The previous GeoCurrents post featured a map of the birthplaces of ten prominent medieval scholars from greater Khorasan. As was noted, two of these thinkers, al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī, were from Khwarazm in what is now northern Uzbekistan – as is obvious in the latter case by his name. Khwarazm, however, has only rarely been considered part of Khorasan. A distinctive and historically important region that is generally ignored, Khwarazm deserves further discussion. Both al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī also deserve more attention, as they were ground-breaking scholars. More important for this blog, they were also great geographers.
Al-Khwārizmī (circa 780-850) was a mathematician, astronomer, and geographer who worked for a time at the celebrated “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. He is generally considered the “father of algebra,” the name of which derives from one of his treatises (Al-Jabr, meaning ”completion” or “rejoining”). His work on the Indian positional numeral system was a key text in European universities from the time of its translation into Latin in 1145 to the sixteenth century. The word “algorithm” derives from his name – and hence from the region of his birth, Khwarazm. Al-Khwarizmi also reworked Ptolemy’s extraordinarily influential work, The Geography. As noted in his Wikipedia article, he corrected several of Ptolemy’s major errors:
Al-Khwārizmī corrected Ptolemy’s gross overestimate for the length of the Mediterranean Sea from the Canary Islands to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean; Ptolemy overestimated it at 63 degrees of longitude, while al-Khwārizmī almost correctly estimated it at nearly 50 degrees of longitude. He “depicted the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as open bodies of water, not land-locked seas as Ptolemy had done.”
Al-Biruni (973-1050) was a scholar of even greater breadth and erudition. According to his Wikipedia article, he has been called “father of comparative religion, father of modern geodesy, founder of Indology, and the first anthropologist.” He conducted innovative research in physics, astronomy, and other sciences, and was equally distinguished is history and linguistics. To my mind, his most impressive achievement was being the world’s first scholarly “civilization crosser” and interpreter. By that I mean he was the first writer to move into a fully alien intellectual context, sit at the feet of its scholars, master their sacred and literary language, delve deeply in their key religious and secular texts, and then return home to turn this newly gained knowledge into a book. His Kitāb al-Hind (The Book on India) also had an ethical and political edge. Al Biruni argued that the savants of India deserved respect for their learning, ethics, and theological sophistication, and thought that Hindus more generally should not be disparaged as idolaters.
Al-Biruni’s work on physical geography was also of signal importance. Using trigonometry, he calculated the radius and circumference of the Earth with surprising accuracy. According to author S. Frederick Starr, “his calculation of the earth’s circumference is only .007 percent less than the modern figure, while his measurement of one degree of longitude at the equator is a mere .085 percent less than the modern figure” (The Genius of their Age, P. 91). Starr claims that this was “the single most momentous act of discovery in the fields of geography and geodesy up to that time.”
Curiously, al-Biruni also hypothesized the existence of a vast “western” continent. According to his Wikipedia article:
Al-Biruni theorized the existence of a landmass along the vast ocean between Asia and Europe, or what is today known as the Americas. He argued for its existence on the basis of his accurate estimations of the Earth’s circumference and Afro-Eurasia’s size, which he found spanned only two-fifths of the Earth’s circumference, reasoning that the geological processes that gave rise to Eurasia must surely have given rise to lands in the vast ocean between Asia and Europe. He also theorized that at least some of the unknown landmass would lie within the known latitudes which humans could inhabit, and therefore would be inhabited.
The mother-tongue of both al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī was Khwārezmian, as would be expected given their places of birth. Both undoubtedly learned Persian at an early age, and both wrote mainly or entirely in Arabic, the language of science in their time and place.* Al-Biruni was also fluent in Sanskrit and had a solid working knowledge of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac (Aramaic). A good part of what we know about the Khwārezmian language comes from him, as he “recorded such calendrical and astronomical terms as some of the traditional names of days months feasts and signs of the Zodiac.”
Al-Biruni’s achievements are more remarkable considering his difficult life. He was essentially kidnapped by the Turkic conqueror Mahmud of Ghazni, perhaps even carted off in chains, and forced to serve as his court astrologer in what is now southeastern Afghanistan. But al-Biruni would eventually be honored by Mahmud’s son and heir, Mas‘ud I, to whom he dedicated one of his key books, Al-Qanun al-Mas’udi (The Mas’udic Canon), an encyclopedia of astronomy, mathematics, and geography. Al-Biruni was subsequently offered a camel-load of silver – which he declined. Instead, he requested to be left to work as he saw fit and be allowed to visit his homeland, Khwarazm, which was permitted.
Al-Biruni also wrote a history of Khwarazm, which has unfortunately not survived except in a few excerpts. S. Frederick Starr outlines some of his historical claims about the region:
Biruni argued that the Persianate Afrighid dynasty, which ruled Khwarazm for seven centuries down to the Arab conquest, had developed a truly remarkable literary and scientific culture. He speaks of whole libraries of their poetry and other literary works, of scientific studies, and philosophical disquisitions.
All of this went up in flames during the Arab conquest in the year 712. Biruni’s chilling report states that the Muslim general Qutaiba bin Muslim “swiftly killed whoever wrote in the Khwarazmian language and knew of the Khwarazmian heritage, history, and culture. He then killed all their Zoroastrian priests and burned and destroyed their books, until only the illiterate [part of the population] remained, and hence the region’s history was mostly forgotten.” In spite of this gruesome assault, Zoroastrianism managed to survive for another century until the Khwarazmian rulers finally converted to Islam and the region’s Zoroastrians either followed suit or fled. The Khwarazmian language fared no better than its traditional religion. So thorough was Qutaiba bin Muslim’s destruction that only a few hundred words of the old Khwarazmian language are known to us today.
To be fair, Khwarazm did substantially recover, both intellectually and economically, from this assault. The conquests of Genghis Khan and Timur were more destructive in the long run.
For anyone interested in Khwarazm and the rest of greater Khorasan in its “golden age,” I highly recommend two books by S. Frederick Starr: Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age (Princeton University Press 2015) and The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2023). The latter work charts the parallel careers of two of the greatest scholars the world has ever seen – Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and al-Biruni – and in the process traces out much of the geography of Persia and Central Asia. Starr’s description of the intellectual pluralism that characterized this “lost Enlightenment,” and especially al-Biruni, is worth quoting:
Unlike Herodotus, who adhered to a purely Greek perspective…, Biruni began with the assumption that all cultures were equal. This assertion is less astounding when viewed in context. It is unlikely that any part of the Eurasian land mass at the time spawned more people who accepted pluralism as a fact than Central Asia in general and Khwarazm in particular. A relativist’s relativist, in the breadth of his perspective, Biruni surpassed all who preceded him and most who followed. …
Biruni is arguably the first thinker to treat all religions, including his own, as equal, and to present them all without polemics. Reporting on the unfamiliar and seemingly bizarre customs of other peoples and other religions, he did so clinically, without sensationalism. In each case he sought to identify the core beliefs of a given faith and then to show how they shaped its believers understanding of time. In this relative approach he was a practitioner of cultural anthropology many centuries before that field emerged as a scientific discipline” (The Genius of their Age, p. 55) (emphasis added).
Given such views, it is not surprising that the Taliban “tried to destroy Biruni’s tomb in Ghazni in May, 2018” (The Genius of their Age, p. 215). But as Starr goes on to note, “a crater on the far side of the moon bears his name, as does an asteroid, 9936 Al-Biruni.”
*Al Biruni once reportedly said that he would rather be criticized in Arabic than praised in Persian, showing the centrality of the Arabic language in the scholarly community in which he operated. It was a different story, however, when it came to poetry.
