27/03/2023
Who was Al-Biruni?
George Sarton, the founder of the History of Science discipline, defined al-Biruni as âone of the very greatest scientists of Islam, and, all considered, one of the greatest of all timesâ. A universal genius that lived in the Central Asia a thousand of years ago, al-Biruni âwas so far ahead of his time that his most brilliant discoveries seemed incomprehensible to most of the scholars of his daysâ, so wrote Bobojan Gafurov in his article on the Unesco Courier.
AbÅĢ al-RayhÄn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-BÄĢrÅĢnÄĢ (973â1048), was born in Kath, Khwarezm. Khwarezm, also known as Chorasmia, is a large oasis region in western Central Asia, bordered by Aral Sea and deserts. It was the country of the Khwarezmian civilization and of several kingdoms. Today, it is fractioned and belongs to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Leaving his homeland, al-Biruni wandered in Persia and Uzbekistan. Then, after Mahmud of Ghazni conquered the emirate of Bukhara, Al-Biruni moved in Ghazni. This town, which is in modern Afghanistan, was at that time the capital of Ghaznavid dynasty. In 1017, al-Biruni travelled to the Indian subcontinent, studying Indian science and conveying it to the Islamic world.
Îl-Biruni was an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, studying physics and natural sciences too. He was the first able to obtain a simple formula for measuring the Earthâs radius. Moreover, he thought it possible for the Earth to revolve around the Sun and developed the idea that geological eras succeed one another. In fact, in his scientific body of work he addresses almost all the sciences. He had excellent knowledge of ancient Greek and studied several works by ancient Greek scientists in their original forms; among them there were the Aristotleâs Physics, Metaphysics, De Caelo, and Meteorology, the works of Euclid and Archimedes, the Almagest of the mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy. âWhen religious fanaticism swept medieval EuropeâĻ al-Biruni, as a forerunner of
