al-Biruni

I don't know how I feel about these, uh, leaders or potentially even these celebrities." Like, people are gonna feel, I think, very kind of, like, disenfranchised in a way, uh, with some of the idols that they have potentially kind of had, especially people who you've looked up to since you were a younger, you know, kind of person.

Now, um, in earlier centuries, I went and looked at what Al, uh, Biruni said, and he warned that the sun and moon get weaker, um, if they come near the tail, especially if they're within 12 degrees.

We don't see that, but we do see that, um, Mars and the South Node and Jupiter are very much influenced by the sun, because it's moving through a solar sign.

So we also have to be paying attention to, well, what's happening with the sun at the time of this particular transit when this is setting up in, you know, mid-November? Well, the sun is in Scorpio, [laughs] so it's already putting the spotlight on the darker side of things and what needs to change and what's kind of being transformed.

The Greeks used a system of circles to map the heavens, and their idea of measuring east-west angles was essentially what would become our modern longitude.

It wasn't until the medieval Islamic world that scholars like Al-Biruni began to formalize latitude using the height of Polaris above the horizon.

European navigators in the 15th century started borrowing those methods, but they still lacked a reliable way to know how far west or east they'd sailed.

That problem became known as the longitude problem and spurred a flurry of invention and navigation tools across Europe.

Professor, um, Roxane Euben, uh, teaches social sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism, and Princeton Readings in Islamic Thought, uh, Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Biruni to Bin Laden, and they've all been published by Princeton University Press.

She's a loyal Princeton University Press author.

Uh, Roxane, welcome to New Books Network.

She crafted a highly complex astronomical calculator named Astrolabe.

Ibn al-Baytar, al-Jahiz, al-Zehrawi, al-Biruni, al-Battani, the list goes on and on.

That's why a Muslim professor Fuad Sezgin once said, Western civilization is the child of Islam.

So, from now on, when someone tells you he has found an error in the Qur'an, you can just smile.

We don't write down things.

And from Al-Biruni downwards to everyone have been saying this.

But in Kashmir, there's been an unbroken tradition of history writing- Which of course starts with Kalhana.

I mean, it starts with the Nilmat Puran-

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.