family origins. He said this in the context of demonstrating his total disgust with flattery, even when it was being directed at him.

His early patronage by the Khwārezm-Shāhs did not seem to have lasted long, for one of their subordinates rebelled against his master and killed him, thus causing a civil war (c. 996–998) that forced al-Bīrūnī to flee and seek patronage from the more formidable Sāmānid dynasty, which ruled the vast eastern lands of Islam, comprising what is now eastern Iran and much of Afghanistan. A short while after al-Bīrūnī found refuge in the Sāmānid capital of Bukhara, a prince of another local dynasty, Qābūs ibn Voshmgīr, was also dethroned and sought help from the Sāmānids to regain his throne. Help was apparently given, for the next record of al-Bīrūnī is when he was in the company of Qābūs in the city of Gurgān near the Caspian Sea. At Qābūs’s court, al-Bīrūnī met the famous philosopher-scientist Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and exchanged with him a philosophical correspondence that did not lack jealousies and slighting. Al-Bīrūnī also dedicated his Al-Āthār al-bāqiyyah ʿan al-qurūn al-khāliyyah (The Chronology of Ancient Nations) to Qābūs.

After a period in which al-Bīrūnī undertook extensive travels—or rather escapes from wars, and a constant search for patrons—the entire domain of the Sāmānids fell under the brutal reign of Maḥmūd, son of Sebüktigin. Maḥmūd took Ghazna as his capital in 998 and demanded that both al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna join his court. Avicenna managed to escape, but al-Bīrūnī did not, and he worked in Ghazna until the end of his life when he was not accompanying Maḥmūd on his campaigns into northern India. Even though al-Bīrūnī was possibly the unwilling guest of a merciless warrior, he still made use of the occasion to pen the acute observations about India that would earn him fame as an ethnographer, anthropologist, and eloquent historian of Indian science.

Works

Listing al-Bīrūnī’s works is relatively easy, for he himself produced an index of his works up to when he was about 60 years old. However, he lived well into his seventies, and, since some of his surviving works are not mentioned in this index, the index is a partial list at best. Adding all the titles in the index, as well as those found later, brings his total production to 146 titles, each averaging about 90 folios. Almost half of the titles were on astronomical and mathematical subjects. Only a minuscule number of his output, 22 titles, has survived, and only about half of that has been published.

His book on Indian culture is by far the most important of his encyclopaedic works. Its expressive title, Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah (“Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable”), says it all; it includes all the lore that al-Bīrūnī could gather about India and its science, religion, literature, and customs. His only other competing encyclopaedic work, in terms of depth and extent of coverage, is The Chronology of Ancient Nations, which is devoted to a universal anthropological account of various cultures and which even records the lore of long-dead cultures or of other cultures that were about to disappear. Taken together, these two works preserve the best premodern description of the cultures al-Bīrūnī came to know. In the latter work, for example, is the most elaborate treatment of the Jewish calendar—more extensive than any surviving medieval Hebrew source and much more scientifically reasoned than any other treatment that this calendar had received up to that time.

An equally encyclopaedic scientific work is the inimitable Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdi (“The Masʿūdic Canon”), dedicated to Masʿūd, the son of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, in which al-Bīrūnī gathered together all the astronomical knowledge from such sources as Ptolemy’s Almagest and “Handy Tables” after having had these two particular works updated. Nevertheless, al-Bīrūnī’s original input is clearly noticeable in almost every chapter. For example, al-Bīrūnī developed new algebraic techniques for the solution of third-degree equations, drew a subtle distinction between the motion of the solar apogee and the motion of precession, and explored many other applied mathematical techniques to achieve much higher precision and ease of use of tabulated astronomical results.

His Al-Tafhīm li-awāʾil ṣināʿat al-tanjīm (“Elements of Astrology”) is still the most comprehensive treatment of the topic as it was then known. Despite the fact that most people believed that astrology was “the fruit of the mathematical sciences,” as al-Bīrūnī called it, his personal opinion of the discipline was “as weak as that of its least adherents.” However, he was fully aware of the importance of astrology as a tool for teaching mathematical and astronomical disciplines. Under the pretext of teaching astrology, he devoted almost two-thirds of this voluminous work to teaching his patron, the otherwise obscure Rayḥānah for whom the book was written, elementary mathematics, astronomy, geography, chronology, and the making of the astrolabe as an observational instrument. After all those disciplines were clearly laid out in question-and-answer format, al-Bīrūnī then allowed his patron to venture into astrology proper—but not before warning her that he himself thought little of the subject.

The Taḥdid nihāyāt al-amākin li-taṣḥīḥ masāfāt al-masākin (“Determination of the Coordinates of Places for the Correction of Distances Between Cities”) is al-Bīrūnī’s masterpiece in mathematical geography. In it he not only defended the role of the mathematical sciences against the attacks of religious scholars who could not understand the utility of the mathematical sciences but also detailed all that one needed to know about determining longitudes and latitudes on land. He capped that particular discussion with a solution to the rather sophisticated spherical trigonometric problem of determining the direction of Mecca along the local horizon at Ghazna. Besides being a challenging mathematical problem, determining the direction of Mecca is a religious requirement for the performance of the ordained five daily prayers in Islam. Thus, not only did al-Bīrūnī not miss a chance to demonstrate the very useful role of the mathematical sciences in religion, but he also used the occasion (as he had done in his treatise on astrology) to include other scientific matters. For example, he raised questions about the formation of mountains and explained the existence there of fossils by positing that Earth was once underwater. (He also raised these questions in his book on India). In both cases he treated these matters with a scientific objectivity that matches the modern explanation.

His relatively minor works are only minor in size, for they are at least as sophisticated as his major works. Al-Bīrūnī’s Maqālīd ʿilm al-hayʾah (“Keys to Astronomy”), Al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir (“Gems”), Kitāb al-ṣaydanah (“Pharmacology”), and Ifrād al-maqāl fī amr al-ẓilāl (The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows), to name only a few, dealt with specific subjects, but in each case the subject was given comprehensive treatment. Furthermore, in a perfect al-Bīrūnī manner, each work contains extremely original comments on seemingly unrelated subjects. For example, in the introduction to his book on gems, al-Bīrūnī gave an elaborate description of man’s place in nature and society and the social need for economic systems. In that context he wrote of precious metals and gems, which were considered foundational for any economic system, and he wrote of diamonds and their particular social importance. In the introduction to his book on pharmacology, he wrote about the importance of language in identifying drugs and in that context took an excursion into the relative worth of languages. He posed as an outsider to both Arabic and Persian as he evaluated their scientific utility, and he enunciated his now famous personal preference “to be criticized in Arabic rather than be praised in Persian.”

His Istīʿāb al-wujūh al-mumkinah fī ṣanʿat al-asṭurlāb (“Exhaustive Book on Astrolabes”) discusses the possibility of Earth’s motion, as a consequence of a particular case of one astrolabe projection, only to dismiss it quickly as philosophical speculation that should not preoccupy the practical astronomer and applied mathematician. The rest of the book details all the various projections of astrolabe parts, mainly retes (star projections), that al-Bīrūnī was familiar with or could imagine.

Al-Bīrūnī did not seem to have any interest in the subject of astronomical cosmology, a subject usually broached by authors of a genre of Islamic astronomical literature called hayʾah texts that were much in the tradition of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses but often critical of that tradition. There is only one hint, in a book known only by its title from other sources, Ibṭāl al-buhtān bi-īrād al-burhān (Disqualifying Falsehood by Producing Proof), that he ever approached such speculative cosmological questions. Even then his comments were apparently restricted to the particular problem of latitude theory in Ptolemaic astronomy.