Every once in a while you hear about somebody tagged as “the father of this” or “the mother of that.” But there’s a person you may not have heard of who’s credibly called the father of four entire fields: comparative religion, Indology (south Asian studies), anthropology, and geodesy (measurement and representation of Earth). I’m talking about Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, who’s more commonly known as Al-Biruni, or in Arabic, أبو الريحان البيروني. He was born on (or around) September 4, 973 in Khwarezm, which today is in northwest Uzbekistan. For the Americans in the audience who, like me, have at best only a general idea where Uzbekistan is, it’s in Central Asia, bordered by Terkmenistan, Afganistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. If that doesn’t help, remember hearing about the Aral Sea (now the Aral Desert)? That’s where Uzbekistan is.
Al-Biruni lived in Khwarezm until he was about 25, and was an exceedingly good student. He studied practically everything: law, theology, grammar, math, astronomy, medicine, physics, chemistry, and geography. He began writing while there, and eventually published 146 books. 95 of them are about astronomy and math. He also studied astrology, but later refuted astrology completely and compared it unfavorably to astronomy.
When he was about 25 he traveled to Bukhara, a larger city in Uzbekistan, to join the court of the ruler Mansur. After that he joined another court, of Ziyarid in Tabaristan, on the Caspian seacoast. Al-Biruni lived during the Islamic Golden Age, which was also politically volatile, especially in his region. When Mahmud of Ghazni captured the city and court where Al-Biruni was, he (along with the other scholars) was taken to Ghazni, where he became the court astrologer. While there he travelled extensively in India, and thanks to his travels was able to make geographic measurements across long distances. Among other things, he explained the diameter and rotation of the earth, the phases of the moon, and designed his own quadrant for measuring the height of the sun at different latitudes and times.
In physics, Al-Biruni developed experimental methods for determining density, and designed his own hydrostatic balance. In Europe, Galileo and Newton employed the techniques Al-Biruni invented and wrote about. In anthropology, a field of study that he came up with independently, he wrote extensively about India, and the religions, people, customs, and cultures there. Particularly for his time, he was very even-handed in describing various religious traditions. He wrote a well-known encyclopedia about India: Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable (there are other translations). At the time there was quite a bit of tension between Muslims and Hindus, but Al-Biruni managed to get past it and interact with Hindu scholars as well. He even understood the Hindu calendar, which was quite a mystery at the time. Calendars were not yet standardized, and there were at least four in common use in that part of the world.
Part of Al-Biruni’s ability to study and interact with a variety of scholars was due to his fluency in at least seven languages, including Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Hebrew. His native language was Khwarezmian, which is no longer spoken.
He lived to be 77, but after his death the politics of the region became even more chaotic, the Islamic Golden Age faded, and his work wasn’t continued or used as a foundation. Centuries later, though, he began to be remembered, and there’s a crater on the Moon and an asteroid named for him. In Antarctica, you can find Biruni Island. And in the United Nations office in Vienna, in the Scholars Pavilion, there is a statue of Al-Biruni (or, at any rate, a statue of what he might have looked like). He’s been portrayed in at least two movies, one from 1974 in the USSR and another from 1988 in India, and on a television series in Türkiye. Not all of his works have survived, but many can still be found. Unfortunately for Western audiences, only a few have been translated from the Arabic and Persian he used to write them.
