The content of merely the section on Hindu philosophy and religion in the India is itself a formidable collection of disparate data. Moreover, A. Jeffery has already provided an adequate description of its main features.¹⁶ There remains the task of discerning what qualities of reflection and analysis characterize al-Bīrūnī's data and point beyond the India to enduring problems in cross-cultural studies.

al-Bīrūnī is catalogic in the degree that one might expect of a man whose primary affiliation is with mathematical sciences and only secondarily with history and its adjunct concerns, namely, religion and philosophy. Al-Bīrūnī loved to count. At the beginning of Chapter 15 of the India, he goes so far as to state:

Counting is innate to man. The measure of a thing becomes knowable in comparison with another thing which belongs to the same species and is assumed as a...