Alberuni's India

Dr Edward C. Sachau was a professor at the Royal University of Berlin, the principal of the Seminary for Oriental Languages, member of the Royal Academy of Berlin, corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Vienna, honorary member of the Asiatic Society of Great Britain and of the American Oriental Society, Cambridge, USA.

The literary history of the East represents the court of King Mahmtld at Ghazna, the leading monarch of Asiatic history between A.D. 997-1030, as having been a centre of literature, and of poetry in particular. There were four hundred poets chanting in his halls and gardens, at their head famous Unsuri, invested with the recently created dignity of a poet-laureate, who by his verdict opened the way to royal favour for rising talents; there was grand Firdausi composing his heroic epos by the special orders of the king, with many more kindred spirits. Unfortunately history knows very little of all this, save the fact that Persian poets flocked together in Ghazna, trying their kasidas on the king, his ministers and generals. History paints Mahmtld as a successful warrior, but ignores him as a Maecenas. With the sole exception of the lucubrations of bombastic Utbi, all contemporary records, the Makaincit of Abtl- Nasr Mishkani, the Tabakeit of his secretary Baihaki, the chronicles of Mulla Muhammad Qhaznavi, Mahrruld A, arrak, and others, have perished, or not yet come to light, and attempts at a literary history dating from a time 300-400 years ater, the so-called Tadhkiras, weigh very light in the scale of arter-of-fact examination, failing almost invariably whenever are applied to for information on some detail of ancient

Persian literature. However this may be, Unsure, the panegyrist, does not seem to have missed the sun of royal favour, whilst Firdausi, immortal Firdausi, had to fly in disguise to evade the doom of being trampled to death by elephants. Attracted by the rising fortune of the young emperor, he seems to have repaired to his court only a year after his enthronisation, i.e. A.D. 998. But when he had finished his Sheihntima, and found himself disappointed in his hopes for reward, he flung at him his famous satire, and fled into peace less exile (A.D. 1010)) In the case of the king versus the poet the king has lost. As long as Firdausi retains the place of honour accorded to him in the history of the world's mental achievements, the stigma will cling to the name of Mahmud, that he who hoarded up perhaps more worldly treasures than were ever hoarded up, did not know how to honour a poet destined for immortality.

And how did the author of this work, as remarkable among the prose compositions of the East as the Sheihncima in poetry, fare with the royal Maecenas of Ghazna? Alberuni, or, as his compatriots called him, Abu Raiban, was born A.D. 973, in the territory of modern Khiva, then called Khwarizm, or Chorasmia in antiquity.2 Early distinguishing himself in science and literature, he played a political part as councilor of the ruling prince of his native country of the Ma'muni family. The counsels he gave do not seem always to have suited the plans of King Mabmild at Ghazna, who was looking out for a pretext for interfering in the affairs of independent Khiva, although its rulers were his own near relatives. This pretext was furnished by a military emeute. Mabmild marched into the country, not without some fighting, established there one of his generals as provincial governor, and soon returned to Ghazna with much booty and a great part of the Khiva troops, together with the princes of the deposed family of Ma'miln and the leading men of the country as prisoners of war or as hostages. Among the last was Abil-Raihan Muhammad Ibu Ahmad Alberuni.

This happened in the spring and summer of A.D. 1017. The Chorasmian princes were sent to distant fortresses as prisoners of state, the Chorasmian soldiers were incorporated in Mahamild's Indian army; and Alberuni—what treatment did he experience at Ghazna? From the very outset it is not likely that both the king and his chancellor, Ahmad lbn Hasan Maimandi, should have accorded special favours to a man whom they knew to have been their political antagonist for years. The latter, the same man who had been the cause of the tragic catastrophe in the life of Firdausi, was in office under Mahmild from A.D. 1007-1025, and a second time under his son and successor, Mas'ild, from 1030-1033. There is nothing to tell us that Alberuni was ever in the service of the state or court in Ghazna. A friend of his and companion of his exile, the Christian philosopher and physician from Bagdad, Abulkhair Alkhammar, seems to have practised in Ghazna his medical profession. Alberuni probably enjoyed the reputation of a great munallim, i.e. astrologer-astronomer, and perhaps it was in this quality that he had relations to the court and its head, as Tycho de Brahe to the Emperor Rudolf. When writing the `IvStica, thirteen years after his involuntary immigration to Afghanistan, he was a master of astrology, both according to the Greek and the Hindu system, and indeed Eastern writers of later centuries seem to consider him as having been the court astrologer of King \lahmud. In a book written five hundred years later (v. Chrestomathie Persane, &c., par Ch. Schefer, Paris, 1883, i.p. 107 Df the Persian text), there is a story of a practical joke which Mahmfid played on Alberuni as an astrologer. Whether this be historic truth or a late invention, anyhow the story does not throw much light on the author's situation in a period of his life which is the most interesting to us , that one, namely, when he dommeneced to study India, Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature.