KABUL (BNA) – Biruni, the Iranian polymath of 10-11^th, called variously the “founder of Indology”, “Father of Comparative Religion”, “Father of modern geodesy”, and the first anthropologist will have his mausoleum as decided by Afghan government.

Annotated Diagram of the Phases of the Moon

From manuscript of the Kitab al-Tafhim by Biruni (973-1048).
Scanned from: Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1976) Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study, World of Islam Festival Publishing Company ISBN 090503502X.

The mausoleum will be built on an area of 7,200 m² in the historic city of Ghazni, which includes the mausoleum building, ticket office, guard room, modern baths, parking lot, sidewalks and green area and construction of which will begin soon.

Last Monday, acting Minister of Information and Culture (MIC), Mohammad Tahir Zuhair met with Sahar Hamdard, Deputy Minister of Construction Affairs of the Ministry of Urban Development and Lands (MUDL) and Ali Farhad Bayat, Head of Historical Monuments and Mosques of the Ministry with the purpose of to ease coordination in order to follow the instructions of the Presidential office regarding the engineering plans of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni Mausoleum, which was proposed to the presidential office by the MIC and MUDL and has been recently approved, the agency added.

The design of the mausoleum is a post-Sassanid architecture, and has an octagonal star shape, which is patterned from the minaret of Bahramshah, the agency quoted MIC officials as saying. Quoting the officials, the agency said that the decorations used in the design are inspired by the minaret of Sultan Massoud, and in the upper part of the mausoleum, an attempt has been made to create a view of modern post-Sassanid architecture by combining arches and bows, so that to add to the beauty of the design.

He was born in the outer district (Bīrūn) of Kath, the capital of the Afrighid dynasty of Khwarezm (Chorasmia) in Central Asia — now part of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in the northwest of Uzbekistan.

Like most Iranian scholars of his time, Biruni was a Muslim only in appearance, a crypto-Mazdean or perhaps even a crypto-Buddhist. In his work on India called Taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah (variously translated as “Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable” or “The book confirming what pertains to India, whether rational or despicable”) he takes the defence of Hidnus and explains how India had suffered waves of destructive attacks on many of its cities by Islamic armies who had taken numerous Hindu slaves to Persia, which contributed to Hindus becoming suspicious of all foreigners, not just Muslims. Hindus considered Muslims violent and impure, and did not want to share anything with them. Over time, Biruni won the welcome of Hindu scholars. Biruni collected books and studied with these Hindu scholars to become fluent in Sanskrit, discover and translate into Arabic the mathematics, science, medicine, astronomy and other fields of arts as practiced in 11^th-century India. At the same time, Biruni was also critical of Indian scribes, who he believed carelessly corrupted Indian documents while making copies of older documents. He also criticized the Hindus on what he saw them do and not do, for example finding them deficient in curiosity about history and religion.