Al-Biruni and the Invention of Anthropology
A polymath of the eleventh century went to India, learned Sanskrit, interviewed Brahmin scholars, and wrote the most accurate account of another civilization that the medieval world produced.
In 1017, the scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni arrived in the Indian subcontinent in the retinue of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Where the sultan came to conquer, al-Biruni came to understand. He spent years learning Sanskrit, debating with pandits, and comparing what he learned against what his own tradition said. The result was Kitab al-Hind — the Book of India — a systematic account of Hindu religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and custom that remains, nine centuries later, a model of rigorous cross-cultural inquiry.
Al-Biruni is sometimes called the first anthropologist. The label is anachronistic, but the spirit behind it is not wrong. He went to understand a civilisation on its own terms, to let its practitioners speak in their own voices, to correct the prejudices of his own tradition where the evidence demanded it. These are recognisably anthropological commitments, and they were remarkably rare in the eleventh century.
