Penchants of the polymaths

The fathers of Islamic science hold lessons for students: breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way

by Mariam Sabri  BIO

From Chronology of Ancient Nations (c1000 CE) by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. Courtesy Edinburgh University, Scotland

is a historian of science, medicine, technology and the environment in South Asia and the littoral Indian Ocean world. She is assistant professor at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, and the author of the forthcoming monographs Time and Clime: The Exact Sciences, Environment and Empire in Early Modern South Asia and People’s Particles: Symmetry, Socialism and Science in the Cold War Era.

This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct: to move freely between mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy and poetry, testing one discipline’s assumptions against another’s. My classroom is in Pakistan, where students arrive eager to talk about disruption and employability, but rarely about breadth. I want them to see, through these four lives, that this kind of expansiveness isn’t a luxury for stable times; it has produced some of the most enduring breakthroughs in the history of science.

After 15 years working in liberal arts education, I believe a reintegration of disciplines in a Hellenistic style can lead the way. I’m not making a superficial case for ‘interdisciplinarity’. Instead, I’m arguing for something more specific: the recovery of the penchants of polymathy that once thrived in the Muslim world. Rather than fetishising disruptive innovation through compulsory courses on entrepreneurship and applied methods, we should offer an entirely different model of how to learn and what learning is for – especially since my students already enter university with a narrowly vocational mindset.

The word polymathy itself captures the bricolage of many (poly) worlds of knowledge (mathy). Polymathy offers respite and reflection in a world fractured by war, climate catastrophe and injustice. It is sourced from indigenous idioms of the Muslim world rather than an imposition by the Global North. Today, polymathy brings different kinds of thinking to bear on political, economic and environmental problems. At a time when students are reading less of the classic canon and worrying more about employment opportunities, the expansiveness of polymathy can offer a meaningful path forward. These are the lessons of the great Islamic polymaths.

The life of our opening actor al-Biruni has much to teach students about the human dimensions of science. Born in the Central Asian city of Khwarizm around 973, he grew up with few opportunities. But that didn’t constrain him: al-Biruni sought an education. In the classic tradition of Islamic polymathy, he studied Islamic law, grammar, theology, the sciences of astronomy and mathematics, as well as history. Throughout his life, lack was not an impediment for al-Biruni. In fact, scarcity has a way of making one appreciate whatever knowledge is at their disposal – a key lesson for any liberal artist.

This resourcefulness fuelled al-Biruni to make key contributions to his fields of expertise. Early in his career, he had limited access to scientific instruments. Undeterred, he taught himself to build them from a handful of old manuals and limited resources. Al-Biruni’s ingenuity also allowed him to take on established scientific leaders. The astronomer al-Khujandi, for instance, had built a massive sextant that he used to measure the tilt of Earth’s axis relative to its orbit (its obliquity). The number he yielded, though, struck al-Biruni as too low. Because of his experience in building his own sextants, he was able to identify the issue: al-Khujandi’s sextant sagged, distorting his results. The scarcity that had compelled al-Biruni to make his own sextants made it possible to see where others with far more resources had gone wrong. Al-Biruni’s own measurements, documented in The Determination of the Coordinates of Locations for Accurately Measuring the Distances between Places, were widely accepted by his contemporaries and later scientists.

Had al-Biruni never been compelled to travel across South and West Asia, he’d never have made this critical observation

Al-Biruni’s later life and works were shaped by Mahmud Ghazni, sultan of the Ghaznavid empire from 998 to 1030. Mahmud was a terrific military leader, reputed never to have lost a battle, who dramatically extended his unstable empire. Among the lands he conquered was al-Biruni’s native Khwarizm; al-Biruni himself was soon compelled to serve in Mahmud’s court. Under Mahmud, he travelled across Central Asia, India and the Arab lands. These years played a crucial role in shaping his intellectual contributions and the fields he chose to study.

From Comprehensive Book on the Possible Methods for Constructing the Astrolabe (11th century) by al-Biruni. Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Al-Biruni’s servitude ironically gave him the opportunity to traverse mountainous and coastal terrains, as well as to learn from the astronomical traditions of India, Persia and Arabia. His groundbreaking method for measuring Earth’s radius grew out of one of these journeys: at Nandana Fort in Punjab, he climbed a hill, measured the angle of the dip of the horizon, and calculated Earth’s radius to within a remarkable degree of accuracy (modern conversions put his figure at 3,928.77 English miles).

While most of al-Biruni’s fellow astronomers subscribed to geocentricism, he actually toyed with heliocentrism, though without formally integrating the theory into the rest of his thought (some 500 years before Copernicus).........

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