SOURCE: "Foreign Interpreters of India: The Case of Al-Blir-i," in The Scholar and the Saint: Studies in Commemoration of the Abu 'l-Rayhan al-Bīrūnī and Jala al-din al-Rumi, edited by Peter J. Chelkowski, New York University Press, 1975, pp. 1-16.

[In the essay that follows, originally delivered as a lecture in 1974, Embree considers al-Bīrūnī's contribution to the study of the history of India and claims that his work neither reduces the complexity of Indian civilization to a false simplicity nor loses its clarity in describing a proliferation of beliefs, practices, and events.]

A century ago, Sir Henry Summer Maine, the famous jurist and historian, remarked that any thinker or student, who approaches India in a serious spirit, "finds it pregnant with difficult questions, not to be disentangled without prodigious pains." Those questions, he said, could not be solved unless one was willing to go through...