Ibn Sīnā—al-Bīrūnī Correspondence—V

Abstract

This fifth installment of the correspondence between Ibn Sīnā and al-Bīrūnī consists of al-Bīrūnī’s objections to the answers he received from Ibn Sīnā. It seems that al-Bīrūnī was dissatisfied by Ibn Sīnā’s responses to all but two of the first set of ten questions and all but one of the last eight questions he had sent to Ibn Sīnā. Thus, he wrote back about fifteen responses (leaving out the response of Ibn Sīnā to his sixth and eighth questions from the first set of ten, and the last question from the second set of eight). This section shows that al-Bīrūnī’s dissatisfaction with the answers he had received was ultimately based on his own independent views about the nature of the physical world which were in stark contrast to the views held by the Paripatetics who based their views on Aristotelian physics. These short and categorical responses to Ibn Sīnā answers not only open a window to understand al-Bīrūnī’s views on the nature of the physical cosmos, they also reflect the vigor and intensity of the Islamic scientific tradition which was at that time appropriating Greek science through a transformative process.