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Al-Khwarizmi could have
chosen Baghdad, his place
of residence, as the prime
meridian. However, perhaps due
to the prevalent practice in the
Arabic-speaking world and al-
Khwarizmi’s dependence on the
Indian astronomical tables, he
kept Ujjain, just like Greenwich
endures as a world standard
despite the fading of the British
Empire in which it originated. As
we know from Said al-Andalusi,
it was Muhammad ibn Ibrahim
al-Fazari, an eighth-century
philosopher, mathematician and
astronomer, who was the first
person to translate into Arabic,
under directives from Caliph Al-
Mansur himself, Brahmagupta’s
Brahmasphuta-Siddhanta,
which provided mathematic
evidence for calculating planetary epicycles and their positions, and even diameters of the
Earth, sun and moon, beyond the Indus Valley. Al-Khwarizmi later summarized this work in
Zij al-Sindhind, which remained an important reference work in Europe during the medieval
period, including, for example, for the Castilian texts Toledo Tablesand the Alfonsine Tables.

MEDICINE

Indian medical texts and ideas also had potent influence in Islamic scientific circles. Al-Tabari,
an early ninth-century scholar from Tabaristan along the southern shore of the Caspian
Sea who later served as physician and counselor to Caliph al-Mutawakkil in Baghdad, wrote
an encyclopedic book on medicine, Firdaws al-Hikmah (Paradise of
Wisdom). This book contains some 36 chapters and refers to the works
of noted Indian physicians such as Caraka, Susruta, Madhavakara
and Vagbhata II. Al-Tabari devoted much space to Ayurvedic medicine,
a science born of early Indus Valley civilizations and recorded in
Sanskrit literature.

Al-Biruni’s thoughts on medicine, likewise, were influenced by Indian
tradition. In his works, we find mention of the availability of an
Arabic translation of Charaka-Samahita, a medical text first written
in Sanskrit before the second century CE. A century before Al-Biruni,
Al-Kindi from Baghdad wrote a medical formulary called Aqrabadhin
(Pharmacology), an English translation of which was published by
Martin Levey, an American professor of Semitic languages, chemistry
and mathematics. According to Levey, about 13 percent of the book
originates from the Indus Valley. In his view, however, “many of
the Persian materia medica may more properly be considered to be
Indian,” thus suggesting that as much as a third of the plants and
drugs described originally came from India. In all these fields of knowledge and inquiry, then,
we find deeper interconnections among the scientific culture that developed in Islamic lands
and India than are often discussed in (mostly Western) histories of science. This kind and
degree of connection, we should note, is not unique to the advances of Islamic science. It is
much of the story of how knowledge itself has advanced through regional and global processes
SIF Bahrain of contact and communication—processes that advance at their most rapid pace ever today.

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