[In the essay that follows, originally presented at a 1973 symposium, Lawrence studies the "humanistic methodology" employed in al-Bīrūnī's India, a treatise on religious, historical, philosophical and cultural topics, and argues that al-Bīrūnī's elitist presuppositions limit the accuracy and scope of this otherwise monumental and masterful work.]

General Introduction

Al-Bīrūnī was born in 973 A.D. near Khwārazm, a region south of the Aral Sea in the present-day Soviet Union. Taught by eminent scientists in his native region, he had already completed his first astronomical experiments by the age of seventeen. Political disturbances in the vicinity of Khwārazm, however, required him to leave the land of his birth, and begin the life of an itinerant scholar (—a pattern recurrently familiar to learned men in medieval Islam and one that strikes an empathetic response in university professors struggling to find an academic haven in twentieth-century America). Al-Bīrūnī was constantly on the move from 995 A.D., when he was all of twenty-two, till 1030 A.D., when at the age of fifty-seven he was at last able to secure a measure of peace and complete projects that had been interrupted over a span of years under various patrons of the Sāmānid, the Ziyārid and finally the Ghaznavid dynasties. Of the competing rulers who employed and not infrequently abused al-Bīrūnlī, it was Mahmūd of Ghaznah who played a determinative role in the direction and tone of al-Bīrūnī's scholarship: Mahmiud compelled al-Bīrūnīl to join his royal entourage in 1018 A.D., removing him first from Ghaznah in present-day Afghanistan, and from there to Northwest India during several forays, and then back to Ghaznah, where both men stayed till Mahmūd's death in 1030 A.D. Mahmūd was succeeded by his son Mas'ūd, and al-Bīrūnī indicated his gratitude for the shift in patronage by dedicating the most comprehensive of his extant astronomical works to the new sultan. It is ironic that al-Qānūn al-Mas'ūd memorialized an otherwise lackluster ruler, while the assertive but stingy Mahmūd drew only an occasional and pithy acknowledgement from al-Bīrūnī.¹

As a scholar al-Bīrūnī's profile was multifarious in scope and staggering in quantitative output. He delved into astronomy and mathematics, geology and pharmacology, languages and geography, history, philosophy and religion. He combined the analytic skill of a first-rate mathematical mind with the descriptive approach and synthesizing propensities of a widely read historian. His total corpus of writings is said to have reached 146, by conservative standards; of them only twenty-two, or roughly 15 percent, have survived.²

While the major contributions of al-Bīrūnī to the sum total of human knowledge are in the mathematical and natural sciences, there are notable aspects to his historical work, especially the sections pertaining to the religious and philosophical life of India in his Kitāb al-tahqīq mā lil hind min maqbūla lil-'aql aw mardhūla often simply known as the India. The remainder of this essay will attempt to provide an overview of al-Bīrūnī's humanistic methodology in the India as well as a judgment on the content of his investigations into the religion and philosophy of Hinduism.

Methodology

A central aspect of al-Bīrūnī's methodology is reflected in the structure of the India. The Preface and the Introduction, for instance, contain almost exclusively ethnographic or religious data. Yet most of the book, roughly forty-eight out of the seventy chapters, sets forth a review of the achievements of Indian science in several fields: grammar, metrology, chrestomathy, astrology and astronomy, cosmology and cosmography, chronology and, of course, mathematics. Hence the Preface and Introduction do not accurately anticipate the content of the discourse that follows.

Closely related to this initial disjuncture is the explicit pairing of philosophy and religion that governs the organization of the other twenty-two chapters of the India and determines their content distribution. At the two extremes of the India, i.e., the first twelve chapters and ten of the last seventeen chapters, al-Bīrūnī deals with Hindu philosophy and religion, respectively. It is a distinction harmonious with the medieval Muslim mind, since the content of the early India chapters pertains to doctrinal discussions, such as God, creation, metempsychosis, salvation and idolatry, while the final chapters set out ritual practices, principally initiation and funerary ceremonies, obligatory sacrifices and dietary rules, together with fasting, pilgrimage and festival observances. A. H. Dani, in his recent topical revision of the India,³ makes clear how separate yet related the fields of religion and philosophy were for al-Bīrūnī. Chapter 6 of Dani's work entitled "Hindu Philosophy, Buddhism and Jainism" is drawn completely from the early chapters of Part I, while Chapter 7 on "Hindu Religion," except for the brief depictions of Nārāyana and Vāsudeva, recapitulates the concluding chapters of Book II. By equating philosophy with doctrine and religion with rituals and separating each from the other, al-Bīrūnī emphasizes the central role of Indian spirituality without, however, integrating them with each other or with other aspects of Indian civilization. The interim chapters on Hindu science and its branches appear to be a kaleidoscopic offering spun between the polar parameters of philosophy and religion.

The structural peculiarities of the India may perhaps be explained with reference to al-Bīrūnī's intended audience. In the Preface he states that he wrote the India

as a help to those (Muslims) who want to discuss religious questions with them, and as a repertory of information to those who want to associate with them.⁴

Yet the enumeration of advances in Hindu science could not have been useful to more than a handful of educated Muslims, even in al-Bīrūnī's day, and it seems more likely that he hoped the material on philosophy and religion, for which he adduces generous parallels from Greek, Persian, Christian and Jewish as well as Sūfī sources, would provide the essential grist for his readers in their anticipated engagement with cultured Indians.

It is also possible, notwithstanding the just quoted India passage, that al-Bīrūnī wrote what he wrote on India mainly for his own clarification and ultimate benefit. In the Chronology as well as in the India, al-Bīrūnī implicitly refers to himself as one who seeks the Truth … and is, in turn, guided by it.⁵ The writing of the India may, therefore, have been primarily an extension of al-Bīrūnī's personal quest for Truth, revealing his own commitment to explore "the original oneness of all higher human civilization."⁶ Did he not postulate a pattern of human conduct, belief and relationship to the natural environment that was the same among Indians as among other civilized peoples? On what other basis could he have been both patient and restrained in accepting the problems he faced as a student of India?

In the introductory first chapter of the India al-Bīrūnī confesses the extreme difficulty he had with Indian culture:

For the reader must always bear in mind (he warns his Muslim contemporaries) that Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect, many a subject appearing intricate and obscure which would be perfectly clear if there were more connection between us. The barriers which separate Muslims and Hindus rest on different causes.⁷

The language barrier was especially formidable, even for one of al-Bīrūnī's compulsively hard-working disposition:

Some of the sounds (consonants) of which Sanskrit is composed are neither identical with sounds of Arabic and Persian, nor resemble them in any way. Our tongue and uvula could scarcely manage to pronounce them correctly, nor our ears in hearing to distinguish them from similar sounds, nor could we transliterate them with our characters. It is very difficult, therefore, to express an Indian word in our writing, for in order to fix the promunciation we must change our orthographical points and signs, and must pronounce the case endings either according to the common Arabic rules or according to special rules adapted for the purpose. Add to this that Indian scribes are careless, and do not take pains to produce correct and well-collated copies.… Sometimes (for instance) we have written down a word from the mouth of Hindus, taking the greatest pains to fix its pronunciation, yet afterwards when we repeated it to them, they have great difficulty in recognizing it.⁸

It is no surprise, therefore, that al-Bīrūnī brings to his exposition of Indian culture a set of categories that are convenient to him, reflective of his own training and adaptable to the bewildering, apparently unordered and often error-marked statements of his Indian informants. What is surprising is that the India, in spite of al-Bīrūnī's difficulties with the Indian mind and Indian people, presents a mountain of factual data with only occasional vituperative interjections. In the Preface al-Bīrūnī inveighs not against Hindus but against fellow Muslims who have treated Indian culture and its religious expression by compiling "a farrago of materials never sifted by the sieve of critical examination."⁹ Nor does he respond to the double bitterness which even his own Indian informants expressed to him. As a foreigner, al-Bīrūnī was ipso facto mleccha, or impure, and hence not able to have social intercourse or public discourse with any Indian; but in addition he was a member of the entourage of the hated Mahmūd who, in al-Bīrūnīl's words, "utterly ruined the prosperity of India" and nurtured in Hindus "the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims."¹⁰ At a time when for an educated Muslim the easiest course of action toward non-Muslims was to caricature their lack of culture and/or condemn their heretical beliefs, al-Bīrūnī chose to be guided in his own investigations by an innate sense of balance. It seems probable that his loyalty to what he adjudged to be the Truth—namely, "the original oneness of all higher human civilization;¹¹—led al-Bīrūnī to investigate and appreciate Indian thought, even though other Muslims before him had ignored or belittled it, just as few Muslims after him chose to acknowledge or themselves examine it.¹²

In gathering information about Indian culture, al-Bīrūnīnl was nonetheless constrained by the limitation of his presence on the sub-continent as a foreigner and, more importantly, an Arabic-writing Muslim. He seems to have reported little about India from first-hand observation.

Instead, he consulted pandits, learned men, undoubtedly Brahmins, who were willing to respond to his questions and communicate their own knowledge to him fragmentarily. With respect to philosophy and religion, as well as the sciences, al-Bīrūnī gleaned his information almost solely from Sanskrit documents. It appears that the pandits read him texts which he then transliterated into Arabic/Persian script, and later translated with the help of these same pandits. Other pandits provided commentaries on the original texts in a similar manner. Al-Bīrūnī himself elliptically refers to this process in the Preface to his Arabic translation of Patanjali's Yogasutras:

I went on translating (he notes) from the Sanskrit books of arithmeticians and astronomers till I turned to books on philosophy preserved by their elite, and with respect to which the ascetics compete in order to progress upon the search for the Truth. (These books) were read to me letter by letter and I grasped their content.¹³

Internal evidence from the India as well as the Kitāb Bātanjal¹⁴ indicates that al-Bīrūnī never mastered the devanāgarī script, but instead relied upon transliterating texts which he subsequently translated into Arabic. With respect to the astronomical material, for instance, D. Pingree has noted the same interpolation of text and commentary that is to be found in the Kitāb Bātanjal and presumably also in the now lost Kitāb Sāmkhya, raising the possibility that

al-Bīrūnī did not paeonally inspect the Sanskrit manuscript or, if he did, he was so ignorant of Sanskrit that he could not distnguish the poetic text from the prose explanation¹⁵

It is also evident that al-Bīrūnīm introduced Muslim categories into his analysis of Indian thought. At first glance, the introductory chapters of Hindu philosophy seem to reflect Greek categories, with divisions and sub-divisions that pertain to God (2,3a), Creation (3b,4), Transmigration (5,6) and Salvation (7). Yet, on close inspection, the structure of Hindu belief, as depicted in Chapters 2-7 of the India, begins with God as transcendent being, treats His relation to creation, and, after an excursus on the Greek/Indian notion of metempsychosis, concludes with the depiction of His saving power. The organizational principle and, one suspects also, the selective criteria utilized by al-Bīrūnī in these chapters are implicitly derived from the Muslim understanding of God as the Other who is at once Creator and Judge.

Is it not, however, an expansive view of the Muslim concept of God which affirms His universality so deeply that His presence is located in the structure not only of Greek but also of Hindu belief? The integrity and persistence to search out the One among the Many marks al-Bīrūnī as a pioneer in formulating methodological approaches to the study of non-Muslim religions—whatever the shortcomings of his language and text control or the penumbric aspects of his faith commitment to Islam.

Content

The content of merely the section on Hindu philosophy and religion in the India is itself a formidable collection of disparate data. Moreover, A. Jeffery has already provided an adequate description of its main features.¹⁶ There remains the task of discerning what qualities of reflection and analysis characterize al-Bīrūnī's data and point beyond the India to enduring problems in cross-cultural studies.

al-Bīrūnī is catalogic in the degree that one might expect of a man whose primary affiliation is with mathematical sciences and only secondarily with history and its adjunct concerns, namely, religion and philosophy. Al-Bīrūnī loved to count. At the beginning of Chapter 15 of the India, he goes so far as to state:

Counting is innate to man. The measure of a thing becomes knowable in comparison with another thing which belongs to the same species and is assumed as a unit by general consent.¹⁷

If one randomly explores the several chapters of the India, with their detailed inquiry into virtually every field of eleventh-century Indian culture, the recurring impression is of an orderly mind that arranges and, above all, enumerates. The impression is equally firm whether one examines material pertaining to Indian philosophy or science. It is no accident that al-Bīrūnī has a predilection for Sāmkhya, the most elaborate Indian ontology, which mathematically scales the reflections of the individual who seeks to explore the nature of ultimate selfhood. The Kitāb Sāmkhya, together with the already mentioned Kitāb Bātanjal constituted the two Indian philosophical texts that al-Bīrūnī is known to have translated into Arabic. Though the text of the Kitāb Sāmkhya has been lost, the third chapter of the India contains a lengthy passage describing the entire range of the Sāmkhyan tattva (elements), beginning with Purusa and extending to the karmendriyāni or organs of action. Nor does the mnemonic quality of numbers elude al-Bīrūnīm. At the conclusion of the third chapter of the India, he quotes Vyāsa's dictum:

Learn the 25 (elements of Sāmkhya)—then profess whatever creed you choose (since) your liberation is a certainty.¹⁸

At the end of Chapter 9, when stressing the egalitarian emphasis of the caste system and the openness of the Hindu tradition, al-Bīrūnī again quotes the same dictum, making the point that caste, like creed, is not automatically a vehicle to, or a barrier against, liberation."¹⁹

The Kitāb Bātanjal is also a catalogic enumeration of mnemonic exercises, and al-Bīrūnī has conveyed the spirit, if not the literal sense, of the Sanskrit text by highlighting gradations within the four sections as points of focus for the sādhaka or devotee. Of the seventy-eight dialogic exchanges between sage and interlocutor that constitute the Kitāb Bātanjal, #41, in particular, exemplifies the numerical disposition of both the text and al-Bīrūnī. It straddles two sections (2 & 3), comprises the entire astānga (eight limbs of classical Yoga), and includes sub-categories of numbers, e.g., the five yamas of limb one and the five niyamas of limb two.²⁰

The advantages to counting are offset by certain limitations that inhere to the counter. al-Bīrūnī fails to reflect on systems or aspects within a given system which cannot be recollected through numbering. Hence, in Chapter 3 of the India, the initial paragraphs are cursory, prefacing the substance of the chapter which describes the Samkhyan system. In broaching other, i.e., non-Samkhyan, views of the First Cause, al-Bīrūnī simply states:

Some think that only the First Cause has real existence, because it alone is self-sufficient, while everything else absolutely requires it, that a thing which for its existence stands in need of something else has only a dream-life, no real life, and that reality is only that one and first being (the First Cause).²¹

The passage is undoubtedly a reference to the Vedānta system exposited by Sankāracārya in the centuries immediately preceding al-Bīrūnīm. Al-Bīrūrnī must have become familiar with this system through his conversations with Indian pandits, and one would like to know more about his understanding of Vedāntic teaching on, e.g., the individual soul and salvation or the critical relationship between Vedānta and Sāmkhya. Yet neither of these questions falls within the realm of counting, and perhaps it is for this reason that they do not appear in the India material on Hindu philosophy.

A second limitation to the numerical conceptualization of reality is suggested by the case of al-Bīrūnī and the character of his India. Could it be that preoccupation with counting deterred al-Bīrūnī from developing an independent and cohesive system of metaphysics such as his contemporary and correspondent Ibn Sīnā evolved?²² While there are metaphysical implications in what al-Bīrūnī did, both with respect to history and science, they are more apparent to the reader than to the writer of the India. (His small treatise, Fīsayr sahmay as-sā'Idah wa-l-ghayb, examined elsewhere in this volume by F. Rosenthal, contains the possibility for depicting an overview of civilized thought in its Greek and Hindu as well as Islamic components, but the structure of such a cross-cultural metaphysic remains oblique and incomplete.) Is it perhaps inevitable that the painstaking particularity of counting precludes the universalizing disposition requisite for true philosophy?

Whatever would have emerged from al-Bīrūnī's further reflection on the nature of ultimate reality, he certainly would have separated human beings of all cultural backgrounds into two groups: one that understood, one that did not. Throughout the India the 'awāmm and the khawāss, the elite and the masses, the literate and the illiterate are constantly counterposed to each other. At the beginning of Chapter 2 he declares:

The belief of educated and uneducated people differs in every nation; for the former strive to conceive abstract ideas and to define general principles, while the latter do not pass beyond the apprehension of the senses, and are content with derived rules, without caring for details, especially in questions of religions and law, regarding which opinions and interests are divided.²³

In Chapter 11 of the India, he elaborates on this distinction between the elite and the masses, arguing that the popular rabble alone engage in idol worship; since abstract truth can never be represented in an idol, it is a definitional error to suggest that philosophers could ever be idolaters.²⁴ Once again, we would like to know in more detail than the India provides what al-Bīrūnī thought of Sankāracārya, since the latter, notwithstanding the lofty powers of perception and analysis, frequently worshipped an idol, one no less formidable, nor, to the Muslim mind, more grotesque in form than the lingam or phallus of Lord Siva.

In al-Bīrūnī's defence, however, it must be said that he was not the first to postulate a perceptual as well as social chasm between the 'awāmm and the khawāss. In ancient Greek philosophy and in its earliest Muslim transmission,²⁵ there existed a similar distinction between the educated elite and the unlettered common masses. What is peculiar to al-Bīrūnī is his application of the 'awānm/khawāss dichotomy as stringently to Muslims as to non-Muslims. One might have expected him to argue that only some Greeks and a very few Indians reached the pinnacle of abstraction, i.e., knowledge of the one God, because the norm of their societies remained the coarse views and crude practices of idolaters, while the obverse was true for Muslins, namely, that the revelation Allah delivered to Muhammad supplied a norm for Islamic society which affected masses and intellectuals alike, raising both above the condition of ignorance prevalent in non-Muslim societies. Yet al-Bīrūnī makes no explicit case for the inherent superiority of the Islamic community due to its revelational foundation. Though he criticizes the Hindus in Chapter 1 of the India,²⁶ the severity of his judgments against them is matched, if not exceeded, by subsequent demurrals against the uneducated generally and Muslims in particular. Consider, for instance, the imaginary scenario illustrating the innately human disposition to idolatry which al-Bīrūnī sets forth in Chapter 11:

If, for example, a picture of the Prophet were made, or of Mecca and the Ka'ba, and were shown to an uneducated man or woman (i.e., an uneducated Muslim man or woman), their joy in looking at the thing would bring them to kiss the picture, to rub their cheeks against it, and to roll themselves in the dust before it, as if they were seeing not the picture, but the original.…²⁷

Again, in describing the superstitious element that lingers in the scientific writings of the renowned astronomer Brahmagupta, al-Bīrūnī notes:

If Brahmagupta means (that) the generality of the Hindus (hold emneous views), we agree that the uneducated among them are much more numerous than the educated; but we also point out that in all our religious codes of divine revelation (ie., the sharī'a) the uneducated crowd is blamed as being ignorant, always doubting, and ungrateftil.²⁸

In one passage of the India al-Bīrūnī does extol the clarity of Qur'ānic dicta, but quickly acknowledges the tendency of 'the vulgar mind' to distort even the divine teaching.²⁹

The cleavage between the khawāss and the' awāmm, therefore, is determinative for al-Bīrūnī's thinking and scholarship. The India repeatedly conveys the impression that for al-Bīrūnīi, as for many medieval Muslim scholars, Islam is no different from other religious traditions in that the ignorant dominate in numbers and influence, while only a very few have the opportunity or the courage to grasp the Truth.

A direct consequence of this world-view is the mandate to isolate and describe the few, whatever the culture in which they are located or the religious community to which they are linked. The comparative evidence introduced in the opening chapters on Indian philosophy and sporadically recurrent throughout the India is not peripheral³⁰ but central to al-Bīrūnī's understanding of the Hindu tradition. Impressed with the achievements of the Greeks and acknowledging their superiority among civilized peoples,³¹ al-Bīrūnī is nonetheless committed to the proposition that all philosophers—Indian as well as Greek—have been guided by the instinctive, tenacious affirmation of Truth epitomized in the example of Socrates:

Think of Socrates (he declares in Chapter I of the India) when he opposed the crowd of his nation as to their idolatry and did not want to call the stars gods. At once eleven of the twelve judges of the Athenians agreed on a sentence of death, yet Socrates remained faithful to the Truth.³²

For al-Bīrūnī the truth lodged in Hindu views on God, creation, metempsychosis and salvation must be comparable to the views of the Greek hukamā' (sages). In juxtaposing and explicating the scholarship of both civilizations, al-Bīrūnīm is upgrading the achievements of Indian philosophy to an extent never attempted by his predecessors. Earlier Muslim scholars had been content to postulate an historical interdependence between Athens and Benares, deriving the Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis, for instance, from the alleged journey of Pythagoras' disciple to India. In the Chronology al-Bīrūnī reiterates this mythical ascription, quoting Ammonius to the effect that:

(Philāyūs) went to India, where Brahman, the founder of Brahmanism, became his disciple for seven years and learned from him the doctrine of Pythagoras.³³

In the India al-Bīrūnī does not deny the possibility of an historical link between Hellenistic and Hindu thought, but instead attempts an expanded intercalation of the two traditions that permits the Indian philosophical corpus and, by extension, the contributions of Indian science to be integrated into the world view of educated Muslims. To the writer of the India the quasi-historical dependency of Indian culture on Greek culture or the inferiority of the former to the latter is less important than their common value for those who seek to understand "eternal wisdom."³⁴ To explicate the connections between them, therefore, was not only possible, but was implicit in the very notion of the Truth as one, indivisible and the property of the few.

Conclusion

The shortcomings to al-Bīrūnīin's description of Indian thought are more obvious to us now than to earlier generations of Western and Eastern scholars. The tacit value of non-literate elements, expressed in myth, magic and ritual, has been impressed on a global readership through the work of anthropological researchers such as Sir J. Frazer and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. As an elitist, al-Bīrūnī prized literacy, adhering mainly to texts for his information on Indian culture at the same time that he equated illiteracy with ignorance and even heresy. In spite of his textualist orientation, he failed to achieve a thorough grasp of the Sanskrit language and relied almost exclusively on the transmissions and interpretations provided by others. He also introduced Muslim categories into seemingly objective descriptions of Hindu belief, even though it was his preoccupation with verifiably objective, scientific methods, especially counting, which apparently prevented him from evolving a novel metaphysical system that would have encompassed Indian thought and made a contribution to the history of ideas as valuable as the largely Aristotelian ontology of his contemporary, Ibn Sma.

All such criticisms, however, do not diminish the achievement of al-Bīrūnī's scholarship, especially the cross-cultural comparisons advanced in the early and final chapters of the India His approach to the culture and religion of a foreign people was infused with a balance that reigns, despite his proclivity to scientism and attachment to unexamined religious presuppositions. He culled several sources of the Indian tradition, pitting the essence of Hindu belief with the best that he knew from Hellenism and Safism. He isolated major conceptual categories, e.g., transmigration… and unicity…, which are still widely discussed and debated among Hindus, Muslims and others. Al-Bīrūnī probed and criticized, without denigrating. His quest for the Truth was not designed to attract a large number of adherents, and it succeeded; but for the few it endures as a source of hope and an exemplar of patient perseverance in cross-cultural discourse.

Notes

¹ On the relations between Mahmūd and al-Bīrūnī, see E. C. Sachau, trans., Albīrūnī's India, London, 1910, reprinted Delhi, 1964; I, p. xi; E. G. Browne, trans., Chahār Maqāla of Nizāmī-i-'Arudī, London, 1921; pp. 65-67; and E. J. Kennedy, "Al-Bīrūnī"a in C. C. Gillespie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography II, p. 150.

² E. J. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 152.

³ A. H. Dani, Albīrūnīn's Indica, Islamabad, 1973.

⁴ Sachmi, op. cit., I, p. 7. For the Arabic text, see Hyderabad edition, 1958; p. 4.

⁵ On the Chronology reference, see E. C. Sachau, Kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiya 'an al-qurūn al-khāliya (Chronologie orientalischer Volker von Albērūnī,), Leipzig, 1878; pp. 4, 5 & 68; trans., The Chronology of Ancient Nations, pp. 3,4 & 81. On the India material, see Sachau I, pp. 24-25; Hyderabad, p. 18.

⁶ See F. Rosenthal, "Al-Bīrūnī between Greece and India," (p. 10).

⁷ Sachau I, p. 17; Hyderabad, p. 13.

⁸Ibid p. 18/p. 13.

⁹Ibid, p. 6/p. 4.

¹⁰Ibid, p. 22/p. 16.

¹¹ Rosenthal, op. cit., (p. 7).

¹² On the negligible influence of al-Bīrūnī's India on subsequent generations of Muslim scholars, see K. Jahn, Rashīd al-Dīn's History of India, The Hague, 1965; pp. ix-xiii.

¹³ H. Ritter, "Al-Bīrūnī-'s Übersetzung des Yoga-Sūtra des Patafijali" Oriens 9 (1956), p. 167; S. Pines & T. Gelblum, 'Al-Bīrūnī's Arabic Version of Patañijali's Yogasūtra," Oriens 20 (1967), p. 309.

¹⁴ The first part of India, ch. 16, for instance, is devoted to the writing of the Hindus, yet it is brief (2-½ pages of Arabic text; Hyderabad, pp. 132-34) and includes no specimens of Sanskrit characters other than om, which is expressed in its imagic rather than alphabetic form. Al-Bīrūnī seems not to have known the alphabetic transcription of om; he makes reference to it once elsewhere in the India (Sachau I, p. 75; Hyderabad, p. 56) and nowhere in the Kitāb Bātanjal (Pines/Gelblum, op. cit., p. 320, fn. 178).

¹⁵ D. Pingree, "Brahmagupta, Balabhadra, Prthudaka, and al-Bīrūnī" in the forthcoming volume of Proceedings from the International Sanskrit Congress, Delhi, 1972; (p. 17).

¹⁶ A. Jeffery, "al-Bīrūnī's Contribution to Comparative Religion" in Al-Bīrūnī Commemoration Volume, Calcutta, 1951; pp. 125-160.

¹⁷ Sachau I, p. 160; Hyderabad, p. 123.

¹⁸Ibid, p. 44/p. 33.

¹⁹lbid, p. 104/p. 79.

²⁰ Ritter, op. cit., pp. 182-184.

²¹ Sachau I, p. 33; Hyderabad, p. 24.

²¹ It is noteworthy that R. Arnaldez, in summarizing what characterizes the Muslim falāsifa, includes their study of natural science, i.e., astronomy, physics, chemistry and medicine, but makes no mention of mathematics; see R Arnaldez, "Falāsifa," Encyclopaedia of Islam²² R, p. 766. Though Muslim philosophers recognized the value of mathematics and its place among the sciences (e.g., al-Fārābī in Ihsā' al-'ulūm), no major metaphysician from the medieval period was trained in, or made significant contributions to, mathematics.

²³ Sachau I, p. 27; Hyderabad, p. 20.

²⁴Ibid, pp. 112-113/p. 85.

²⁵ Consult, for instance, M. Mahdi, trans., Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, New York 1962; pp. 47 & 59-60. Al-Fārābī's views on the relationship between the elite and the multitude parallel his descriptions of the relationship between philosophy and religion, and like the latter, they are tinged with ambiguity insofar as the philosopher, that rare individual, performs religious, i.e., prophetic, functions for society as a whole. See Mahdi's introductory essay, pp. 6-8.

²⁶ Sachau I, p. 23; Hyderabad, p. 17.

²⁷Ibid, p. Ill/p. 84.

²⁸Ibid II, p. 112/p. 436.

²⁹Ibid, pp. 263-264/pp. 219-220.

³⁰ A. Embree, in his introduction to a valuable summary edition of the India (Albīrūī's India, New York, 1971; p. xix), implies that "some of the many discussions of Greek philosophy" are dispensable, but the task of excising them is perilous.

³¹ See Rosenthal, "Al-Bīrūnī between Greece and India," passim.

³² Sachau I, p. 25; Hyderabad, p. 19. On Varāhamihira as a 'truth-speaker' see Ibid II, p. 110/p. 434.

³³ The quotation appears in a passage of the Chronology omitted from Sachau's edition and translation but published, with translation, in S. H. Taqizadeh, "A New Contribution to the Materials Concerning the Life of Zoroaster," Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 8 (1935-1937); p. 953.

³⁴ Rosenthal, op. cit. (p. 10).