SOURCE: "Science, History, and Religion: Some Reflections on the India of Abu Raihān Al-Bīrun̄i" in Al-Bīrcunī Commemorative Volume: Proceedings on the International Congress Held in Pakistan on the Occasion of Millenary of Abū Rāihān Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Bīrūnī (973 Ca 1051 A.D.) November 26, 1973 thru' December 12, 1973, edited by Hakim Mohammed Said, Hamdard National Faoundation, 1979, pp. 233-42.

[In the essay that follows, originally presented at a 1973 conference, Peters discusses al-Bīrūrūni's "literary history" of India which was conceived as a way of providing religious and cultural information for Islamic scholars.]

For all his individual genius, Bīrūnī lived in an age when the intellectual life of Islam was preparing its descent into encyclopedism. By the eleventh century medical encyclopedias were already commonplace, and Bīrūnī's contemporary Ibn Sīnā had fulfilled the promise, or the threat, implicit in...