Where was al biruni born boots

Top 10 Fascinating Facts about Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī

Abu Rayhan is commonly known as al-Birun, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age.

A film about his life, Abu Raykhan Beruni, was released in the Soviet Union in

In Iran, Biruni&#;s birthday is celebrated as the day of the surveying engineer.

In June , Iran donated a pavilion to the United Nations Office in Vienna—placed in the central Memorial Plaza of the Vienna International Center.

Was Born in Kath, Khwarazmian, Iran

Abu was born on Sept.

4, CE, in the outer district of Kath, the capital of the Afrighid dynasty of Khwarazm in Central Asia

Al-Biruni spent the first twenty-five years of his life in Khwarezm where he lived both in Kath and in Jurjaniyya.

He was educated by a Khwārezm-Shāh prince, Abū Naṣr Manṣūr ibn ʿIrāq, a member of the dynasty that ruled the area and possibly a patron of al-Bīrūnī.

He died in c.

at the age of  77 years, Ghazni, Ghaznavid Empire, modern-day Afghanistan.

Did Not Know His Father or Family Origin

By his own admission, in a poem preserved in a medieval biographical dictionary, al-Bīrūnī claims that he did not know his own father, much less his family origins.

 He said this in the context of demonstrating his total disgust with flattery, even when it was being directed at him.

Iranian Khwarezmian Language Was His Mother Tongue

Khwarezmian is an extinct East Iranian language closely related to Sogdian, survived for several centuries after Islam until the Turkification of the region.

At least some of the culture of ancient Khwarezm endured and it was hard to imagine that the commanding figure of Biruni, a repository of so much knowledge, should have appeared in a cultural vacuum.

Left His Homeland For Bukhara

 He was sympathetic to the Afrighids, who were overthrown by the rival dynasty of Ma&#;munids in

His early patronage by the Khwārezm-Shāhs did not last long, for one of their subordinates rebelled against his master and killed him.

It caused a civil war c.

Where was al biruni born boots Biruni also had an interest in studying Hermeticism and often criticized its religious views. Biruni was the first to conduct elaborate experiments related to astronomical phenomena. John J. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

– that forced al-Bīrūnī to flee and seek patronage from the more formidable Sāmānid dynasty, which ruled the vast eastern lands of Islam, comprising what is now eastern Iran and much of Afghanistan.

A short while after al-Bīrūnī found refuge in the Sāmānid capital of Bukhara, a prince of another local dynasty, Qābūs ibn Voshmgīr, was also dethroned and sought help from the Sāmānids to regain his throne.

 Help was apparently given, for the next record of al-Bīrūnī is when he was in the company of Qābūs in the city of Gurgān near the Caspian Sea.

 At Qābūs’s court, al-Bīrūnī met the famous philosopher-scientist Ibn Sīnā Avicenna and exchanged with him a philosophical correspondence that did not lack jealousies and slighting.

 Al-Bīrūnī also dedicated his Al-Āthār al-bāqiyyah ʿan al-qurūn al-khāliyyah, The Chronology of Ancient Nations, to Qābūs.

Was Forced To Work in Ghazna Until The End of His Life

After a period in which al-Bīrūnī undertook extensive travels or rather escapes from wars, and a constant search for patrons.

The entire domain of the Sāmānids fell under the brutal reign of Maḥmūd, son of Sebüktigin.

Maḥmūd took Ghazna as his capital in and demanded that both al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna join his court.

Avicenna managed to escape, but al-Bīrūnī did not, and he worked in Ghazna until the end of his life when he was not accompanying Maḥmūd on his campaigns into northern India.

Even though al-Bīrūnī was possibly the unwilling guest of a merciless warrior, he still made use of the occasion to pen the acute observations about India that would earn him fame as an ethnographer, anthropologist, and eloquent historian of Indian science.

Book on Indian Culture is The Most Important of His Encyclopedic Works

 Its expressive title, Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah, translated as &#;Verifying all that the Indians recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable, says it all&#;.

It includes all the role that al-Bīrūnī could gather about India and its science, religion, literature, and customs.

His only other competing encyclopedic work, in terms of depth and extent of coverage, is The Chronology of Ancient Nations, which is devoted to a universal anthropological account of various cultures and which even records the lore of long-dead cultures or of other cultures that were about to disappear.

Two works preserve the best pre-modern description of the cultures al-Bīrūnī came to know.

 The most elaborate treatment was of the Jewish calendar, more extensive than any surviving medieval Hebrew source and much more scientifically reasoned than any other treatment that this calendar had received up to that time.

Developed New Algebraic Techniques For The Solution of Third-degree Equation

An equally encyclopedic scientific work is the inimitable Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdi  The Masʿūdic Canon, was dedicated to Masʿūd, the son of Maḥmūd of Ghazna.

Al-Bīrūnī gathered all the astronomical knowledge from sources as Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables after having had these two particular works updated.

He explored many other applied mathematical techniques to achieve much higher precision and ease of use of tabulated astronomical results.

Called Astrology as The Fruit of Mathematical Sciences

His Al-Tafhīm li-awāʾil ṣināʿat al-tanjīm, Elements of Astrology, is still the most comprehensive treatment of the topic as it was then known.

Despite the fact that most people believed that astrology was “the fruit of the mathematical sciences,” as he called it, his personal opinion of the discipline was, as weak as that of its least adherents.

 However, he was fully aware of the importance of astrology as a tool for teaching mathematical and astronomical disciplines.

Under the pretext of teaching astrology, he devoted almost two-thirds of this voluminous work to teaching his patron, mathematics, astronomy, geography, chronology, and the making of the astrolabe as an observational instrument.

All those disciplines were clearly laid out in question-and-answer format.

Defended Mathematical Sciences Against The Attacks of Religious Scholars

The Determination of the Coordinates of Places for the Correction of Distances Between Cities is al-Bīrūnī’s masterpiece in mathematical geography.

He not only defended the role of the mathematical sciences against the attacks of religious scholars who could not understand the utility of the mathematical sciences but also detailed all that one needed to know about determining longitudes and latitudes on land.

 He capped that particular discussion with a solution to the rather sophisticated spherical trigonometric problem of determining the direction of Mecca along the local horizon at Ghazna.

 Besides being a challenging mathematical problem, determining the direction of Mecca is a religious requirement for the performance of the ordained five daily prayers in Islam.

His Work Was Neither Built Upon, nor Even Referenced

Following Al-Biruni&#;s death, during the remainder of the period of Ghaznavid rule and the centuries following, his work was neither built upon, nor even referenced.

It was only centuries later, that his works were once again read and reference made to them, most notably in the case of his book on India, which became relevant to the British Empire&#;s activity in India from the 17th century.

The asteroid and lunar crater Al-Biruni, on the far side of the Moon, as seen by Apollo 14 were named in his honor.