Project Noon

by Saad Ismail

“I have found it very hard to work my way into the subject, although I have a great liking for it, in which respect I stand quite alone in my time.”

Al Biruni

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni’s precocious and magisterial study al-Hind (India) was undoubtedly far ahead of its times. Exactly one millennium before us, the promising polymath found himself in the crossfires of changing political tides and was soon smuggled by Mahmud of Ghazna into the royal retinue and employed in the service of the emperor whose exploits he did not fully endorse. While the emperor would earn a particular kind of reputation over the years, history would come to regard the scholar quite differently. 

Al-Biruni’s India is now widely regarded as one of the first truly comparative cross-cultural intellectual exercises in history. He is said to have pioneered the study of comparative religion and is seen, in many ways, to be a forerunner of a method widely used in academic religious studies today, namely phenomenology.

The term itself is credited in modern times to the Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl from the early 20^th century. Central to this method is the idea of ‘bracketing’ i.e., seeking to understand a phenomenon on its own terms, bracketing out one’s biases and presuppositions. This is exactly what al-Biruni announces in the introduction to his Kitab al Hind. The polymath makes it clear that his book is not intended to be a polemical tract out to prove or disprove something. He felt that the contemporaneous Muslim literature on Hindu traditions was plagued by an inability to move beyond the urge to critique and condemn, to the point that a sound understanding of these complex traditions was nowhere to be found in the slim corpus of enthusiastic Muslim writings on the subject. With the exception of one or two notable cases, al-Biruni laments that:

“… everything which exists on this subject in our literature is secondhand information which one has copied from the other, a farrago of materials never sifted by the sieve of critical examination.”

The insistently critical al-Biruni was first and foremost a formidable scientist. His expertise spanned a wide variety of disciplines including physics, mathematics, astronomy, mineralogy, pharmacology, geography, chronology, linguistics, history, and philosophy. His anthropological study of Hindu societies and cultures, therefore, is driven by the selfsame scientific temperament and intellectual rigor in the quest for truth that had already aided him successfully in so many fields. In the quest for truth, scientific or social, one must always aim to be entirely unprejudiced. In seeking to grasp the truth, we are confronting a reality that is independent of us, which cannot simply be molded or falsified to fit our fancies. To do so would only be the most unflattering reflection of one’s own intelligence.

Another major work of his is The Chronology of the Ancient Nations which is a monumental compendium of the calendars and chronological systems of an extensive range of societies and cultures from the late antique Hellenistic world to the ancient and medieval Near East and Central Asia. While discussing Jewish and Christian methods for the computation of the Passover festival in the book, al-Biruni remarks:

“Now since it has been our object in all that has preceded thus far, to point out scientific truth, to mediate between the two parties, and to clear up the differences between them, we have here set down the methods of each of the two sects according to their own opinion, as well as that of others, so as to show to each of them what is for and what against the same… in this we are guided by a desire that both parties should dismiss from their minds any suspicion that we are partial to either side.”

In fact, al-Biruni grounds the spirit of objectivity in scriptural foundations:

“It has been said in the Koran, “Speak the truth, even if it were against yourselves” and the Messiah expresses himself in the Gospel to this effect: “Do not mind the fury of kings in speaking the truth before them. They only possess your body, but they have no power over your soul”.”

We find many more instances in scripture exhorting objectivity. The Quran unequivocally ties the demand to do justice with the status of one’s piety or taqwa (“Do justice, it is closer to taqwa”). It also demands an unmistakably principled approach: do not apply one criterion to others and another to yourself (“Why do you preach what you do not yourself practice?”). Or, to desist from pronouncing blanket statements about other religious communities (“They are not all the same”). Hypocrisy, too, is not a defining characteristic of any one community to the exclusion of others. There may be as many hypocrites among the believers as among other communities. 

It is quite characteristic of various Quranic passages to challenge one’s conceptual closure when it comes to declaring the status of any community. Take a discussion in the first few pages of Surah al-Ma’idah, for example, which does not allow you a neat cut-and-dried answer when it comes to the question of what the status of the ‘people of the book’ is. It’s complicated, the Quran wants to say. This is the first point it forces you to concede. Arguably, because human societies themselves are complex. Such oscillations between the scripture’s attitudes towards a subject force the reader to stay vigilant in order to keep track. Ultimately, one must learn to read the scripture itself with the earnest intent to listen to the voice of God which is revealed anew in each instant, and not to retire to the familiar and reassuring echoes of one’s preformed opinions. Finally, a much-repeated prayer of the Prophet, as well, seeks to consolidate this temperament in the believer: “My Lord, show me the truth as it is truly.” (Rabbi arinil haqqa haqqan).

Yet despite unequivocal scriptural injunctions to fairmindedness, people seldom stick to their principles. In practice, many groups and sects generally misrepresent the other as an easy tactic of vindicating oneself. Al-Biruni mentions the scholar Abu Sahl at Tiflisi complaining on one occasion about a certain author who had grossly misrepresented a theory of the Mutazilites in his book to show them in a bad light. Al-Biruni then suggests to Tiflisi that this is true not just of inter-sectarian Muslim animus, but also, perhaps more greatly, of inter-religious relations. 

“Thereupon I pointed out to the master (Tiflisi) that precisely the same method is much in fashion among those who undertake the task of giving an account of religious and philosophical systems from which they slightly differ or to which they are entirely opposed.”

In fact, it is much easier to detect such misrepresentation, argues al-Biruni, if they occur within the frame of one religion. 

“On the other hand, you would have great difficulty in detecting it in a report about entirely foreign systems of thought totally differing both in principle and details, for such a research is rather an out-of-the-way one, and there are few means of arriving at a thorough comprehension of it. The same tendency prevails throughout our whole literature on philosophical and religious sects. If such an author is not alive to the requirements of a strictly scientific method, he will procure some superficial information which will satisfy neither the adherents of the doctrine in question nor those who really know it.”

We will explore the details of al-Biruni’s scientific method in a future essay. But, if the detailed quotations above are any indication, it should be clear by now that his primary purpose is to provide, what he terms “nothing but a simple historic record of facts”. His desire is to place before the reader “the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are”. In this vein, al-Biruni stands very much within the spirit of phenomenology. “To the things themselves”, would become Husserl’s rallying cry in the modern period. Thus, the phenomenological method of keeping one’s prejudice in check by checking one’s presumptions is quite characteristic of al-Biruni’s technique itself.

While conscious prejudices may be kept in check to an extent, what of those prejudices that one is unconscious of? With the distance and hindsight of a thousand years, we have the privilege to notice some of these latent biases which al-Biruni himself may have been blind to. As much as he wanted to keep his Islamic presuppositions out of his analysis of Hindu traditions, and as much as he sought to understand them ‘on their own terms’, we can now recognize, nonetheless, that the very choice and structure of the topics of his book reflect a deeply Islamic and Persianate intellectual background. We can also recognize other idiosyncrasies in his views: the claim that the doctrine of rebirth or metempsychosis is the cornerstone “of the Hindu religion… just as the Kalima is (the cornerstone) of Islam”. He had translated into Arabic the Samkhya-karika and the Yoga-sutras of Patanjali, the latter being in his view, a central “Holy Book” for Hindus. His remarks on Hindu philosophy are, therefore, unevenly inclined towards the Samkhya and the Yoga schools. The Vedanta, by contrast, is conspicuously absent in his treatment. And despite his preference for first-hand accounts (‘eye-witnessing’) over secondary written sources (‘hearsay’) the great bulk of his data derives from his interactions with Hindu scholars and traders in the Ghaznavid court. Additionally, he chooses to privilege elite, Brahmin points of view in his sources of Hinduism, and to privilege texts over folk traditions in his account.  At a more fundamental level, al-Biruni is reconfiguring Hinduism by the simple act of branding it as a unified “religion”, an unwitting intellectual move that presages the European orientalism of the nineteenth century and strays from al-Biruni’s own desire to see things on their own terms.

It is easy for us, with the hindsight of a thousand years, to make these critical and corrective comments. We have greater access now through the internet and through dedicated academic studies, to source materials that al-Biruni would never have come across. So it is not advisable to accept his analyses in all their details today. It is, however, of the utmost importance that we inherit some of al-Biruni’s cross-cultural cosmopolitan intellectual courage.

Finally, let us not forget that al-Biruni, the Persianate, was fully an outsider to al Hind – who unmistakably felt himself, and was also made to feel, a foreigner, a yavana, a mleccha. He would write: 

“the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect… they totally differ from us in religion as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa… in all manners and usages, they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be devil’s breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper.”

He immediately recognizes, however, that hostility to foreigners is not reason enough to distrust them, refuse engagement, or fail to understand. It represents, rather, a baser tendency common to all human societies:

“We must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Hindus, but is common to all nations towards each other.”

Yet, it was precisely al-Biruni’s clear awareness of his own religious and ethnic positionality, in the view of the late German Indologist Wilhelm Halbfass, that would lead al-Biruni “to perceive the “otherness” of the Indian religious philosophical context and horizon with a remarkable clarity…,  unparalleled in the world of classical antiquity with its attitudes towards the “barbarians” and the Orient.” Al-Biruni saw no contradiction between his Islamic faith and the fair representation of beliefs he did not subscribe to. While his co-religionists would most likely have expressed shock and horror at his free expression of ‘idolatrous’ beliefs, al-Biruni’s standards of objectivity would not allow his personal preferences to distort and disfigure his vision of the other. Neither does one find in him any desire to renounce one’s own beliefs in order to extend intellectual sympathy to the other. This lends to al-Biruni’s account, what Halbfass describes as, a “clarity of hermeneutic awareness”.

“Al-Biruni did not possess the amorphous “openness” of syncretism and the search for “common denominators”. That is why he could comprehend and appreciate the other, the foreign as such, thematizing and explicating in an essentially new manner the problems of intercultural understanding and the challenge of “objectivity” when shifting from one tradition to another, from one context to another.”

But it is a sorry state of affairs today if the capaciousness of this ‘outsider’ from a thousand years ago is still our gold standard. We have, it seems, made little progress in intercultural understanding. To be fair, we have a long history of social and cultural indigenization since al-Biruni’s times, having witnessed the likes of a Dara Shikoh, a Nizamuddin Panipatti, or an Amir Khusrau, and our imaginations still remain deeply suffused by these currents. Nevertheless, we find our intellectual production today to yet again resemble that shallow internecine and intercommunal polemics that al-Biruni identified in his own times and felt both morally and scholarly repulsed by.  

Can we find it within us to embark once again on a sincere scholarly quest to understand our religious others? It would be a shame if we let the brilliance of this ‘outsider’ outshine our own integrated vision as citizens of modern India. Al-Biruni’s India is an intellectual call to arms for any aspiring student of indigenous traditions. Beyond the grave, from across the ages, al-Biruni’s staggering intellect beckons: a millennium hence, and no comparable successor to outstrip my legacy!

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Bibliography:

• al-Biruni, A. R. (2002). Alberuni’s India: An account of the religion, philosophy, literature, geography, chronology, astronomy, customs, laws and astrology of India about A.D. 1030 (Trans. and Ed. Edward Sachau) (reprint ed.). Rupa & Co. (Original work published in 1883). 
• al-Biruni, A. R. (2004). The chronology of ancient nations (Trans. and Ed. C. Edward Sachau) (reprint ed.). Kessinger Publishing.
• Ernst, Carl. (2016). Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Persian and Arabic Translations from Arabic, in Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga, SAGE publications.
• Halbfass, Wilhelm. (1988). Islamic Encounters with Indian Philosophy, in India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding. State University of New York.
• Jerffrey, A. (1951). al-Biruni’s contribution to comparative religion, in al-Biruni commemoration volume. Iran Society, Calcutta. 
• Kozah, Mario. (2015). The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science: Al-Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology. Brill.
• Lawrence, Bruce (1976) al-Biruni’s approach to the comparative study of Indian Culture, in Biruni Symposium. Iran Center, Columbia.
• Malagaris, George. (2020). Biruni. Oxford University Press. 
• Mirza, M. (2011), Bīrūnī’s Thought and Legacy. Religion Compass, 5: 609-623. 
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. (1993). An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, State University of New York Press.

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