The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology
al-Bīrūnī, trans. R. Ramsay Wright. . London: Luzac & Co., 1934, xviii + 333 pp.. Composed 1029. In Arabic and Persian, with facing English translation.
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Reproduces British Museum MS Or. 8349, al-Bīrūnī's own catechism-form textbook of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and astrology, written in 1029 for Rayḥāna bint al-Ḥasan. Read from this scan, including Wright's translator's note on p. 3 quoting Eduard Sachau's judgment, from Sachau's preface to his edition of al-Bīrūnī's "India", that al-Bīrūnī nowhere states outright whether he believed the planets act on the sublunary world, against which Wright sets the contrast of al-Bīrūnī's contemporary Avicenna, who wrote an explicit refutation of astrologers. Record confirmed against the contemporary review in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, which gives the same pagination.
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- al-Bīrūnī
- Wright quotes Sachau's judgment, from Sachau's preface to al-Bīrūnī's "India", on the unresolved question of al-Bīrūnī's own belief.