Ibn Sina, known in the West as ‘Avicenna,’ and his contemporary Biruni set out to redefine law, medicine and philosophy in the 11th century
The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment; By S. Frederick Starr
Reviewed by Maxwell Carter
I never realized quite how idle and inadequate I was until reading S. Frederick Starr’s “The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment.” The 11th-century scholar Ibn Sina—known in the West as Avicenna—was practicing medicine and law in his teens and sought, through hundreds of works, to create, as Mr. Starr writes, an “intellectual framework that encompassed philosophy, science, medicine, and religion. His contemporary Biruni has meanwhile been celebrated as “an eleventh-century da Vinci,” “a universal genius” and “The Master.” To the extent that we can begin to comprehend their lives and the range of their accomplishments, “The Genius of Their Age” is an ideal guide.
Modeling his paired biographical structure on Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” Mr. Starr, an expert on Central Asian politics and history and the former president of Oberlin College, tends to define his subjects in opposition to each other. Both were “products of the same culture”—an Arabic-literate society influenced by Persia and fought over by ascendant Turkic powers—who belonged to its “small elite of highly educated persons who had the means and inclination to pursue knowledge for its own sake.” They differed in personality and perspective. Ibn Sina (b. ca. 980) was gregarious and desired to “create a single umbrella under which all knowledge could be organized.” Biruni (b. 973) was an inward-looking man who “spent much of his life toiling alone” and “reveled in every discrete phenomenon, and proceeded to generalize only on the basis of what he had observed at the level of specifics.”
Genius seems generally to bestow its gifts in childhood and, in Mr. Starr’s telling, Biruni and Ibn Sina were indeed “early starters.” The title of the second chapter, “Privileged Prodigies,” put me in mind of Manhattan’s dystopian preschool admissions.
Biruni, an orphan, learned by the example of his fabulously erudite stepfather, Ibn Iraq, the brother-in-law of the last ruler of Khwarazm in what is mostly now Uzbekistan. Ibn Sina’s father was an “ambitious, upwardly mobile, and cultivated senior civil servant.” They were versed from an early age in the Quran, the hadith—the sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad—and related textual criticisms. And the pair was exposed in translation to Aristotle—“The Philosopher” to medieval Muslim admirers.
“Reading Aristotle challenged both young men to explore all fields,” observes Mr. Starr. The Greek thinker’s breadth of knowledge and inquiry was an inspiration as well as the standard to be measured against. Ibn Sina aspired to the mastery of Aristotle’s works and to the erection of “a new and even more comprehensive structure of knowledge.”” In his autobiography, Ibn Sina claimed to have read the “Metaphysics” 40 times with limited success, grasping it only after coming across an analysis by the philosopher al-Farabi (for this, he had an importunate book peddler to thank). Biruni, who looked also to Euclid and Ptolemy, acknowledged Aristotle’s pre-eminence but was more apt to reject and revise his thought. When Biruni and Ibn Sina corresponded around 997-998—the 35-page paraphrase of this important exchange was discovered in an archive in Cairo in 1920—they bickered over Aristotle. Biruni questioned his method and conclusions on the heavens, physics and geography; Ibn Sina held to the authority of the “First Teacher.”
It is easy to marvel at the visionary innovations of Biruni and Ibn Sina, from their improvements on the astrolabe—still in use, centuries later, by Columbus—to Ibn Sina’s grand synthesis, the “Canon of Medicine,” and Biruni’s near-exact measurement of the earth’s diameter. Equally staggering is their precocity: Ibn Sina’s first two major texts, completed before he turned 20, were “A Compendium of the Soul” and “The Compilation,” an overview of philosophy. Yet Mr. Starr reminds us that their maturities were spent not in ivory-tower tranquility, but in exceedingly violent and unsettling circumstances.
As Mr. Starr relates, “for both Ibn Sina and Biruni, the turning point in their lives can be dated to the years 992-995, when they were in their early twenties. Radical change engulfed both their worlds,” spurred by the fall of the Samani dynasty, which had administered effective, decentralized rule over much of Central Asia from the city of Bukhara for nearly 200 years. To Biruni, the collapse of order was shocking: “Disaster took me by surprise, erasing all that I had known and all the fruits of my endeavors.” He, like Ibn Sina, lost his scientific instruments and, devastatingly for the retiring sage, all his books. The two seekers were not, however, to be deterred: “neither abandoned [his] interests in the face of adversity.”
For the balance of their careers, patronage was uncertain—and often unhinged. Biruni would for five years serve as court scientist to Qabus, emir of Gorgan (on the Caspian Sea in modern-day Iran and at that time, according to Mr. Starr, “a hotbed of anti-Samani activity”), whose open-handedness was matched by his brutality. His own grandson’s verdict (“he was an evil person”) is echoed by the historian Yaqut, who lamented Qabus’s penchant for “chopping off heads and silencing souls. He extended this practice even to people close to him and to his trusted soldiers and followers.” Such cruelty was nothing compared with that of Mahmud of Ghazni, Biruni’s subsequent master, who had his enemies trampled to death by elephants, and the remnants of their corpses paraded, dismembered and hanged on gibbets. (We owe, it must be said, Biruni’s treatise on India to Mahmud’s serial invasions.)
The jurist Valvalidji, attending at Biruni’s deathbed, “expressed amazement” at the ailing polymath’s curiosity about an esoteric point of contract law. If Ibn Sina and Biruni’s abilities are out of reach, we may still channel the spirit of the latter’s response to his visitor: “Is it not better for me to leave this world knowing the answer to this question than not knowing it?”
After the truth-shower 