Shunya's Notes

Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies,

‘[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.’ [2]

For a flavor of what other notable thinkers of his age thought of him, consider this remarkable passage from the autobiography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980-1037 CE), the Persian philosopher and physician famous in the West as the ‘Islamic Galen.’ Ibn Sina wrote that after a diligent study of ‘the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences’ in his youth, he finally reached the study of metaphysics:

‘I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author’s object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to a point where I had memorized it. In spite of this I could not understand it nor its object, and I despaired of myself and said, ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’ But one day in the afternoon when I was at the booksellers’ quarter a salesman approached with a book in his hand which he was calling out for sale. He offered it to me, but I refused it with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science. But he said to me, ‘Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams.’ So I bought it and, lo and behold, it was Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returned home and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects of that book became clear to me because I had got to the point of having memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted ...’ [3]

Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95

Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him "arguably the greatest American of the 20th century".

Borlaug's life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.

He is eulogized today in the Wall Street Journal:

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.
....

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

In Light of Nalanda

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years, from 629-645 CE, in the Indian subcontinent, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects like grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, and theology were taught. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars ‘in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj ... Xuanzang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.’ [4]

The Nalanda establishment greatly admired Xuanzang. Beseeching him to stay, they even offered him a senior position on their academic staff. But he declined with this reply: ‘Buddha established his doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to enjoy it alone, and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?’ For scores of years, he was accorded a place in Indian temple paintings with his ‘hemp shoes, spoon and chop sticks mounted on multicolored clouds.’ [5]

This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen

Tadeusz Borowski was 21 years old when he was deported to the cluster of concentration camps in southern Poland, collectively known as Auschwitz, in 1943. His fiancée had mysteriously disappeared one night; when he went to look for her, he was befallen by her same fate: entrapment by the Nazis, arrest, and deportation for participation in the Polish resistance.

     

Until that night, young Borowski had been a student of literature in the underground university of Warsaw. Since it was the Nazis' intention to enslave the Poles, secondary school and university were forbidden to them during the occupation. Still, thousands risked death and deportation, meeting in small groups in private homes in order to pursue their studies. (This was a system revived from an earlier time, as similar restrictions had been resisted by Poles under the Russian occupation some decades earlier, when Marie Curie had studied in the underground "Floating University" of Warsaw.)

Borowski had started to write early, publishing his dark poetry through the underground press during his student days. While at Auschwitz, he wrote lengthy letters to his fiancée in the women's camp, and immediately after the war he wrote several devastatingly stark short stories recalling his life in the camps. A selection of these letters and stories have been published and translated in a small volume with the English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (although his story by that name doesn't appear in the collection). Having survived two years, mostly as a high-level prisoner, in a place where surreal violence and suffering were normalized and experienced as mundane, Borowski's first-person stories are characterized by a brutal acknowledgment of the fact that such extremes of acceptance, of behavior, are, indeed, humanly possible. The penetrating honesty and deep compassion of his writing confronts the reader surprisingly, a mixture of darkness and wonder that opens more questions than it settles on the nature of the human beast and gives a more textured evocation of life in a Nazi concentration camp than any I've read before.

While working in a position of relative comfort as an orderly in the medical facility at Auschwitz, where prisoners are healed or used for experimentation, where infants' corpses are cataloged, he writes to his lover in the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau about the normalcy of the absurd, the daily goings on around him. These letters constitute the heart of this collection. In them, as in his stories, he writes about death, about the lines of prisoners headed for the gas chambers, about other murders and tortures inflicted by prisoners or guards; he writes about love, about his dreams for the future, about the emptiness that encroaches upon them all. He writes about the exhilaration of a prisoner boxing match, the pleasure of listening to the prisoner symphony orchestra, the greedy desire of the men prisoners for the women of the "Puff," the camp brothel where women prisoners are both pimped and privileged by the camp authorities.

A Journey to the West

Journey to the West, "China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure," was published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel's hero, "a mischievous monkey with human traits ... accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture." * It is "an extended allegory in which ... pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment." * Indeed there aren't many books in which "go west, young man" would be a call to go to India.

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th century CE Chinese man, Xuan Zang (or Hieun Tsang). Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang'an (modern Xi'an), Hieun Tsang followed his brother into a Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a year-long journey full of peril and adventure, crossing deserts and mountains, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan (where he saw the Bamiyan Buddhas, recently destroyed by the Taliban), he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years in India, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha's life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the famous Nalanda University. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India when in a religious convocation "in Harsha's capital of Kannauj during the first week of the year 643 ... Hieun Tsang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate." *

For his return, he gathered hundreds of Sanskrit texts (sutras), loaded them on pack animals, and set off for Xi'an. Many of them got destroyed en route but he still managed to bring back 657 books. It was the time of the Tang dynasty in China, best known for its cultural effulgence akin to the Guptas of India (not the least because Shunya came into being then :). The Tang were Buddhist and, like the Guptas, major patrons of Buddhism.

Upon his return and for the remaining 19 years of his life, Hieun Tsang worked with a team of linguist monks to translate many of the 657 books and wrote a commentary on them. He also published an account of his travels which is now a precious historical record. He founded the Faxiang school of Buddhism whose ideas live on in the Zen variant. When Buddhism died out in India, its texts lost forever, these translations would become the only version of the Indian originals -- like the many Classical and Hellenistic Greek texts we know only via Arabic translations made during the so-called golden age of Islam in Baghdad.

The Tang emperor, Gaozong, supported Hieun Tsang's enterprise. He even built a pagoda -- now called the Big Goose Pagoda -- to house his translations, many still in use and displayed in a small museum on site. Outside the entrance stands an elegant modern statue of the man. It is said that the emperor canceled all audiences for three days when he heard of his death.

Like Chinese food in India, Buddhism altered its flavor in China. Confucianism, above all, stood for hierarchical relations, social order, respect for authority, orthodox family values, practical success, and ancestor worship. Despite their shared agnosticism and focus on this world, the centrality of the individual spiritual quest, detachment, and monasticism in Buddhism must have threatened Confucianism. What therefore arose in China was a "Confucianized" Buddhism. And just as Hinduism borrowed from and then pushed out Buddhism in India, Neo-Confucianism marginalized Buddhism in China only a few centuries after Hieun Tsang, not the least because it was a "foreign faith" (though it would not disappear as completely as in India).
   

(Note: Xuan Zang is variously spelled Hsüan Tsang, Hiuen Tsang, Xuanzang, Hiouen Thsang, Hsuan Chwang, Hsien-tsang, etc.)

Death of a Colonel

Col. Vasanth V, commanding officer of the 9th Maratha light infantry battalion, died on Tuesday, July 31st. He was injured while battling a group of militants who were trying to cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in the Uri sector in Kashmir.

I had met Col. Vasanth briefly in 1991 when I was on vacation in India. He was a soft-spoken man with a good sense of humor. He had surprised me with his knowledge of obscure things by asking whether the culture of the Cajuns in Louisiana was still alive. I hadn't known about the Cajuns before coming to the US, and hadn't expected that someone in India would know about them. So I naturally asked him how he even knew of their existence. Though he couldn't recall exactly where he had read about them, he brushed off my surprise by saying "We used to read a lot of things, including the newspaper the samosas came wrapped in"! I could immediately sense a kindred soul, having been book and library-starved during my childhood. For some reason, that moment of resonance came back to me today, when I heard about his death.

I have often wondered if the chaos of the world of political violence, either within countries or between them, is going to affect me directly. There are so many conflicts in the world that I must count myself incredibly fortunate never to have come within sniffing distance of any. This time though, the violence has come quite close. Col. Vasanth and I had only one degree of separation. He was a long-time colleague and a good friend of my brother.

I wonder if the planners of violence like the generals and spy agencies pursuing "strategic depth" or "balance of power" ever pause to think of the misery they are inflicting upon people. Scratch that. It is quite obvious that they don't. For them, the jihadi groups are pawns in a broader chess game.

We read of the deaths of people in the news reports so often. Yet, when a person we know dies, we are forced to pause and reflect on the tragedy. Our own sorrows, frustrations and hassles start looking trivial by comparison. A death you reflect upon forces you to evaluate life again.

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer.

Wise Man Socrates

Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest man of Classical Greece. This is by no means an original insight, but one that I was able to convince myself of many years ago.

Socrates is justly famous for declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for his dialectic method of inquiry, the Socratic Method. With Socrates, the central problem of (Western) philosophy shifted from cosmology to the formulation of a rule of life through understanding, to a practical use of reason. He upheld self-knowledge and the supremacy of the intellect, insisting that one must work hard to discover the right and wrong. As the Apology relates, Socrates advocated the tending of one’s soul, to make it as good as possible – and not to ruin one’s life by putting care of the body and possessions before care for the soul.**

Socrates was no retiring ascetic but an urbane intellectual of aristocratic lineage, a man of the world, famed for his practical wisdom, modesty, self-control, generosity, alertness, and integrity. "There was no complacent self-righteousness of the Pharisee nor the angry bitterness of the satirist in his attitude toward the follies or even the crimes of his fellowmen. It was his deep and lifelong conviction that the improvement not only of himself but also of his countrymen was a task laid upon him by his God, not to be executed with a scowling face and an upbraiding voice. He frequented the society of promising young men, and talked freely to politicians, poets, and artisans about their various callings, their notions of right and wrong, the matters of familiar interest to them."**

In his youth, he had served in the Athenian army, apparently with distinction. Yet he missed no opportunity to be a gadfly to the establishment, working "to undermine the collective notion of 'might makes right' so common to Greece during this period."*** A story goes that Socrates, when pronounced the wisest of men by the oracle at Delphi, earnestly set out to investigate the truth of this claim. He interrogated poets, craftsmen, politicians and other 'wise men'. After investigating, his conclusion certainly didn't help him win friends among them:

Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire

The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement, almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings, therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility. —Percy Julian, 1899-1975

Percy Lavon Julian, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899, the grandson of slaves, was one of the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century. His work, especially in the field of steroid chemistry, positively affected countless millions of lives and did nothing less than to help change the world.

In the Jim Crow South, libraries were closed to blacks and public schooling ended with 8th grade; teacher’s colleges were available for aspirants to the 10th grade. This education was seen as adequate to produce laborers for the larger economy and teachers for the black community. Though Percy’s parents had but a basic education themselves, they scraped together their coins to build a home library for their six children, all of whom would grow up to earn post-graduate degrees. Percy went first when at sixteen years he gained admission to DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, as a “sub-freshman” who had not completed high school. DePauw would be life-changing for Julian, as he recalled, “On my first day in College, I remember walking in and a white fellow stuck out his hand and said ‘How are you?–Welcome!’ I had never shaken hands with a white boy before and did not know whether I should or not.”

Percy Julian was not the only black student at Depauw, but he was surprised to find upon arrival that campus hostel facilities were closed to them. Alone in a strange town, it took young Percy a day and a half before he found a place that would serve him a meal. Eventually, he made a deal with a college fraternity for bed and board in exchange for his service as a waiter. He also took work digging ditches to help pay his tuition. Far behind his white classmates in education, Julian attended the local high school while pursuing his first two years of university studies. He did catch up with his peers and by the end of his fourth year, Percy Julian graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian: first in his class.

At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders, and she showed me, for the first time, the deep scars that had remained from a beating she had received when, one day, during the waning days of the Civil War, she went through the Negro quarters and cried out, “Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming. The Lord has heard our prayers!” And then, proudly, she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”

Julian’s dream was to get a PhD in chemistry, following the inspiration of St. Elmo Brady, the first African American to have accomplished the same a few years before. But Julian's professors dissuaded him; they would not recommend him for graduate programs; they showed him letters from top graduate schools expressing concern that he would over-qualify himself as a black man and be unable to find a job. So Julian took a teaching position at Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee. Though he was terribly unhappy, he made the best of his role, writing a completely new series of lectures for organic chemistry. When he showed these to William Blanchard, his mentor at DePauw, the professor was so impressed he finally advocated for him to win the Austin Fellowship in Chemistry at Harvard University.

Omar Khayyam of Persia

In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. The Great Seljuq Empire owed the reform of its calendar to him. The result was the Jalali era (named after Jalal-ud-din, one of the kings)—'a computation of time,' wrote Gibbon, 'which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian [calendar].' He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a number improved to 365.242196 days only in the 19th century and the current measure is 365.242190 days.

 

He not only discovered a general method of extracting roots of an arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations which he did by means of conic sections. He was also part of the Islamic tradition of investigating Euclid and his parallel postulate. Arguing that ratios should be regarded as 'ideal numbers,' he conceived a much broader system of numbers than used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers. In many such areas, he furthered the remarkable work of al-Beruni. Commissioned to build an observatory in the city of Esfahan, he led a team of astronomers to do so.

   

Omar Khayyam ('Tentmaker', possibly his father's profession) was not only a top-notch mathematician but also a major poet. The world today knows him for his quatrains, the Rubaiyat. Besides the social attitudes of the times, they reveal a sensitive, intelligent, humble, gently-mocking yet good-humored man, skeptical of divine providence and certainty of truth, wistful of an ever-present evanescence, mystical in one, lamenting human ignorance in another. Many of his 500 or so quatrains celebrate wine, exhorting all those who take themselves too seriously to partake of it while time permits. He "chooses to put his faith in a joyful appreciation of the fleeting and sensuous beauties of the material world. The idyllic nature of the modest pleasures he celebrates, however, cannot dispel his honest and straightforward brooding over fundamental metaphysical questions."*

 

Khayyam was attached to the court of the Seljuks—of Khorasan, later of Baghdad, Samarkand and Esfahan as well—and lived amidst political turbulence interspersed with quiet periods. His ideas frequently attracted flak from the growing religious conservatism of Sunni Turks. According to Professor Iraj Bashiri, Khayyam—synthesizing the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonian al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna)—believed that  

 

“God had created the world but … [it] had been a necessity for God and, therefore, inevitable. The stages leading to the creation of matter followed each other as night follows day … This ascription of limits to the power of the Almighty is the most startling notion in Khayyam's Quatrains. It jolts the unwary reader out of the routine of orthodox thinking and places him or her in the uncomfortable position of the unwilling blasphemer. Yet, Khayyam's God is more real and approachable than the fearful Creator of orthodoxy … [he] formally rejects the Creator/creature relationship for a cause and effect relationship … God becomes the cause of a necessary creation … that develops of its own accord, and at its own pace. A number of Khayyam's quatrains concentrate on what religion teaches about the powers of the Almighty and … the limitations of that power.” * 

 

Here are ten sample quatrains (translated by EH Whinfield).

 

O unenlightened race of humankind,
Ye are a nothing, built on empty wind!
Yea, a mere nothing, hovering in the abyss,
A void before you, and a void behind!

 

All my companions, one by one died
With Angel of Death they now reside
In the banquette of life same wine we tried
A few cups back, they fell to the side.

   

Some are thoughtful on their way
Some are doubtful, so they pray.
I hear the hidden voice that may
Shout, "Both paths lead astray."

 

The secrets eternal neither you know nor I
And answers to the riddle neither you know nor I
Behind the veil there is much talk about us, why
When the veil falls, neither you remain nor I.

 

Drinking wine is my travail
Till my body is dead and stale
At my grave site all shall hail
Odor of wine shall prevail.

 

Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine;
If to the poor his portion you assign,
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, and now some wine!

 

Slaves of vain wisdom and philosophy,
Who toil at Being and Nonentity,
Parching your brains till they are like dry grapes,
Be wise in time, and drink grapejuice like me!

 

You, who in carnal lusts your time employ,
Wearing your precious spirit with annoy,
Know that these things you set your heart upon
Sooner or later must the soul destroy!

 

Never in this false world on friends rely,
(I give this counsel confidentially);
Put up with pain, and seek no antidote;
Endure your grief, and ask no sympathy!

 

You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,
Why then remain a prey to empty fear?
You can not bend things to your will, but yet
Cheer up for the few moments you are here!

 

(More quatrains?) 

Al-Beruni's India

The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, destroyer of temples, and plunderer of their wealth, but in his own dominion he was known as a patron of the arts, literature, and science (not unlike Genghis Khan who is a great and beloved hero in Mongolia today, gracing its currency, plazas, airports, etc.). He assembled in his court and the university he established at Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan) the greatest scholars and writers of the age.

 

One such scholar was al-Beruni (973-1048; another was Firdausi), "commissioned" by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental commentary on Indian philosophy and culture – Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind. “In his search for pure knowledge he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in Islamic history.”* Romila Thapar calls him "perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia ... His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms, religion ... are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India."

 

Born near modern Khiva in Uzbekistan, he possessed "a profound and original mind of encyclopedic scope ... conversant with Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Syriac (Armenian) in addition to the Arabic in which he wrote. He applied his talents in many fields of knowledge, excelling particularly in astronomy, mathematics, chronology, physics, medicine, mineralogy and history."*

     

Al-Beruni wrote his work on India to provide, in his own words, "the essential facts for any Muslim who wanted to converse with Hindus and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature." He traveled in India for thirteen years, observing, questioning, studying. The result was a comprehensive exposition of Indian thought and society. "Not for nearly 800 years would any other writer match al-Beruni's profound understanding of almost all aspects of Indian life."*

   

He read the major Indian religious and astronomical texts; in his account he highlights choice parts of the Gita, the Upanishads, Patanjali, Puranas, the four Vedas, scientific texts (by Nagarjuna, Aryabhata, etc.), relating stories from Indian mythology to make his point. He also compares Indian thought to the Greek thought of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and others, and at times with Sufi teaching. Here is one of his observations on the Hindus of his day:    

 

"The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner ... Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is."

 

His translator, Edward Sachau, observes:    

 

"To al-Beruni the Hindus were excellent philosophers, good mathematicians and astronomers, though [out of a certain self-confidence] he believes himself to be superior to them, and disdains to be put on a level with them. He does not conceal whatever he considers wrong and unpractical with them, but he duly appreciates their mental achievements ... and whenever he hits upon something that is noble and grand both in science and in practical life, he never fails to lay it before his readers with warm-hearted words of approbation. Speaking of the construction of the ponds at holy bathing-places, he says: “In this they have attained a very high degree of art, so that our people (the Muslims), when they see them, wonder at them, and are unable to describe them, much less to construct anything like them.”

 

Al-Beruni records some of the more egregious plundering by his boss, Mahmud of Ghazni (esp. at Mathura and Somnath); for obvious reasons he doesn't explicitly denounce it though his text betrays a definite sense of lament. He does say that Mahmud "utterly ruined the prosperity of the country", created a hatred of Muslims among the locals, and caused the Hindu sciences to retreat "far away from those parts of the country conquered by us" to places "where our hands cannot yet reach." Sachau also notes that "he dares not attack Islam, but he attacks the Arabs", reproaching the original Arabs for destroying the civilization of Persia.   

 

Besides his work on India, "In his works on astronomy, he discussed with approval the theory of the Earth's rotation on its axis and made accurate calculations of latitude and longitude. In those on physics, he explained natural springs by the laws of hydrostatics and determined with remarkable accuracy the specific weight of 18 precious stones and metals. In his works on geography, he advanced the daring view that the valley of the Indus had once been a sea basin. In religion he was a Shi'ite Muslim, but with agnostic tendencies. His poetical works in the main seek to combine Greek wisdom and Islamic thought."* He also corresponded with the famous philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna). A lunar crater is named after him.

 

[Alberuni's India by Al-Beruni (973-1048) (Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind or simply, Ta'riqh al-hind), early 11th century, translated by Edward C. Sachau. Edited with introduction and notes by Ainslee T. Embree, The Norton Library, 1971. This is an abridged version - the complete version by Sachau spans two volumes and is really for the specialist. Al-Beruni is also spelled Alberuni and Al-Biruni.]