TEHRAN -- Iran on Wednesday marked Biruni Day with a virtual commemoration of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, the philosopher, astronomer and mathematician whose extraordinary range made him one of the defining intellectual figures of the Islamic world. 
Organized by the Cultural Works and Luminaries Society, the event brought together prominent Iranian scholars and researchers to reflect on a legacy that has remained remarkably alive more than a millennium after his birth.
Manouchehr Sedghi-Saha, professor and researcher of Islamic philosophy, described Biruni as a foremost polymath of Islamic civilization and “a sea with no visible shore”—a figure whose knowledge extended across so many fields that even a focused discussion can scarcely encompass him.
Sedghi-Saha spoke of his own work on two of Biruni’s important texts, Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind (The Book of the Verification of What Is in India) and Patanjali. He translated the first volume of Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind into Persian in 1356 in the Iranian calendar, with the encouragement of scholar Baha al-Din Khorramshahi. 
Published later by the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, the translation went through several editions. Sedghi-Saha emphasized that the work remains, even after a thousand years, a major text in the study of India for both Muslim scholars and Western Indologists.
His second project was a new critical edition of Biruni’s Patanjali, building on an earlier edition by the German Orientalist Hellmut Ritter. Sedghi-Saha highlighted the work’s particular importance for understanding its influence on discussions of Sufism.
Mahmoud Shaloui, president of the Association, emphasized Biruni’s breadth of learning and his reliance on experience and reasoning. With more than one hundred works attributed to him, Biruni produced important studies of astronomy, geography, mathematics, anthropology and literature. 
Shaloui described him as a possible pioneer of the experimental method in science and stressed his intellectual independence.
Gholamreza A’vani, a member of the Academy of Sciences, placed Biruni alongside Avicenna among the outstanding scholars of the fourth and fifth Islamic centuries. Born in 362 AH, eight years before Avicenna, Biruni lived until 440 AH. His writings extended beyond India studies into history, natural philosophy, mineralogy, gemology, botany and pharmacology.
Gholamhussein Rahimi examined Biruni’s intellectual exchange with Avicenna, particularly
 their discussion of whether other physical worlds might exist beyond our own. Biruni questioned Aristotle’s rejection of such possibilities, asking whether other worlds might possess different natures—or the same nature but different inhabitants.
Barzu Qaderi, an Indologist and researcher of Biruni, focused on his encounter with India. Unlike approaches shaped by fixed assumptions, Biruni approached Indian thought with an independent and searching mind, seeking to understand its philosophical and spiritual traditions on their own terms while also placing them within the intellectual framework of his own age. 
He translated important Indian works, including the Samkhya Karika and the Yoga Sutras, into Arabic, demonstrating a sustained engagement with traditions that had long been regarded in Iran as a repository of mysteries.
His treatment of the Yoga Sutras is particularly revealing. Rather than simply reproducing Sanskrit terminology, Biruni sought precise equivalents within the philosophical vocabulary of his time. 
His rendering of karma, for example, through the concepts of “recompense” and “punishment,” reflects not merely translation but interpretation. For Qaderi, such choices point to Biruni’s ability to penetrate the concepts he encountered and rearticulate them within a different intellectual world.