Although al-Bīrūnī remained almost unknown to Western scholars until the modern period, he was a well-known and celebrated scholar in his own time, and his work has been preserved in Islamic centers of learning. One of the first of his works to be translated and published in English was India in 1888. Many manuscripts remain unpublished, but portions of most of al-Bīrūnī's have appeared in translation. A great deal of interest by Western scholars was sparked by the millennial anniversary of al-Bīrūnī's birth in 1973 which has resulted in more recent and more numerous translations.