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. The astronomer al-Khujandi, for instance, had built a massive sextant that he used to measure the tilt of Earth’s axis relative to its orbit (its obliquity). The number he yielded, though, struck al-Biruni as too low. Because of his experience in building his own sextants, he was able to identify the issue: al-Khujandi’s sextant sagged, distorting his results. The scarcity that had compelled al-Biruni to make his own sextants made it possible to see where others with far more resources had gone wrong. Al-Biruni’s own measurements, documented in _The Determination of the Coordinates of Locations for Accurately Measuring the Distances between Places_, were widely accepted by his contemporaries and later scientists.
Al-Biruni’s later life and works were shaped by Mahmud Ghazni, sultan of the Ghaznavid empire from 998 to 1030. Mahmud was a terrific military leader, reputed never to have lost a battle, who dramatically extended his unstable empire. Among the lands he conquered was al-Biruni’s native Khwarizm; al-Biruni himself was soon compelled to serve in Mahmud’s court. Under Mahmud, he travelled across Central Asia, India and the Arab lands. These years played a crucial role in shaping his intellectual contributions and the fields he chose to study.
From _Comprehensive Book on the Possible Methods for Constructing the Astrolabe_ (11th century) by al-Biruni_._ Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Al-Biruni’s servitude ironically gave him the opportunity to traverse mountainous and coastal terrains, as well as to learn from the astronomical traditions of India, Persia and Arabia. His groundbreaking method for measuring Earth’s radius grew out of one of these journeys: at Nandana Fort in Punjab, he climbed a hill, measured the angle of the dip of the horizon, and calculated Earth’s radius to within a remarkable degree of accuracy (modern conversions put his figure at 3,928.77 English miles).
While most of al-Biruni’s fellow astronomers subscribed to geocentricism, he actually toyed with heliocentrism, though without formally integrating the theory into the rest of his thought (some 500 years before Copernicus). And al-Biruni’s travels to coastal areas and the Arabian deserts helped him understand the formation of canyons and composition of sand. ‘With the passing of time,’ he observed, ‘the sea becomes dry land, and dry land the sea.’ Had al-Biruni never left Central Asia and been compelled to undertake his travels across South and West Asia, he would never have made this critical observation. Al-Biruni’s life teaches students today that lack and scarcity need not be impediments; they can be resources for innovation.
Creativity can come as much from unimagined possibilities as from unforeseen limitations. The life and work of our next polymath, Alhazen, is a testament to how creativity emerges under constraints, particularly in captivity. While both poverty and captivity prompt creativity, these constraints are qualitatively different. One relates to scarcity and the other to immobility. Scarcity does not foreclose travel, while captivity – an unfortunately common experience for students working under oppressive governments today – disconnects one entirely from the outside world that offers a plethora of possibilities. These circumstances distinguished al-Biruni and Alhazen.
Alhazen (also known as Ibn al-Haytham) was a major scholar of optics, born around 965 in Basra, in modern-day Iraq, where there was a thriving intellectual climate that led to significant scientific and literary production. It was where the study of Arabic grammar was founded; where al-Jahiz explored everything from zoology to theology; where the Ikhwan al-Safa – a clandestine brotherhood of scientist-philosophers – compiled a massive encyclopaedia that wove together mathematics, music and metaphysics. It was this cosmopolitan and bookish culture that shaped Alhazen.
In his early days, he became famous for his revolutionary feats in engineering. But he outdid himself when he boldly proposed the construction of a dam on the River Nile to regulate its flow. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, ruling from Cairo, got wind of Alhazen’s extraordinary proposal. Known to history as the ‘Mad Caliph’, al-Hakim was a deeply eccentric and vindictive ruler, who persecuted religious minorities and once ordered that all the dogs in Cairo be killed (he was evidently annoyed by their barking). When Alhazen arrived in Egypt, he found to his dismay that the Nile could not be so easily tamed; his dam was entirely unfeasible. Reasonably fearing that his failure would upset the Mad Caliph, Alhazen himself claimed insanity. The ruse worked: he escaped execution and instead remained under house arrest until al-Hakim’s death.
Alhazen was among the first to argue that vision results from light entering the eye, not rays emitted by it
Alhazen remained under house arrest for a decade. Bound to his abode with nothing but his interests, he developed groundbreaking theories of vision in a book entitled _Kitab_ _al-Manazir_ (‘Book of Optics’). Given the physical limitations of his house arrest, he spent a lot of time building, tinkering and experimenting with instruments that helped him understand the behaviour of light. His vast knowledge was his sole resource during the imprisonment. As a polymath, Alhazen combined his knowledge of geometry, astronomy, optics and engineering. He developed mathematical equations to explain how light worked, studied many astronomical phenomena, especially stars, to explain theories of brightness, and used engineering principles of the camera obscura to mimic the function of the eye.
From _Opticæ thesaurus_ (1572) by Alhazen. Courtesy the Houghton Library, Harvard University
His most influential contribution remains foundational to optics. Alhazen was among the first to argue that vision results from light entering the eye, not rays emitted by it. This was his influential theory of intromission. His views put him at odds with such greats as Ptolemy, Euclid and Galen, whose emission theory of optics held that the eye projected rays onto the objects it perceived. But Alhazen countered that this couldn’t be squared with astronomy: if the eye had to send out rays before we could see anything, there’d be no way to explain how we see distant stars the instant we open our eyes.
His development of the intromission theory revealed another crucial ability: his critical thinking. His works are a testament to the fact that Muslim polymaths did not just consume, translate or replicate Greek knowledge. Rather, they critiqued and innovated. Had Alhazen not critiqued Greek science, combining his knowledge of optics, astronomy and mathematics with practical demonstrations of the camera obscura – all under conditions of captivity – his intromission theory would not have emerged.
While most believe the theories of intromission were the pinnacle of Alhazen’s intellectual achievements, but in fact his polymathy also created novel connections between optics and psychology. As the neuroscientist Charles G Gross has argued, Alhazen was ‘the first to recognise the crucial importance of eye movement for perception’, thus constituting our consciousness of the visual world. Alhazen realised that the reception of light by the eye was the first of many crucial steps in perception. His optics explained how light physically reaches the eye, but insisted that it was only the first step – turning that raw sensation into an actual conscious percept required unconscious inference, memory and comparison. It is a startlingly modern view, which wouldn’t be articulated in the West until the 19th century – and had Alhazen been narrowly wedded to a single field he would never have made this discovery.
Whether students endeavour to be scholars or entrepreneurs, they need to seek out eclectic experiences without a predetermined outcome. Alhazen’s combination of creativity and critical thinking under constraints led to the extraordinary achievements for which he is still remembered.
Perhaps the most prominent polymath from the Islamic world was Avicenna, who was intellectually active from 997 to 1037. A widely known physician and philosopher hailing from Bukhara in Central Asia, he was a child prodigy, demonstrating mastery over complex texts and concepts at a young age. While his contributions to medicine are often cited today, his contributions to the development of the scientific method were his primary achievements. Much like Alhazen, Avicenna moved fluidly from observation to experimentation, from induction to deduction, leading to his breakthroughs in medicine and philosophy as well as lesser-known contributions to psychology and geology.
Avicenna’s magnum opus, _Al_\-_Qanun fi al-Tibb_ (‘The Canon of Medicine’), was an attempt to compress the entire medical knowledge of his age – Greek, Persian and Indian – into a single, systematic reference. Completed around 1025, it unfolds across five books: general principles of physiology and disease; an alphabetical catalogue of some 800 medicinal substances; diseases organised by body part, from head to foot; conditions affecting the whole body, such as fevers; and a formulary of roughly 650 compound remedies. But what distinguishes the _Canon_ is its method. Avicenna lays out the rules for testing a new drug’s effects, effectively articulating the idea of a clinical trial centuries before the term existed. Translated into Latin in the 12th century, the _Canon_ became the standard medical textbook in European universities for more than half a millennium. Avicenna’s genius, though, lay not just in the substance of this achievement but in what we would now call science communication: he wrote lucid prose and evocative poetry.
When Avicenna was stuck on a logic problem, he headed to the mosque and prayed until his mental fog lifted
Poetry was, in fact, a key didactic device for communicating scientific knowledge in the classical world. Rhyme and meter helped make the material easy to memorise. Avicenna’s _Al-Urjuzah_ _fi_ _al-Tibb_ (‘Poem on Medicine’) distilled the lessons of the _Canon_ so that physicians could easily recall its recommendations and insights. These lines, in Haven C Krueger’s 1963 translation, evocatively capture the experience of disease:
> Symptoms are obtained through physical examination of the body at certain moments. There are some visible ones such as jaundice and oedema; there are some perceptible to the ear such as gurgling of the abdomen in dropsy; the foul odour strikes at the sense of smell; for example that of purulent ulcers; there are some accessible to taste such as the acidity of the mouth; touch recognises certain ones: the firmness of cancer!
Avicenna’s contributions far outweighed medical discoveries and innovations. His contribution to the scientific method itself was groundbreaking. When he was stuck on a logic problem, he used mysticism as a method: he headed to the mosque and prayed until his mental fog lifted and he solved the puzzle. In many ways, this anticipates the role that meditation plays today in achieving mental clarity. Scientists are now finding that a change of scenery and change of pace can work wonders for researchers. Contrary to popular belief, mindfulness is not a new solution to an old problem. It is a recycled recommendation from many spiritual traditions, packaged in a palatable secularism. Seeing mindfulness through its historic uses from Buddha to Avicenna gives the practice credibility beyond its fetishisation as a disruptive approach by Silicon Valley. It is an age-old practice linked to innovation.
From ‘The Canon of Medicine’ by Avicenna. Courtesy the Wellcome Library, London
Whenever I assign Avicenna’s autobiography in my history of science class, my students are struck by something very simple: the intertwinement of religion and science. The two have not always been at loggerheads, as students are now ahistorically encouraged to believe. Avicenna’s own habit of praying his way through a difficult logic problem is a case in point: for him, turning to the mosque when reason stalled wasn’t a retreat from rigorous thought but an extension of it, since prayer and logical enquiry were both aimed at the same goal of grasping a difficult truth. I have lost count of the number of times students gawk at examples of scientists from history who were spiritual, not secular, without ascribing a value judgment to their belief systems. These also include relatively recent scientists such as the Nobel Laureate in Physics Abdus Salam, a Pakistani who openly identified as Muslim and saw no contradiction between his faith and his research.
Furthermore, Avicenna was not alone in using lush language to explain scientific concepts. Rhetoric was one of the main liberal arts in the Greek and Islamic traditions, and most scholars were skilled in it. That tradition persisted to 20th-century scientists such as Abdus Salam, who carried a lifelong love of poetry in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi and English, and colleagues who heard him lecture on particle physics remarked that his eloquence made the subject sound like literature. For both Avicenna and Salam, vivid language wasn’t decoration bolted on to the science after the fact; it was part of how the ideas were thought through, and how they were made to stick. Emphasising effective and evocative writing skills to students in the liberal arts classroom today is key to their success. Writing is not an isolated skill that can be replaced by AI. It is fundamental to both communication and cognition for future leaders in science and entrepreneurship. Avicenna’s life and legacy attest to both methodological eclecticism and compelling science communication in ways that are waning today due to specialisation and narrow vocational education.
Our final polymath, al-Khwarizmi, is invaluable to a liberal arts curriculum in the Muslim world and beyond. As the father of algebra and namesake of the word ‘algorithm’, his work shows that theory emerges from wrestling with practical problems and that abstraction can solve pragmatic challenges. Born in Central Asia around 780, al-Khwarizmi rose to prominence as a leader of Islamic science. He was a key scholar at the Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad – then the largest institution of intellectual enquiry in the Muslim world – with a vast knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography that was relevant to the practical problems of governance and administration faced by the Abbasid empire.
He described his treatise on algebra, the _Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab_ _al-Jabr_ _wa_ _al-Muqabala_ (‘The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing’), as a practical handbook, a ‘work on algebra, confining it to the fine and important parts of its calculations, such as people constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, law-suits, and trade, and in all their dealings with one another where surveying, the digging of canals, geometrical computation, and other objects of various sorts and kinds are concerned.’ These were all imperative applications for successful imperial administration under the Abbasids. Despite the abstract attraction of algebra, it was never meant to be a purely theoretical tradition divorced from real-world needs.
Al-Khwarizmi’s algebra grew out of practical problems – inheritance disputes, land surveys, canal digging
Al-Khwarizmi is best remembered for founding algebra, but his ambitions extended into astronomy and geography as well. In dedication to Caliph al-Ma’mun, who reigned in 813-33, he composed his own _Zij_ _al-Sindhind,_ astronomical tables charting the movements of the Sun, the Moon and five known planets, adapting earlier material brought to Baghdad from India. The tables included calculations for the length of shadows cast at different times of day, essential for setting prayer times and calibrating sundials. Later, in the _Kitab Surat_ _al-Ard_ (‘Book of the Description of the Earth’), he turned to geography, correcting and expanding Ptolemy’s centuries-old map of the world with coordinates for 2,402 locations. Across mathematics, astronomy and geography alike, the through-line in al-Khwarizmi’s work is precision: an insistence on measuring, tabulating and correcting, rather than simply inheriting received knowledge.
From al-Khwarizmi’s treatise on algebra, _The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing_. Courtesy the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, UK
Theory itself is often the real barrier I see in the classroom, especially among students from geographically disadvantaged backgrounds who arrive well practised in applied knowledge but not in abstraction. The mainstream Pakistani school curriculum rewards rote learning over critical or abstract thinking, so theory can feel foreign rather than useful. Al-Khwarizmi’s life argues otherwise: his algebra grew out of thoroughly practical problems – inheritance disputes, land surveys, canal digging – but its power lay in outlasting them, becoming a method supple enough to structure problems no 9th-century administrator could have imagined. Theory, in other words, isn’t the opposite of practice; it’s what practice becomes once it’s generalised. That is the lesson worth carrying into a liberal arts classroom that too often treats abstraction as a luxury rather than a skill.
The lives of these polymaths prompt us to appreciate that constraints can lead to creativity and innovation. This is especially illustrated by the examples of al-Biruni and Alhazen, even if the nature of those constraints is different: scarcity made al-Biruni create his own instruments, while Alhazen’s captivity forced him to look inward, contemplating the connections between vision and psychology. For Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi, polymathy grew instead out of institutional patronage and courtly upheaval, which gave them both the room and the reason to move between medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and geography as they wove Greek, Persian and Indian traditions into new syntheses.
What unites the four is not the particular constraint or opportunity each encountered, but what they did with it: none let a single discipline set a boundary on their thinking. Critique was central to this refusal, too, as Alhazen’s disputation of emission theory in favour of intromission illustrates: polymaths did not simply inherit received knowledge; they interrogated it. And theory and practice were never opposed, as Avicenna’s clinical method and al-Khwarizmi’s precision-driven mathematics attest: exactitude and abstraction are as much cornerstones of a liberal arts education as breadth itself. What each of these lives shares, finally, is the cross-cultural exposure that pluralistic patronage made possible. Polymathy has never been a solitary pursuit, but one fed by contact across traditions.
That lesson matters for my students in Pakistan today, most of whom will build careers in a world reshaped by AI, climate disruption and political upheaval far more volatile than any single discipline can prepare them for. If al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi could turn scarcity, captivity, patronage and instability into new ways of knowing, then breadth is the necessary preparation for the tremendous work ahead.