IRNA’s correspondent has reached to a university professor on the occasion of the 1050th birth anniversary of al-Biruni to interview him on the Iranian scholar’s life and works.
Dr. Qasem Pourhassan, faculty member of Allameh Tabatabaei University, said that al-Biruni lived his 77-year life during the Islamic Golden Age, i.e. 8th to 14th century.
When he was 28, Pourhassan said, al-Biruni who was born in 973 AD successfully tried to measure the diameter of the earth and advocated for the rotation and its orbit.
Al-Biruni observed lunar eclipse three times in Gorgan, Khwarazm, and India around 1005 AD, according to the professor who also added that al-Biruni was so important in astronomy that he managed to construct an observatory in Khwarazm when he was 44.
Pourhassan said that Muslim scholars read each other’s works and wrote new works during the 4th and 5th century AH (11th and 12th century AD) and this led to accumulation of knowledge.
Some Muslim scholars in the early 10th century AD believed that no Plato and Aristotle could emerge in the non-Hellenic world, but the advent of great figures such as al-Farabi (Avenassar), Avicenna, al-Biruni, and al-Razi (Rhazes) invalidated the belief, as said by Pourhassan.
The philosophy professor opined that Muslim scientists in today’s world could do the same their predecessors like the aforementioned scholars did by accumulating knowledge for 150 years to reconstruct the Islamic civilization and even more, to build a new civilization based on the needs of the new era.
He highlighted the difference between Christianity and Islam, saying that Christianity was based on science-aversion and faith-centrism, as it can be discerned in the recent two centuries.
However, he noted, scholars in the Islamic world, from Jamal al-Din Assadabadi until now have tried to reconstruct the scientific era, because they believe that Islam supports science and there now confrontation between faith and science in Islam.
No one can claim that technology can establish a civilization, but there is a difference between the technology to which humans yield and the technology which is moral, humane, and spiritual, Pourhassan noted, mentioning a quote from Martin Heidegger that the West has been defeated by technology.
The West has no way out but to start a dialogue with religion, the philosophy professor said, adding that what we see in the West today is the instrumental rationality in which humans are valuable to the extent that they are beneficial and this is immoral.
In conclusion, Pourhassan underlined, the more the West progressed in technology, the more it declined in terms of morality and this is what most of the Western thinkers acknowledge.
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