In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

Ultimately, Nietzsche’s analysis is quite optimistic, particularly when compared to Sigmund Freud and his book Civilisation and Its Discontents, published in 1930. Although Freud did not refer to Nietzsche in that, the analysis that he offered was uncannily close to some of the things that Nietzsche had highlighted in The Genealogy.

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: Freud posits an irredeemable conflict between, on the one hand, the demands of instinct and, on the other hand, the restrictions of civilisation, and he locates guilt as the fundamental problem of civilisation. What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that civilisation is built on the taming of our aggressive instincts, through their repression and sublimation. But, where Freud is a pessimist about the future of civilisation, Nietzsche is more optimistic.

  Freud thought that we have to make a pessimistic choice between civilisation or instinctual happiness; we cannot have both. Nietzsche thought there was at least a possibility of a form of moral self-determination that would be free of this self-lacerating guilt and self-inflicted cruelty. It is what he signalled at the start of the second essay as the ‘super moral, sovereign individual’.

  Nietzsche had a short life, Melvyn observed, and, not long after The Genealogy, he spent his last eleven years in sanatoria. He had a massive nervous breakdown and did not do any more writing. He was looked after by his anti-Semitic sister, who also took control of his papers, and his reputation took a long time to recover from the harm she caused. Now, Stephen Mulhall said, Nietzsche is having a lot of influence and is regarded as a genuine, intelligible interlocutor, particularly in moral philosophy, not just in the Franco-German traditions of philosophy but also in the Anglophone traditions, and, broadly, that is because of his naturalist inclinations. He was someone who wanted to explain things, without reference to the supernatural.

  AL-BIRUNI

  If you were to point a reasonably powerful telescope at the surface of the moon, at latitude 17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you would find yourself looking at the Al-Biruni crater. This lunar feature is named in honour of a tenth-century Muslim scholar, who was not only one of the greatest figures of medieval natural philosophy, but is also claimed as one of the most outstanding scholars of all time. Born in central Asia, Al-Biruni was an astonishing polymath, a master of mathematics, astronomy and medicine. He was fluent in five languages and he was as great a scholar of philosophy as he was a scientist. Perhaps Al-Biruni’s most remarkable book is The India, a comprehensive account of Hindu philosophy, religion and science. It is the first work about India by a Muslim scholar, and is so compelling a portrait of one culture, seen from the perspective of another, that it has been described as the first work of anthropology.

  With Melvyn to discuss Al-Biruni, and his groundbreaking work, were: Amira K. Bennison, professor in the history and culture of the Maghrib, University of Cambridge; Hugh Kennedy, professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and James Montgomery, professor of classical Arabic at the University of Cambridge.

  In Arabic, Hugh Kennedy began, Al-Biruni’s full name is Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī, and the Biruni part, by which he is always known, reflects the fact that he was apparently born in the suburb (or birun) of the city of Kath in Khwarezm. This region is in the delta of the Oxus river, which flows from the Pamir mountains down into the deserts of what is now Uzbekistan. The area was very fertile and densely populated, but, at the same time, also very isolated. His birth, around 973, was in the period after the universal caliphate had collapsed and the Muslim world in the tenth century was in a state of political disintegration that had not spread to the culture.

  HUGH KENNEDY: One of the features of the medieval Muslim world is that it retained a cultural unity and identity and, instead of having one centre in Baghdad, there were numerous different places where intellectuals worked. Among the many dynasties that followed the Abbasids, it was something of a statement, a legitimising device, to have intellectuals at your court.

  While we know relatively little about Al-Biruni’s early education, he must have studied what are sometimes described as the religious sciences, becoming skilled in areas such as jurisprudence, law and the exegesis of the Qur’an.

  AMIRA K. BENNISON: He also studied what were often called the Greek sciences or the sciences of the ancients. He became very proficient in mathematics, astronomy, also astrology, which was closely associated with astronomy in those days. He was able to engage with all kinds of different scholars in the region in which he was living.

  He was a contemporary of people like Avicenna, and they all had access to the Greek sciences. In most of the region’s cities, there were libraries full of Greek works that had been translated into Arabic, including the works of Aristotle. Muslims were using paper and that meant that volumes of works were much more readily available than they would have been with parchment, or other materials. There was relatively less of Plato, although some things, particularly Neoplatonism, had been translated.

  AMIRA K. BENNISON: The important thing is to remember that, at this point, there doesn’t seem to be any disparagement of non-Islamic, or non-Arab science. It is fully integrated among these intellectual circles.

  Al-Biruni became part of the court of Ma’mun, one of the Khwarezm shahs, and his position is sometimes described as that of nadim, a boon companion, someone who did not necessarily have a formal position but who was an adviser and was probably also used as an ambassador to undertake missions for Ma’mun.

  There was almost nothing that Al-Biruni saw around him that did not attract his interest, Hugh Kennedy commented, and his first book was an attempt to sum up how different cultures calculated their years. He wrote some 140 books, not all of them very long, but The India has 600 pages in the English translation and is a serious work.

  It was in around AD 1000 that Al-Biruni came into contact with Avicenna, the foremost philosopher of his time and a recognised expert on the interpretation of Aristotle. What they would have had in common was the broad-based education, mentioned earlier, although they may have diverged in their teens when aspiring students could specialise.

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: Avicenna had developed his interest in philosophy through reading every bit of Aristotle that he could get by the age of sixteen or seventeen. They shared very much the same educational background, but they differed enormously in how they viewed natural philosophy. For Avicenna, Aristotle had begun to ask the right questions and provide most of the right answers. Al-Biruni took a slightly more quizzical stance towards the ancient Greek tradition when it came to accounting for natural phenomena.

  For example, the natural philosophy of the day said that, when an object was cooled, it would shrink. Al-Biruni asked Avicenna why it was, then, that when there is water in a glass jar and that freezes, the glass jar breaks. Avicenna did not provide a very convincing answer to this simple question. Al-Biruni posed a series of other questions, including the following one that appears insightful (although there is some contention over the interpretation).

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: Aristotle in On the Heavens says that planets must move in a complete circle because otherwise a vacuum would be created. Now Al-Biruni asks Avicenna: why is it that, when objects move around an axis in such a way that they either form an oval or a lentil shape, they don’t seem to have any problem in completing the circuit?

  Al-Biruni seemed to be talking about the elliptical movement of the planets, something that Kepler took up in the seventeenth century in his Laws of Planetary Motion, and he appeared to reckon that the whole notion of circular movement of the heavens was something that Aristotle had invented.

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: Avicenna says, ‘Well, we must remember what Themistius says. Themistius says that we should always interpret the philosopher Aristotle in the best possible way.’ Avicenna effectively admits that Al-Biruni is right, but then deflects the argument by a quibble and says, ‘Of course, things that move inside the celestial sphere are different from the celestial sphere its
elf, which is tantamount to perfection.’ And that really is not a proper answer, in my opinion. Al-Biruni had Avicenna on the run.

  When he was twenty-seven, in the year 1000, Al-Biruni dedicated a work of which the title roughly translates as The Extant Remains of By-Gone Eras, and he worked on this book for the rest of his life. It was an exercise in the charting and the mapping of time and he asked how all the world religions, prior to Islam, calculated their religious feasts. He started off with the Persians. Those before Zoroaster were thought to be Buddhists, so he discussed them, and those after Zoroaster were obviously Zoroastrians. Then he moved onto the Sogdians, who were in what is roughly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan now, and then his own people, the Khwarezmians, then the Jews, the Christians and the late antique pagans, and then he moved onto the Muslims themselves. He was trying to work out how accurately time could be charted.

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: That’s one of his big obsessions. He, after all, was occupied through numerous courts as an astronomer, and one of the jobs of the astronomer was determining the times of prayer. He has this deep-rooted fascination with time, and one of the things that he says is that counting is fundamental to man’s existence.

  Al-Biruni had been enjoying the patronage of Ma’mun in Khwarezm, but that was about to be interrupted. Mahmud of Ghazna was a Turk by origin, from central Asia, and his father had been employed as a professional soldier by a local Persian dynasty, the Samanids. When his father died, Mahmud took over the warlordship and was determined to establish himself as a major political figure in what is now Afghanistan and the edge of India.

  HUGH KENNEDY: One of the things that he wanted to do was establish a proper court, a distinguished court that people would look up to. He needed a number of court intellectuals to make this a proper palace set-up, and Biruni, in Khwarezm, was an obvious target for his recruitment. He conquered Khwarezm and, effectively, kidnapped Biruni and took him back to his court and (this is about 1017). Biruni spent the rest of his life as a court intellectual with Mahmud of Ghazna.

  It was here he started The India, and it is remarkable that he wrote it at all because, for most Muslims, Hinduism was dismissed simply as polytheism and idol worship.

  HUGH KENNEDY: Biruni is the one Muslim intellectual of his time, or, indeed, of the pre-modern period, who tries to get behind that and see that Hinduism is, in fact, a complex religion with many different philosophical and intellectual sides to it.

  The India does not made it explicitly clear where Al-Biruni gained his knowledge of Hindu ideas and culture. His biographies talk very little about the period when he was at Mahmud’s court, from around 1017 until Mahmud’s death in 1030.

  AMIRA K. BENNISON: Mahmud was already engaged on the conquest of India. By India, we don’t really mean the whole of the subcontinent. Mahmud’s conquests and raids were primarily in the Indus Valley region, what is now Pakistan, rather than what is now India. He did make some raids into the Gangetic plain area, but relatively few. He was already engaged in India, going on annual campaigns, before Al-Biruni arrived at the court in Ghazna, by whatever means he arrived there.

  There are almost no references to Al-Biruni going to India. The text of The India has a list of places with very little description of the kind you might ordinarily find in geographical works, so it is difficult to see him as an eyewitness. His information may have come from Mahmud’s conquests and the capture of individuals.

  AMIRA K. BENNISON: When Mahmud went into the Punjab, the Indus Valley region, he captured large numbers of people who were also brought back to Ghazna, just as Al-Biruni himself had been brought from Khwarezm. You can imagine in Ghazna, this kind of frontier border town, where Mahmud is trying to build up a court, he was actually collecting elites from all the regions he raided or conquered and bringing them together.

  Al-Biruni would thus have had a great deal of contact with many people of Indian origin. Mahmud of Ghazna had Indians within his army, as the Ghaznavid army was very ethnically mixed, with Turkish warriors as the elite commanding group, but with Arabs from Khorasan, Afghans and Daylamite soldiers from the Caspian Sea. He also captured intellectuals, craftsmen and scholars and brought them back to his city.

  The India goes through the various areas of Hindu knowledge, and it is essentially about Hinduism. He says nothing about Buddhism, which was almost extinct there. The inspiration to write it was unlikely to have come from Mahmud of Ghazna, whose objective was raiding the major Hindu shrines for their gold and silver. There is no indication that Mahmud had any interest in Hindu culture whatsoever.

  HUGH KENNEDY: Biruni took a lot of interest in the measurement of time, how they measure their festivals, rituals of purity among the Hindus, how you become a brahmin, what brahmins were and so on. It is described as a work of anthropology, but it is only in a certain sense that; it is about the religious and intellectual life of the Hindus.

  If you wanted to find out what sort of houses the Indians lived in, what they ate, what they wore, then there is nothing of that in The India. But, if you want to find out their thought systems, then the work is very eloquent.

  Al-Biruni was particularly interested in how Hinduism compared with Greek ideas of science and wisdom.

  HUGH KENNEDY: He is discussing the mathematical aptitude, but he is saying about Hinduism that it is much more than just simple idol worship with tons of Gods. There is a system to it, it has philosophical background. And that’s what distinguishes him from the other people.

  There is an Aristotelian aspect to the structure of the work. Al-Biruni described in the introduction to The India, using what James Montgomery called ‘very disingenuous terms’, that he had tried to apply a geometrical method in analysing the thoughts and beliefs of the Indians. What he meant by that was that you do not talk about something unless you have first defined all of the functions and the meaning of the words, and the terms on which you are going to use them.

  The arrival of an Indian embassy before Mahmud of Ghazna.

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: He begins with the Hindu vision of existence, he begins with God, he moves onto philosophy, ontology, how the soul is liberated from the body, talks about heaven and hell, and so on. He does this roughly over the first seventeen chapters, but he also mentions the religious literature of the Hindus in order to prepare you for the next stage of his argument.

  He then turned to how the Indians described their own universe, a cosmography. He began with mathematical geography and, from there, he moved onto astronomy. The bulk of the book was again concerned with how Indians calculated time, a chronography. He began with the measurements for night and day and went on through every conceivable permutation that the Indians had. If other people were doing this kind of work, theirs has not survived, so we can be fairly confident this interest was something unique to Al-Biruni.

  MELVYN BRAGG: It is still itching away in the back of my mind, I am awfully sorry, to take up Amira’s more or less definite declaration that he didn’t go there [to India]. Where do you stand on that?

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: I agree with Amira. There is one reference to a trip to India, it is in a later work. Al-Biruni had devised his own method for measuring the radius of the earth, through observing the height of a mountain, and he goes to Mount Nandana in the Punjabi mountain range of Salt, and that’s the only time, that I am aware of, that he actually mentions being in India.

  Besides, in The India, he does allude to restricted freedom, saying at the introduction, ‘I haven’t been able to move freely,’ which James Montgomery took as a reference to the fact that, for thirteen years, he was, effectively, a hostage of Mahmud.

  Al-Biruni was a good Muslim and, for him, Islam was a perfect religion. He was in no sense an atheist or freethinker, but he did recognise that other religions shared certain core values even if, on the face of it, they were very different.

  HUGH KENNEDY: He also includes in that Greek philosophy and Plato and so on as having a valid religious point of view. And this is very important not jus
t intellectually but also socially, because the view of most of the people at the court of Mahmud was that Hindus were not people of the book, they didn’t have a fundamentally worked-out religious faith and they were essentially expendable.

  When Al-Biruni explained that Hinduism was a valid religion (as was Christianity), he was making a pitch for the rights of the Hindu subjects of Mahmud of Ghazna, with implications that went beyond just the intellectual.

  Even if Mahmud thought Hindus were expendable, he still was bringing the Hindu elite back to Ghazna, so obviously he was not killing everyone.

  AMIRA K. BENNISON: Al-Biruni is special, he does stand out by his intellectual curiosity, but I think that one would want to counterbalance that also by saying that, obviously, for some time, within the earlier Abbasid court in Baghdad, there had also been appreciation of Sanskritic knowledge. Where he is unique is taking it so much further and writing such a lengthy book about the belief systems and chronology and cosmology of the Indians.

  Al-Biruni, in his view of how human civilisation developed, was of the opinion that the ancient Greeks and the ancient Indians shared the same set of ideas. He actually said that the doctrine of transmigration, which the Hindus believed in, was borrowed by them from Pythagoras.

  JAMES MONTGOMERY: The further back he goes in time, he becomes a religious syncretist: the Greeks and the Indians share the same effective set of beliefs. This is an exercise in historical archaeology for him. Islam, of course, is at the top, but the Greeks have formed a very important stream in Islam, and Al-Biruni is pondering why the Indians haven’t progressed according to this pattern.

  With the death of Mahmud in 1030, it seems that Al-Biruni felt a lot freer, although he chose to remain in Ghazna under Mahmud’s successor, his son Ma’sud. He dedicated his next work to Ma’sud, which suggests that the relationship between the two was more like his earlier relationship with Ma’mun in Khwarezm.