Who Did Discovered America, Muslim Scholar Al-Biruni or Christopher Columbus

Statue of Al-Biruni in Tehran Iran

Thousands of scholars, enthusiastic and eccentrics are trying from almost a century to find out that who discovered the America first.

According to a website historytoday, many people have claimed before Columbus that they reached the mainland first but one proof is obvious that traders from Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan sent their goods across Europe via camel caravans and through ships.Their land routes were through Europe via Turkey and their sea routes were via Sri Lanka, South Africa towards England. They bring back the routes and maps of these land which were than utilized by scholars and enthusiasts to discover the new worlds. 

The greatest of these scholars was Abu Raihan al-Biruni who was born in 973 near Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. Biruni, (foreigner) as his name suggests was a traveler who in his youth mastered mathematics, astronomy, mineralogy, geography, cartography, geometry, and trigonometry. While he spoke different languages like, Arabic, Persian, Khwarazmian and later on he also learned Sanskrit. 

While he was young he already calculated the latitude and longitude of his home town and had begun to collect similar co-ordinates for other places. Using ancient Greek sources he compiled data on hundreds of locales in the Mediterranean world and then began adding calculations on other locations from all points of the compass. He, through ancient readings of Claudius Ptolemy (c.150 BC), and his own calculations knew that earth is round. At the age of 30 Biruni calculated the circumference of the Earth by employing most advanced systems of his day. He also constructed a 16 ft high Earth Globe showing Earth's terrestrial features.

He followed the footsteps of other scientists of Central Asia like Ahmad al-Farghani, who calculated the width of one degree of longitude at the equator, from which he deduced earth's circumference. His calculations, although, less precise than Biruni, marked a significant improvement on those made by the ancient Greeks and assured a wide readership for his book on the subject, A Compendium of the Science of the Stars (c.833).

Sketch of Al-Biruni with Astrolabe

Five centuries later Columbus came across a Latin translation of Farghani's treatise. He, besides welcoming confirmation that the Earth is round, used Farghani's data to argue before sceptical potential sponsors that it was small enough for him potentially to circumnavigate. However, Columbus wrongly assumed that Farghani had presented his measurements in Roman miles rather than Arab miles due to which he understate the actual circumference of the earth by 25 percent. His misreading caused Columbus to place Cipango, or Japan , near the Virgin Islands. This convenient error proved crucial in Columbus obtaining funding for what he estimated would be a relatively short voyage to China or India.

Al-Biruni, while dealing with mineralogy, specifically the relative density and weight of minerals of all types and how the separate minerals interact in nature, while in this research he discovered the concept of specific gravity.

Al-Biruni by 1017 had become an honored scientist at Gurganch, the intellectual capital of Khwarazm. But at that time a fierce leader of Afghanistan Mahmud Ghaznavi attacked and crushed the Khwarazm but he was known for his care of poets, scholars and researchers, Mahmud Ghaznavi invited Al-Biruni to come Ghazni along with his research.

Biruni ceased this moment to see India which was conquered by Ghaznavi over previous decade. But soon, Biruni realized that Mahmud was a ruthless leader he had to distance from his court by moving to Lahore, now in Pakistan, where he penned the world's first book on comparative religion, focusing on Hinduism and Islam. He than further moved back along with his simple astrolabe and notes towards a heavily fortified hilltop at Nandana which is not far from Islamabad and again he tried to measure the earth's circumference. He devised a new technique which involved careful observation, spherical trigonometry and the application of the law of sines. Besides being far simpler than using two distant points on flat land, this method produced a measure of the earth's circumference that was a mere 10.44 miles less than the definitive modern measurement.

After Mahmud's death, Biruni went back to Ghazni, Afghanistan, where Mahmud's son, Masud I welcomed him and settle him in a quiet place to do his research work. Biruni wrote his research work in a book form which is known as the Codex Masudicus, in which he summarized everything known at the time about astronomy and allied disciplines. In this book Al-Biruni considered that the sun is stationary and that the earth revolves around the sun and he stopped short of fully embracing a heliocentric view, noting instead that the notion of a heliocentric universe is no less logical than its alternative and called on mathematicians and astronomers to either refute or accept it.

Al Biruni Natal Chart

Al-Biruni started presenting his research on the earth's circumference and set about fixing all known geographical locations onto his new, more accurate map of the globe. His lat-long list grown as he added 70 more sites in India alone, as well as hundreds of the locations which stretched across the Eurasian landmass. But, while transforming these data on his map he realize that the entire breadth of Eurasia, from the westernmost tip of Africa to the easternmost shore of China, spanned only about two fifth of the globe which left three fifths of the Earth's surface unaccounted for. This gap of 15,000 miles was explained by all geographers from antiquity down to Biruni's day as the World Ocean. As three fifths of the Earth's circumference couldn't be considered water so Al-Biruni rejected it on the grounds of both observation and logic. Due to his knowledge of specific gravity he knew that most solid minerals were heavier than water, would so watery a world not give rise to serious imbalances to which the planet would have had to adjust over time? And why, he asked, would the forces that had given rise to land on two fifths of the earth's belt not also have had an effect on the other three fifths as well? Al-Biruni concluded that somewhere in the vast expanses of ocean between Europe and Asia there must be one or more unknown land masses or continents. 

But where these unknown or inhabited land would be, to address this question Biruni turned to his data on longitudes. By checking that humans have inhabited a broad north-south band which stretched from Russian to India and Africa and if the unknown continents were uninhibited, they would have to lie north or south of this band.

Biruni, to pursue his hypothesis, went beyond his field observations and employed Aristotelian logic noting that the Eurasian land mass stretched roughly around the earth's belt, he hypothesized that it must have been the result of powerful processes that would surely have obtained elsewhere. Known evidence of the Earth gave him no grounds for believing that the unknown continents would be squashed into the northernmost and southernmost latitudes. He concluded that the unknown land masses between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would have to be inhabitable.

Al-Biruni reached these conclusions about the existence of new continents by 1037 which were based on his research of three decades. Although, Biruni never discover America as he never traveled to the continents about which he wrote, yet he is at least as deserving of the title of North America's discoverer as compared to any Norseman. Noteworthy is the intellectual process by which he reached his conclusions and the tools which he used were not merely a guess work or hit-or-miss methods of Venetian seamen or Norse sailors but an adroit combination of carefully controlled observation, meticulously assembled quantitative data and rigorous logic. Such sophisticated tools were only applied after further half-millennium by others to explore the globe.

Al-Biruni devised completely new methods and technologies to generate his voluminous and precise data and processed it with the latest tools of mathematics, trigonometry and spherical geometry which he learned through the wisdom of Greeks, Indians and medieval Arabs.

Biruni was careful to present his conclusions in the form of hypothesis on the understanding that other researchers would want to test and refine his findings, although this did not happen for another five hundred years. In the end European explorers confirmed his hypotheses and vindicated his proposals. 

Al-Biruni, the son of Central Asia was the greatest explorer between the ancient world and the great age of European exploration. He was a Muslim but despite scientists in the Christian West struggled for several more centuries to achieve, he carried out his intellectual explorations with out any bondage imposed on him by his religion Islam. It is a fact that Biruni never left his study room, which was far from sea in a landlocked region, except to carry out scientific measurements. 

Al-Biruni accomplished all this while living and working in a region which many  still regard as backward, a region immersed in superstition, fanaticism and violence. Although his birth place, visits, and his tomb in Afghanistan are the regions of many conflicts and one could not reach there with heavy armored vehicles but when ever Afghanistan becomes stable in future the world researchers would prefer to visit his tomb in Gazni to pay him tribute for his works.

Main portion of above article are derived from the writing of  S. Frederick Starr who is research professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.