In Our Time - al-Biruni

Episode Date: August 31, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Central Asian polymath al-Biruni and his eleventh-century book the India.Born in around 973 in the central Asian region of Chorasmia, al-Biruni became an itinerant scholar of immense learning, a master of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and many languages. He corresponded with the age's greatest scientist, Avicenna, and made significant contributions to many fields of knowledge.In 1017 al-Biruni became a member of the court of the ruler Mahmud of Ghazna. Over the course of the next thirteen years he wrote the India, a comprehensive account of Hindu culture which was the first book about India by a Muslim scholar. It contains detailed information about Hindu religion, science and everyday life which have caused some to call it the first work of anthropology.With:James MontgomeryProfessor of Classical Arabic at the University of CambridgeHugh KennedyProfessor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of LondonAmira BennisonSenior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of CambridgeProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, if you were to point a reasonably powerful telescope at the surface of the moon at latitude 17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you'll find yourself looking at the Al-Biruni crater. This lunar feature is named in honour of a 10th century Muslim scholar, who was not only one of the greatest figures of medieval science, but he's also claimed as one of the outstanding scholars of all time. Born in Central Asia, Albiruni was an astonishing polymath,

master of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. He was equally at home in five languages and was as great a scholar of the humanities as he was a scientist. Perhaps Albaroni's most remarkable book is The India, a comprehensive account of Hindu religion, science, history and customs. It's the first work about India by a Muslim scholar, and is so compelling a portrait of one culture seen from the perspective of another

of another that it's been described as the first work of anthropology. With me to discuss Al-Biruni and his groundbreaking work are Amira Benison, Senior Lecturer in Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, and James Montgomery, Professor of Classical Arabic at the University of Cambridge. Hugh Kennedy, can you give us Al-Burini's full name?

first of all, and then we'll go on from there. It's Abu Raichan Mohammed bin Ahmed al-Biruni, and the Biruni bit, by which he's always known, reflects the fact that he was born apparently in the suburb, the Birun, of the city of Kath in Khorazam. I've talked about his reputation as a scholar. Can you give us more informed notion of the range of his scholarship? Well, he is, as you were saying, an astonishing polymath

with wide interest in all sorts of natural sciences, in mathematics, in astronomy, and the thing that he's best known for, of course, is the India that you were mentioning again, which is remarkable because for most Muslims, Hinduism was simply polytheism, idol worship. Biruni is the one Muslim intellectual of his time, or indeed of the pre-modern period,

who tries to get behind that and see that Hinduism is, in fact, complex religion, with many different philosophical and intellectual sides to it. We've got to spend a continual time on India, but I'd like you to rummage around about the disciplines about which. You mentioned mathematics, you mentioned astronomy, but it went further than that even, didn't it? Yes, he was very interested, for example, in mineralogy

and the weights of different minerals and things like that. There was almost nothing that he saw around him that didn't attract his interest. Now, his first book was an attempt to, sum up the different eras that different cultures used, how they calculated their years and things like that. As we understand it, this was seen when he was quite young. At 17, he was already considered to be an advanced mathematician, and he was also very interested in languages.

I just want to build this up a bit before we get cracking. Yes, and he wrote some 140 books, and not all of those were very big books, but the India, again, come back to it, is 600 pages in the... the English translation. And so it's a serious, it's a serious work. He must have written sort of continuously to achieve this. Of these books, about a quarter survive. He was born in around 973, not completely certain, but it's around then. In what we're now

called Uzbekistan, is that right? Yes. So what was remarkable about that that made him such a remarkable scholar? Well, this is the period after the universal caliphate had collapsed. And the Muslim world in the 10th century was in a state of political disintegration. But one of the features of the medieval Muslim world was that it retained a cultural unity and identity. And instead of having one centre in Baghdad or whatever, there were numerous different cultural centres or numerous different places where intellectuals worked. And it became amongst the many dynasties that followed the Abbasids. It was something of, if you like, a fashion.

a statement, a legitimising device, to have intellectuals at your court. And so there was a wide variety of patronage available. Now, where Biruni came from, Chorasm, is the delta of the Oxus River, which flows from the Pamir Mountains down into the deserts of what is now as Beckistan. And there it spreads out and it creates a sort of inland delta. And it was, since the earliest history, it's been very fertile, It's been very densely populated, but at the same time very isolated. Amira Benison, can we dig in a bit more about his early life?

What do we know about it? And how did he get this remarkable early education? He must have had that to get going. It must have been great teachers. Indeed. I mean, we actually know relatively little about his early educational formation. It's obvious that he studied two different kinds of science. On the one hand, he studied what,

sometimes described as the Arab sciences or the religious sciences. So he was skilled in things like jurisprudence, law, the exegesis of the Quran. But on the other hand, he also studied what often called the Greek sciences or the sciences of the ancients. So he also became very proficient in mathematics, astronomy. Also astrology, which although nowadays seen as a pseudoscience, was closely associated with astronomy in those days. And as Hugh was saying, you know, he was able to engage with all kinds of different scholars in the region in which he was living. There were this multiplicity of sort of local courts where scholars gathered, where they exchanged views.

So although we don't know that much about the actual details of al-Baruni's personal education, we do have a fairly good idea of the kind of education he would have had access to, these sort of dispersed centres of learning in Uzbekistan and other places. Two things I take from that to Amir, see if we can go any further. One is his deep knowledge of Greek thought. These fantastic Arab scholars over these centuries not only translated the great Greek work, but they added to it. And he seemed to have had complete access to Aristotle.

Can you bring that in, first of all? And then I'd like to dig away at the mathematics. Why was he so quickly, so advanced in mathematics? But let's take the Greek stuff first. Well, I think the point there, is of course, you know, he's a contemporary of people like Avicenna. They all had access to the Greek sciences. In most of these cities, there were libraries,

which were full of Greek works, which had been translated into Arabic, including the works of Aristotle, relatively less work from Plato, although some things, particularly neoplatonism, have been translated. So there's a wide range of materials, which people were commonly able to access in the libraries

which were built up by these rulers, the Kharazam Shars in this case, or the Sarmarnids, or other dynasties who were trying to make their mark at this time by patronising knowledge. And I think the important thing is just to remember that at this point, there doesn't seem to be any disparagement of non-Islamic or non-Arab science. it's fully integrated among these intellectual circles.

And we have to remember that this time, Europe was, this is very broad, because it was in the dark age, is that this was a blaze of scholarship going across this particular Arab world, which then carried through to the Renaissance and carried on into the modern age. We're not going to get any further with the mathematics now. We don't really know how he got to know so much so early. No, but I mean in the same way, you know, there was already a mathematical tradition in the Islamic lands.

There were mathematicians working that Euclid had been translated. So again, there was access to Greek mathematics which Arab mathematicians were building on and working with, which he would have had access to. So you have to rest on the fact that he was very, very, very, very, very, very clever. He was very clever and he had access to a lot of information. I mean, I think we mentioned this when we talked about Avicenna some time ago, but of course, you know, the fact that Muslims were using paper

meant that volumes of works were much more readily available than they would have been if one was just working with parchment or other materials. Hugh mentioned the courts, the sort of culture wars between the courts. One of the ways you define yourself was how many extremely clever and able intellectuals you had in your court. Can you give us a little bit more about that? What would he be at the court? He was at the local court, started off at the local court, and what would he be described as, would he be part of the household and so on?

He became part of the court of Mahmoun, one of the Kharazam Shars. And his position is sometimes described as that of Nadim, which means a boon companion, someone who didn't necessarily have a formally defined role in the sense of a position, but who was an advisor, a companion, someone that the ruler would demonstrate his sort of ability to rule by engaging intellectual discussions with,

but he was probably also used as an ambassador on occasion to undertake missions for Al-Ma'amun. So he had a... You can't find one word really for his role. It was multiple different things he would do, but he was very close to the ruler, and this was seen as a mark of a good ruler, to have these kind of intelligent, well-educated people around them.

James Montgomery, and let's say around 1,000. I mean, you've got to give a take, a few years there, but that'll do. He came into contact with, as Amiris said, with another great and extraordinary polymath at that time, Avicenna. For people who can't bring to mind instantly the program we did on Avicenna a few years ago,

can you tell us what they had in common and how they differed? Well, Avicenna was the foremost philosopher of his generation and of his time. He was the recognized, from a very early age, He recognized the expert on the interpretation of Aristotle. He was also a politician. So he spent some time as the vizier to one of the local courts.

What they would have had in common is this broad-based basic education that we've been hearing about. And it seems that in teenage years there was an opportunity for aspiring students to specialize in one subject or another. Baroni chose applied mathematics and astronomy. Avicenna had developed his interest in philosophy through reading every bit of Aristotle he could get by the age of 16 or 17. So they shared very much the same educational background, but they differed enormously in how they viewed natural philosophy. So for Avicenna, Aristotle had begun to ask the right questions

and provide most of the right answers. for El Bironi, he was a little bit more skeptical and took a slightly more quizzical stance towards the ancient Greek tradition when it came to accounting for natural phenomena. Can you give us an example, though? Yes, yeah. Well, the natural philosophy of the day said

that when an object was cooled, it would shrink. And Al Bironi poses, obviously, in our question, to say that, why is it then, that when we have water in a glass jar and we freeze it, the glass jar break? so the water is obviously expanding. Avicenna doesn't provide a very convincing answer to this very simple question.

And Al-Buroni does this in the treatise called the questions and answers. He asks Avicenna 18 questions. Ten of them relate to Aristotle's work on the heavens. Eight of them relate to these general issues of natural philosophy. Avicenna, who is obviously the more senior of the two irrespective of their age because Al-Buroni is posing the questions and so it was the custom for the student to pose the questions of the master. Avicenna answers each question one by one, and El Beironi is dissatisfied with the answers.

Can you give us another example to them? Yes, I can, yeah. Avicenna gives answers. El Beirani then asks further 15 questions, and Avicenna, perhaps because of the burden of the offices of state, instructs his prize pupil El Marumi to answer El Beironi. I think that Avicenna was under. the end of

the short straw here. Can we have one more specific example? Sorry to be looking for an extra sweet, but actually... There's one which is very, very interesting. It's a slightly obscure passage and if I've... There's some contention as to how it's interpreted.

But Aristotle in on the heaven says that planets must move in a complete circle, in a form of perfect circle because otherwise a vacuum would be created. Now Albiaroni asks Avicenna, why is it that

when objects move around an axis in such a way that they either form an oval or a lentil shape, they don't seem to have any problem in completing the circuit. Elberoni reckons that there is no need for a vacuum in this and therefore that the whole notion of the circular movement of the heavens is in fact

something that Aristotle has effectively invented. What Albironi seems to be talking about is the elliptical movement of the planets, something that Kepler took up in the 17th century and his laws of planetary movement. Avicenna admits that Aristotle is not his strongest at this point, and there's a very interesting exchange between the two, but Avicenna says, well, we must remember what Themistius says. Themistius says that we should always interpret the philosopher Aristotle in the best possible way. And Avicenna effectively admits that Al-Biruni is right, but then deflects

the argument by a quibble and says, of course, things which move inside the celestial sphere, i.e. the planets and so on, are different from the celestial sphere itself, which is tantamount to perfection. And that really is not a proper answer in my opinion. So Al-Bironi had Avicenna on the run. That's great. And I wish we could go through all the questions. Maybe we'll come back to the 18 questions in a year or two when people's excitement are subsided about it. Right. The first book he wrote, I mean, he's talking about measurement and time, isn't he? Yes.

Very young, man, his first book, yeah. So when he was 27 in the year 1000, he dedicates a work, the title which is roughly translated as, the extant remains of bygone eras. In fact, he worked in this book for the rest of his life. and in his late 60s, he completed it again some 40 or so years later. Effectively what it is is an exercise in chronography in the charting and the mapping of time, and the subject that Albironi chooses are religious festivals.

How do all the previous world religions prior to Islam calculate their religious feasts, their festivals, and how do they determine the time that these ought to be celebrated in? And he goes through a list. He starts off with the Persians. Those before Zoroasa were thought to be Buddhists, so he discusses them. Those after Zoroasa were obviously Zoroastrians.

Then he moves on to the Sogdians, which roughly is in present-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. He moves on to his own people, the Choresmians. He moves on to Jews, Christians. He talks about late antique pagans from Haran and then gets on to the Muslims himself. And what he's trying to do is to work out how accurately time can be charted.

And that's one of his big obsessions. He, after all, was effectively occupied through numerous courts as an astronomer. One of the jobs of the astronomer was determining the times of prayer. So he has this deep-rooted fascination with time. And one of the things that he says is that counting calculation, enumeration,

and I include lists in this, is fundamental to man's existence. So his vision of man's anthropology is that man is a counting animal and not a political animal. I must remember that he was a very accomplished astronomer without a telescope. Hugh Kennedy, now,

have already been mentioned, but a significant figure enters his life, Mahmoud of Ghazni. Can you tell us how he came into Britain's life and what immediate effect he had on it? Mahmoud of Ghazna was a Turk by origin from Central Asia his father had lived in what is now Kyrgyzstan in the remote steps of Central Asia

but had been employed as a professional soldier basically by a local Persian dynasty of the Sarminids so Mahmoud was brought up in a Muslim environment a Muslim military environment and when his father died he took over as it were the warlordship that his father had had and his father's followers and determined to establish himself as a major political

figure in what is now Afghanistan and the borders of India. And one of the things that he wanted to do was establish a proper court, a distinguished court that people would look up to. And so he needed a number of court intellectuals to make this a proper palace set up. And Biruni in Charazim was an obvious target, if you like, for his recruitment. He conquered Charazim and he effect. kidnapped or Biruni and took him back to his court

and Birruni spent the rest of his life, this is about 1017, but spent the rest of his life effectively as a court intellectual with Mahmoud of Kassna. And the great thing that happened there, Amir Abederson, is that Mahmoud decided to invade India and it took Baruni with him. Yes, that's one version of the story.

I'd prefer your version, but that's the version I've got at the moment. Yeah, well, indeed. I mean, the odd thing is that Al-Biruni's biographies talk very little about the period when he was at Mahmoud's court from around 1017 till Mahmoud's death in 1030. Mahmoud was already engaged on the conquest of India, but by India we don't really mean the whole of the subcontinent. Mahmoud's conquests and raids and incursions were primarily in the Indus Valley region, what's now Pakistan, right? other than what's now India. He did make some raids into sort of the gangetic plain area, but are relatively few.

And so he was already engaged in India going on annual campaigns before Al-Biruni arrived at the court in Razzna by whatever means. He arrived there. And then we have very little reference, we have almost no reference to Al-Biruni actually going to India. Now that, we've got a 600-page book, a lot of which came from interviews, as we understand it, and we've got page after page after page on Indian science,

which had scarcely appeared before, and details about how people shaved. So he got it from somewhere. Let's say that we can't prove he went there, but if he didn't, how did he get hold of this immense amount of information which has been lauded by people for the last thousand years? Well, I mean, this is the fascinating question.

I mean, when you look at India, his geographic sense is quite weak. It's a list of places, with very little description of the kind you ordinarily find in geographical works. It's difficult to see him as an eyewitness. His description of places is often a little complicated. How do you think he got this stuff then?

Well, I was just getting on to that. Yeah, I think obviously one of the, well, not say the purposes of conquest, but one of the effects of conquest was the capture of individuals. So when Mahmoud went into the Punjab, the Indus Valley region, and he definitely captured large numbers of people

who were also brought back to Ghazna, just as Al-Biruni himself had been bought from Harazim. So that you can imagine in Ghazna, this kind of frontier border town where Mahmoud's trying to build up a court, he was actually collecting elites from all the regions he raided or conquered and bringing them together. So I think there's no disputing that Al-Biruni had a great deal of contact with many people of Indian origin, Brahmin's and others.

It's known that Mahmoud of Ghazna had Indians within his army. The Raznavid army was very ethnically mixed. It had Turkish warriors as the elite commanding group. But there were Arabs from Khorsan, Afghans, Indians, other Dalamite soldiers from the Caspian Sea. So it was a very multiracial army. He also brought artisans. And this is something that Timor later did in Central Asia as well

in his sort of raiding and conquest, he captured intellectuals, craftsmen and scholars and brought them back to his city. Hugh Kennedy, can you give us some idea of the structure of this book? The structure of the book is, it goes through the various areas of Hindu knowledge. He's, and it's essentially about Hinduism. He says nothing about Buddhism, which was effectively extinct. Can we just say how extraordinary that was that a Muslim should want to

about, discuss and write about Hinduism at the time. It was the most extraordinary thing even to want to do, let alone do it at that lengthen in that depth. Yes, and particularly considering the environment he was working in, Mahmoud of Gadsen was raiding India, essentially to plunder temples. He headed for the major Hindu shrines because he wanted the golden silver that he could find there. There's no indication that Mahmoud had any interest in Hindu culture whatsoever,

and so it's essentially something to be plundered and destroyed. whereas Biruni took a lot of interest in the things that James was talking about, the measurement of time, how they measure their festivals, rituals of purity amongst the Hindus, how you become a Brahmin, what Brahmins were and so on. It's described as a work of anthropology, but it's only in a certain sense that. It's about the religious and intellectual life of the Hindus. If you want to find out what sort of houses they lived in, what they ate, what they wore and so on, then there's nothing there.

But if you want to find out their thought systems, then he's very eloquent about that. And he's particularly interested as well in how, as it were, Hinduism compares with Greek ideas of science and wisdom. He says that there's two families in the same house. Sorry, to interrupt. He talks of them as two families in the same house, doesn't he? Yes, exactly.

So it's this cross-cultural aspect. Why did he say that so firmly? Is it because of the number of gods they had or because of the similar sort of mathematical aptitudes he discovered. Well, he's discussing the mathematical aptitude certainly, but he is saying about Hinduism that it is much more than just simple idol worship with tons of gods. There is a system to it.

It has a philosophical background and so on. And that's what distinguishes him from the other people who were. Finally, I said at the beginning, and maybe I was just being rushing it, rushing it through that there was an aristotelian structure to this. Is that correct? I haven't, I can't really comment on that, actually. I think Jones is better on these.

James, James. John. The Elbeoni describes, in the introduction to the India, in very disingenuous terms, perhaps he's simply being over-scrupulous, that he's tried to apply a geometrical method in analysing the, the thoughts and beliefs of the Indians.

Now he could mean by that something like the Euclidean method or simply providing information in short apathymatic sentences. But what he actually means is that you do not talk about something unless you have first defined all of the functions and the meaning of the word and the terms of which you're going to use it. So what he effectively does

is he begins with the Hindu vision of existence. He begins with God. He moves on to philosophy, ontology, how is the soul liberated from the body, talks about heaven and hell and so on. And he does this roughly over the first 17 chapters, but he also gives... There are 80 chapters.

There are 80 of the... This is the first 17. And he mentions the religious literature of the Hindus in order to prepare you for the next stage of his argument. The next stage of his argument is he then turns to his description of how the Indians describe their own universe. So it's a cosmography. He begins with mathematical geography,

and then from there he moves on to astronomy. Now this, I think, as I read the work, is preparation for the real substance. These are the first 30 chapters or so. The next 30 chapters, so the bulk of the book, is again concerned with how the Indian calculate time. It's a chronography.

And he begins with the measurements for night and day. He moves on from there through every conceivable permutation that the Indians have. Two things. Can you give us any idea about

lots of other people doing this? Was he on his own here? Well, if other people were doing it, their work hasn't survived. Right. This, I think, we can be fairly confident is something unique to Bironi. And I'm still itching away in the back of my mind

in Mofflerosur, but to take up Amir's more or less definite declaration that he didn't go there, where do you stand on then? I agree with the mirror. There is one reference to a trip to India. It's not in the India itself in

El Beironi's work. It's in a later work. And El Beironi had devised his own method for measuring the radius of the earth through observing the height of a mountain. and he goes to Mount Nandana in the Punjab. And he calculates the circumference, isn't it? He does. The world is around for him, and he's very nearly perfectly right.

Yes, I mean, it's astonishingly accurate. But he says he did this calculation on this particular mountain in the Punjabi mountain range of salt. So that's the only time that I'm aware of that he actually mentions being in India. And in India, the book itself, he does allude to restricted freedom. He says in the introduction, that I haven't been able to move freely. And I take that as a reference to the fact that for 13 years,

he was effectively a hostage of Mahmoud. So basically, Indian intellectuals roped in by his boss, were coming back to the court, and he was learning Sanskrit from them, interviewing them, gaining his knowledge from them. Right, that's cleared up. Hugh Kennedy, can we just move to his thoughts, to develop what James has started on his,

what he's telling us about religion, both Hinduism and how he's comparing it. And he brings in Christianity, and of course the apex of course. He's concerned as Islam. But what he's talking about there? Well, he's a good Muslim. And for him, Islam is a perfect religion. He's in no sense a sort of atheist or freethinker or anything like that.

But he does recognize that other religions share certain sorts of core values, even if apparently they're very different. And he also includes in that, effectively Greek philosophers, Greek philosophy and Plato and so on again as having a valid religious point of view. And this is very important, not just intellectually but also socially, because the view of most of the people at the Court of Mahmoud was that Hindus were not people of the book, they didn't have a fundamentally worked out religious faith,

and that they were essentially expendable, therefore. I mean, they could be killed at will and you could do anything you wanted to them because they didn't have any rights, because they didn't have a proper religion. So when he explains that Hinduism is, and Christianity, but when he explains that Hinduism is a valid religion, he's making a pitch, if you like, for the rights of the Hindu subjects of Mahmoud of Kassna, at least. So it has implications that go beyond just the intellectual. Amira, can you develop this in the context of Muslim thought at the time?

Is it almost saying you've got to take these people a lot more serious than your art, They're not canon fodder. They're not just to be looted and carted off. They have a system which is well worth examination and consideration. I think he is, but I think one can exaggerate the, I mean, obviously we're already saying that Mahmoud was bringing Hindu elite back to Ghazna. So obviously he's not simply killing everyone. You know, he, Mahmoud does recognise that there may be some prestige attached to capturing the intellectual elite of the Punjab and being. bringing them back to Ruzna. So I think Al-Barruni is special. He does stand out by his intellectual curiosity, but I think one would want to counterbalance that also by saying that obviously for some time within the earlier Abbasid court in Baghdad,

there had also been appreciation of Sanskritic knowledge. I mean, although the translation movement focused on Greek materials, there have been earlier translations, particularly of astronomical tables collected via Sindh, the Zieg tables. So there was already a sense that the Indians were very skilled in astronomy and that they had their...

And as an astronomer, Al Baruni would naturally have become or drawn into finding out more about that. I think where he's unique is in taking it so much further and writing such a lengthy book about the belief systems and chronology and cosmology

of the Indians. James Montgomery, the sort of information he was putting in the book, would that be about the lives not so much the day allows because I've already been told by here that there was very little of them. But about what was going on in that society,

would that be startling news to his Muslim audience, which would be tiny, but elitist and influential? The issue of the audience is something which raises a number of quite difficult questions. It's obvious from what Biruni says that he's written this

almost as a heresography, so that Muslims can engage with Hindus in religious debate. He is aware of the fact that both the Indians think that the Muslims are deviant from the truth and the Muslims think that the Indians are deviant from the truth. So I think his audience for this is the elite at Mahmoud's court, the Muslim elite. It was commissioned by an otherwise unknown

member of that elite. So Biruni was asked to draw on his expertise in order to provide this account of Indian beliefs in order to enable Muslim intellectuals to engage with these Brahmin scholars in debate. Before we move away from India,

the India, Hugh Kennedy, finally, in this book, Burundi is very true to himself. of 48 chapters are devoted to thought. Yes. What is he most, in which areas is he most keen to pass on what he's found out about Hindu thought system?

Well, it is essentially, as James has been stressing, the question of time, the question of the festivals, the question of their view of the universe and astronomy. He's keen to pass on the intellectual side of, of Hindu thought, well, I mean, all thoughts intellectual, but the intellectual aspects of it, rather than, as it were, the social philosophy. Though he does talk about the caste system and how different the Hindu caste system is

from the perceived egalitarian nature of Muslim life. I'm intrigued by this link he makes with the Greeks, and we've talked about Aristotle quite a bit. Can you be even more specific to just kind of nail that one? You're looking around the table. I'm feeling in time. James. James is the Aristotle man.

Baroni, in his view of how human civilization develops, was of the opinion that the ancient Greeks and the ancient Indians shared the same set of ideas and notions. He actually says in one of his other works that the doctrine of transmigration, which the Hindus believed in, was borrowed by them from Pythagoras. So the further back he goes in time,

he becomes, if you like, a sort of a religious syncretist. The Greeks and the Indians share the same effect of set of beliefs. He thinks that the Greeks have progressed more than the Indians have. And part of the India is Albuhrone's attempt to understand why the Indians haven't achieved what the Greeks have achieved. And he puts the blame very firmly on their language, on Sanskrit. And it's the tendency to rely on synonyms and homonyms. as opposed to exact terminology. So he thinks that there is something not scientific about Sanskrit.

And so I think that this is, in a sense, an exercise in historical archaeology for him. Islam, of course, is at the top, but the Greeks formed a very important stream, as we've heard from Amir and Hugh in Islam. An al-Buroni is pondering in himself why the Indians haven't progressed according to this pattern. Amira, the India was completed around 10.30 around that time. We're always talking around, don't we? And shortly after that, his master or his captor, Mahmoud, died. What effect did that have on, Bruni?

It seems that from that point onwards, he felt a lot more free. Although he chose to remain in Ghazna, under Mahmoud's successor, his son, Masurud. He seems to have felt much more comfortable. He dedicated his next work, the Kanun, another work of astronomy to Masoud, which suggests that the relationship between the two was much friendlier and more like his earlier relationship with Mahmoun in Kharazm. He seems not to light Mahmoud. I'm talking from the notes here, get in the text.

Did he write that while Mahmoud was alive or was that after Mahmoud popped his clogs? He finished it after Mahmoud's death. I mean, I think we have to. to imagine El Biruni working on a lot of things at one time, rather like scholars do today. But he probably finished the India just after Mahmoud's death, but as James has said, it wasn't dedicated to Mahmoud. This doesn't seem to be a work that Mahmood commissioned.

He wasn't the patron. Someone else was the patron, and Al-Biruni sort of writes it almost in a vacuum. Whereas with the Masudi canon, he's dedicating it to the ruler, which is a clear mark of a sort of a more positive relationship between the two. and of course he chooses to spend the rest of his life in Ghazna. So he seems to become reconciled to being there and to become a much more prominent court intellectual rather than the much more sort of figure in the background

that he is with Mahmoud. So this later work, which is considered as a very important work too, this canon for Massoud James Montgomery. Can you, is it, it says here, as it were, that it is a rewriting of Ptolemy. Yes. Right. Can you help us on that? Well, the most important work of astronomy

in the classical period, both late Greek antiquity and Islamic culture is the alma jest of Ptolemy. It's basically a set of mathematical accounts for planetary motion. And Elbearoni sets out to provide the new ruler with a comprehensive guide to the structure of the universe, the movement of the planets,

together with a number of his own observations. Some historians of mathematics, for example, have seen one or two of Albuhrini's calculations and anticipations of functional relationships. But effectively, I think what this is, is a sense that the Almagest has reached the limit of its applicability. Elbeiroini wants to rewrite the astronomical rule book, the Kahnon is in fact a set of rules.

And what's really unusual is that although he provides a lot of astronomical tables, the Zizis, which Amira mentioned, he actually shows the parameters whereby he came to the calculations so that you can then use all of his findings in order to compute the position of the planets for yourself. There's an implication there, Hugh Kennedy, that he was in many ways anticipated things that happened much, much later. in the West, is that something that you can bring to birth?

Yes, he certainly does anticipate things that happen, but it's not clear. His legacy in the Muslim world is very small. There's no direct connection, as it were. There is one significant manuscript of his India book. We get it by a very thin thread. It survived. There are one or two references to it.

It appears again in the Ottoman period. and has been taken up by, well, it was taken up by 19th century European intellectuals, and particularly the British, of course, extremely interested at that stage in Indian culture and Indian history, and that's high-profiled it. And in the 20th century, by Muslims, particularly in Iran, because he's considered to be an Iranian, looking for intellectuals who they can, as it were, put up on the world stages. But his overall, nobody seems to have read his body. very much. Nobody followed on his work really. Nobody built on his discussion of India, for example,

and took the research any further. It's a bit of a shooting star. Amira, having started, can we learn anything much of significance about his character from his writings or writings about him? We know it was obviously a very keen question now. I mean, to take on Avicenna and Fox him was quite something. I mean he's clearly a very brilliant and very flexible mind. I mean, as has been said many times today, he was very obsessed with lists. He is a listmaker par excellence. He's very interesting, these issues of time.

He's more interested in applied than theoretical science. He's got a very inquiring mind, obviously the fact that he wanted to sit down with Indians, whether in India or Rasmah, and find out everything he could from them. He's very inquisitive. and we mentioned his interest in the natural world was enormous. He did write about minerals. He wrote a book on pharmacy, which we haven't mentioned yet. And he, in that book, which was a typical pharmacological work,

he lists all the different herbs and plants you can use and gave their names in five different languages, which is a remarkable achievement. And I think in total, there are about 20 different dialects and languages are actually employed in the work. So he was a hugely intelligent man. But in terms of character, we don't get much sense of the real man. We don't know about his personal life or anything like that.

Finally, James, briefly, I'm sorry to say, can you give us just one example, two examples, of this anticipatory faculty here, and of being way ahead of the game? Well, I think I've sort of alluded to some of them. The first is a possible potential anticipation of the elliptical movement of the planets in terms of pharmacology, there were one or two substances that he seems to have used, derived from local herbs and so on. He was a man who was at the cutting edge of his science.

Well, the story will go on, I'm sure, I hope. Anyway, thank you very much. That was terrific. Amira Benison, Hugh Kennedy, James Montgomery. Next week, we'll be talking about the Neanderthals. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.