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| Sat 25 May 2013 15 Rajab 1434 AH |
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AL-BIRUNI
ON PLANTS
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JOHN
H. HARVEY
AMONG the greatest of the early scientists who
wrote in Arabic was now to the Western public a forgotten name,
over-shadowed by his contemporary and correspondent Ibn Sina,
or, as he is popularly known, Avicenna. Born in the suburb (bfrün)
of Käth, capital of Kharezm [a region adjoining the Aral Sea now known as Karakalpakstan]
on 4 September A.D. 973
and therefore seven years before Avicenna, al-Birüni survived
the latter by some fourteen years, dying about 1051. At the time
he was still working, though almost blind and deaf, at over eighty
years of age in lunar years—roughly seventy- eight according to
Western reckoning. Famous in his own time as a mathematician and
astronomer as well as for his wide travels in India and elsewhere,
he deserves to be remembered particularly for his last work,
Kitãb al-saydana fi al-tibb or, to give it the title
under which it has at last been translated into English, the Book
on Pharmacy and Materia Medica."1"
For the first time the modern world of scientific enquiry can
study in adequate detail one of the most thorough of all pharmacopoeias,
which is at the same time fundamental for historical botany and
the lexicography of plants. For al-Birüni was not concerned simply
with herbs and drugs and their medicinal uses; he went to great
lengths to identify the names in use in all the languages to which
he had access. These normally included Arabic, Persian, Syriac
and Greek, to which he added Hindi, several other languages of
India, sometimes Turki and dialects of central Asia. The text
incorporates much from earlier writers, notably Dioscorides, Galen
and Aba Hanifa al-Dinawari (c. 820—895), an Arab scholar
of Iranian extraction. Al-BirUni also quotes freely from Arabic
poems which mention plants and their properties. What makes the
book outstandingly valuable, however, is the author’s wide personal
observation and his humane and humorous outlook. The present edition
and translation form a remarkable collaborative product of a team
of Pakistani scholars led by Hakim Mohammed Said. It comprises
an Arabic text collated and annotated from the surviving manuscripts
by Dr. Rana Ehsan Elahie, Professor of Arabic at the University
of the Punjab, and reproduced from his own handwriting (430 pages!);
with a complete English translation by Kamal Muhammad Habib and
others, also fully annotated. In a second volume are an introduction
and commentary by Sami K. Hamarneh of the Smithsonian Institution.
The amount of work represented is stupendous, and one can only
regret that the printing abounds in obvious errors and prints
several pages of the Arabic text on top of others. Another handicap,
less easy to correct, is inherent in the independent attempts
at identification made in the footnotes to the text, those to
the translation, and those of the com- mentator. Some of the botanical
solutions proposed—discrepancies apart —are impossible: for example,
the suggestion that the herb asfaly&~iqus, as.tirä or khurram
might be a Helonias (p. 26 and p. 6o note 154), since that genus
is exclusively American. Lucien Leclerc a century ago regarded
this plant as Aster amellus. "2"
Before considering the light which al-Birüni throws upon the horti-
culture of the Middle East in the eleventh century we may notice
the glimpses of social life afforded by his remarkable book. On
the highest level we meet (p. 3!) the Caliph’s ambassador seated
at table with the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Mansür
(Caliph A.D. 754—775) sent Umara ibn Hamza as leader of a mission
to Constantine V Copronymus (741—775) who ‘one day during lunch
called for a sealed earthen crock and ordered the attendant to
take out some pickle from it. He then passed it on to Ilamza who
tasted it, found it to be the pickle of kabar (caper), and smiled
at this. When the Emperor asked for the reason of his smile, he
told him, “This plant grows abundantly in our parts”. Thereat
the Emperor said: “This means that your land is arid, for this
plant grows only in uncultivated regions and for this reason
is a rarity in our country”.’ By the ninth century dill pickles
had become famous: ‘Isa ibn Mãsa al-Basri (d. A.D. 888) laid down
that ‘a pickle having dill is the best of all’. (p. 349.) Opium
already constituted a drug menace, for ‘people of hot climes,
especially those of Mecca, gradually increased the dosage to the
extent where it would be considered lethal’ (p. 36). Another addiction
‘was to the intoxicating grains and leaves of the dãdhi or
dazi tree, sometimes identified with Cercis siliqua~trum.
Al-Biruni tells us that in the time of the ‘Abbãsids (from A.D.
750) a caravan pitched its tents by ‘a pond over which a dadhi
tree cast its shadow and had shed its leaves on the water which
had been contaminated . . . When the people drank the water they
all became inebriated and from that day... people began to fetch
leaves of that plant and use them in (date) wine’. We are
also told of the African origin of mosquito nets (p. 229): ‘the
people of Aswän observe the custom of sitting under domes of silk
so as to be safe from the flies and the
Al-Biruni was a cautious and experimental scientist, far in advance
of
It has long been recognized from a passage in his Chronology,
published in translation almost a century ago,"3"
that al-BirUni was the first to suggest that flowers could be
identified by the number of their parts. He had a good notion
of natural relationships and ‘deserves to be recognized as
the father of Arabic Pharmacy in Mediaeval Islam’. (II, 35.)
He was undoubtedly a sound practical botanist and in advance of
his time, but we have to bear in mind that in his book botany
and horticulture are sub- ordinate to medicine. We cannot hope
to find in it a direct equivalent to the surviving works on agriculture
which, for Muslim Spain of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
A.D., provide us with definitive handbooks and lists of what was
grown.
It is, however, from al-Birüni rather than from any other source
that it is possible to derive an adequate list of at least the
economic plants grown in the region from India on the east to
Syria and Egypt on the west. Where Persian names are given it
is fair to assume that the plants grew in Persia, either as natives
or as garden exotics, and this is confirmed by the general agreement
with what is known of the later garden flora of Iran. What is
lacking, however, is a substantial group of purely decorative
plants. In al-BirUnI we do not find the Carnation, the Crown Imperial,
Hyacinth, Lilac, Lily, Pink, Primrose, Ranunculus or Tulip, whose
varieties provided so much of the beauty of the eastern flower-garden,
and were among the chief imports of the first great age of plant
introductions to sixteenth-century Europe.
What can be deduced is, firstly, a list of 65 plants mentioned
as culti- vated, grown in gardens, planted, grafted or sown; or
identifiable as such by reference to a wild variety. In the lists
which form an appendix all these 65 plants are printed in capitals.
To them are added other plants described by al-Birüni and notoriously
of ancient cultivation, either native to the region or certainly
introduced at very early dates."4"
The best jujube (sidr: Zizyphus jujuba) ‘grows in Hajar
in one locality only, the royal garden’ (p. 180), a demonstration
of the early formation of botanical gardens under royal patronage,
also evidenced at Toledo and Seville in the 11th century A.D.
Madder (fuwwat al-sabbaghin, Rubia cordifolia) ‘is sown
in Antioch, being rare there’ (p. 255). Garden anemones (shaqa'q
al-nu'man) already existed in red, white and violet colour
varieties (p. 355). Elsewhere al-Birüni quotes from a poem by
Sanawbari (A.D. 895—945), the first great Muslim nature poet: ‘How beautiful are the anemone flowers’ (p. i8i) though the translators mistakenly substitute
‘tulip’."5" The tulip itself
does not appear in the text, for it is clear that the Persian
lãlä (if correctly reported by al-Biruni) was used in the sense
of the Greek ‘animünus’, anemone. It remains an open question
when and where it was first brought into cultivation, and why
it should have acquired the name which etymologically belongs
to the lily. The translation is again mistaken when another poem
is made to refer to ‘garden primrose (khuzama) in the full flush
of their bloom in the garden’; the plant named in the text normally means lavender,
though al-Biruni (p. 140) equates it with the wild wallflower
khiri (Cheiranthus cheiri).
A much more serious difficulty is raised by the confusion, by
al-Birüni himself of the names for plum and pear (ijjas, anjas,
p. i 7); and again, by him or his continuator al-NahshaeI, for
elm and ash (p. 351). It is, of course, a commonplace that words
etymologically identical change their meanings in course of time
and yet may in some conservative region simultaneously occur in
their original sense. The wide area from which al-Birüni drew
his synonyms adequately explains inconsistencies of usage, yet
in general he was at pains to point out which senses are correct
and which erroneous. His whole book, indeed, is largely an essay
on the importance to medicine of precise terminology and translation
of plant- names. Many plants, notably the aromatic labiates, resemble
one another confusingly and it is not surprising that we should
meet, for example, confusion between betony and germander."6" ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For much help and encouragement in this field
I am very deeply indebted to Dr. J. D. Latham, as well as to Dr.
Penelope Johnstone~and Professor Geoffrey L. Lewis. My thanks
go also to Dr. James Dickie, Dr. A. Z. Iskandar, Mr. R. H. Pinder-Wilson
and Dr. C. H. Talbot; and for a great deal of assistance over
the identifications of plants to Mr. Richard Corer. For access
to relevant books I am grateful to the librarians of the Wellcome
Institute for the History of Medicine, the School of Oriental
and African Studies, the Oriental Institute of Oxford University
and the India Office Library, as well as to the London Library
and to Mr. Philip Waley of the Oriental Department of the British
Library. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Islamic Quarterly, London |
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