In Our Time by Melvyn Bragg

Author:Melvyn Bragg [Bragg, Melvyn and Tillotson, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

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 just 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.

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