Al-Bīrūnī was born in 973 A.D. near Khwārazm, a region south of the Aral Sea in the present-day Soviet Union. Taught by eminent scientists in his native region, he had already completed his first astronomical experiments by the age of seventeen. Political disturbances in the vicinity of Khwārazm, however, required him to leave the land of his birth, and begin the life of an itinerant scholar (—a pattern recurrently familiar to learned men in medieval Islam and one that strikes an empathetic response in university professors struggling to find an academic haven in twentieth-century America). Al-Bīrūnī was constantly on the move from 995 A.D., when he was all of twenty-two, till 1030 A.D., when at the age of fifty-seven he was at last able to secure a measure of peace and complete projects that had been interrupted over a span of years...