This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct: to move freely between mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy and poetry, testing one discipline’s assumptions against another’s. My classroom is in Pakistan, where students arrive eager to talk about disruption and employability, but rarely about breadth. I want them to see, through these four lives, that this kind of expansiveness isn’t a luxury for stable times; it has produced some of the most enduring breakthroughs in the history of science.
After 15 years working in liberal arts education, I believe a reintegration of disciplines in a Hellenistic style can lead the way. I’m not making a superficial case for ‘interdisciplinarity’. Instead, I’m arguing for something more specific: the recovery of the penchants of polymathy that once thrived in the Muslim world. Rather than fetishising disruptive innovation through compulsory courses on entrepreneurship and applied methods, we should offer an entirely different model of how to learn and what learning is for – especially since my students already enter university with a narrowly vocational mindset.
The word polymathy itself captures the bricolage of many (poly) worlds of knowledge (mathy). Polymathy offers respite and reflection in a world fractured by war, climate catastrophe and injustice. It is sourced from indigenous idioms of the Muslim world rather than an imposition by the Global North. Today, polymathy brings different kinds of thinking to bear on political, economic and environmental problems. At a time when students are reading less of the classic canon and worrying more about employment opportunities, the expansiveness of polymathy can offer a meaningful path forward. These are the lessons of the great Islamic polymaths.
The life of our opening actor al-Biruni has much to teach students about the human dimensions of science. Born in the Central Asian city of Khwarizm around 973, he grew up with few opportunities. But that didn’t constrain him: al-Biruni sought an education. In the classic tradition of Islamic polymathy, he studied Islamic law, grammar, theology, the sciences of astronomy and mathematics, as well as history. Throughout his life, lack was not an impediment for al-Biruni. In fact, scarcity has a way of making one appreciate whatever knowledge is at their disposal – a key lesson for any liberal artist.
This resourcefulness fuelled al-Biruni to make key contributions to his fields of expertise. Early in his career, he had limited access to scientific instruments. Undeterred, he taught himself to build them from a handful of old manuals and limited resources. Al-Biruni’s ingenuity also allowed him to take on established scientific leaders.
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