Al-Biruni

Abu Reyhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (Persian: ابوریحان محمد بن احمد بیرونی, romanized: Abū-Reyhān Bīrūnī; Arabic: أبو الريحان محمد بن أحمد البيروني; c. 973 – c. 1050), known as Biruni (بیرونی), was an Iranian Khwarazmian polymath of the Islamic Golden Age. Well versed in physics, mathematics, astronomy and the natural sciences, he also distinguished himself as a historian, chronologist and linguist, and has been described as the first anthropologist and a founding figure in comparative religion, geodesy and Indology.

Born in Kath in Khwarazm, al-Biruni spent the first twenty-five years of his life there before moving, after the fall of the Afrighids in 995, between the courts of Bukhara, Tabaristan and Gurganj. Around 1000 he completed his first major work, al-Āthār al-bāqiya ʿan al-qurūn al-khāliya, on historical and scientific chronology. From 1017 he lived at Ghazni under Mahmud of Ghazni, serving as court astrologer and accompanying Mahmud's campaigns in the Indian subcontinent; the resulting Tārīkh al-Hind, finished around 1030, is the work on which his reputation as an Indologist chiefly rests. He died at Ghazni around 1050.

He studied almost all the sciences of his day and was rewarded abundantly for his research in many fields of knowledge. Royalty and other powerful elements in society funded al-Biruni's research and sought him out with specific projects in mind. Influential in his own right, he was himself influenced by the scholars of other nations, such as the Greeks, from whom he took inspiration when he turned to the study of philosophy. A gifted linguist, in addition to his native Khwarezmian he was conversant in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit, and also knew Greek, Hebrew and Syriac. He was, for his time, an admirably impartial writer on the customs and creeds of various nations, his scholarly objectivity earning him the title al-Ustadh ("The Master") in recognition of his remarkable description of early 11th-century India.