A central aspect of al-Bīrūnī's methodology is reflected in the structure of the India. The Preface and the Introduction, for instance, contain almost exclusively ethnographic or religious data. Yet most of the book, roughly forty-eight out of the seventy chapters, sets forth a review of the achievements of Indian science in several fields: grammar, metrology, chrestomathy, astrology and astronomy, cosmology and cosmography, chronology and, of course, mathematics. Hence the Preface and Introduction do not accurately anticipate the content of the discourse that follows.

Closely related to this initial disjuncture is the explicit pairing of philosophy and religion that governs the organization of the other twenty-two chapters of the India and determines their content distribution. At the two extremes of the India, i.e., the first twelve chapters and ten of the last seventeen chapters, al-Bīrūnī deals with Hindu philosophy and religion, respectively. It...