How cultures differ and meet

Compare what stays of a custom or an idea, and what changes, when it moves from one place to another or from one language to another. Then ask who is telling us this, and whether they saw it themselves or took it from others.

Read what a critic says translators need. In the first part of Kitab al-Hayawan, al-Jahiz holds that poetry cannot be translated: once transferred, its metre is broken and its beauty lost; yet the books of India were carried over, the wisdom of the Greeks translated and the literature of Persia transferred, some gaining in beauty and some losing nothing ². He then sets out "the conditions of the translator": his expression in the translation must match his knowledge of the subject itself, and he must be the most learned of people in both the language translated from and the language translated into ³. He observes that whoever speaks two languages wrongs both, since each pulls at the other ³. To this he adds the copyists' faults: a copy never free of mistakes is copied by one who adds more, until a book in circulation becomes "sheer error and solid falsehood" ⁴.

The museum's records hold no passage in which al-Biruni says why he studied India, and they do not supply one for him. What they show is where he was and what the article and the editor report. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says that learned men, including al-Biruni, were among the prisoners taken to Ghazna in 408/1017, that he accompanied Mahmud on several expeditions to north-west India, and that he taught the Greek sciences there and received in exchange an initiation into Sanskrit and various dialects ⁵. The editor of al-Qanun al-Mas'udi says that he lived among the Indians, learned their language and took up their sciences ⁶. The article calls him an impartial observer of customs and creeds ⁵; that is the article's description, not his own.

Customs differ even inside one rite. The record of the aqiqa reports that the Encyclopaedia of Islam defines it as the sacrifice on the seventh day after a child's birth, with two rams or two he-goats for a boy, and for a girl one of these according to the Shafi'is, but only one animal for either sex according to the Malikis ⁷. The same article cites Doughty's observation that in the Arabian desert it is performed only at the birth of a boy ⁷. On its status the record gives al-Nawawi's survey: Malik, Abu Thawr and most scholars held it recommended, while others, including Dawud al-Zahiri, held it obligatory; Abu Hanifa, as al-Nawawi reports him, held it neither obligatory nor sunna ⁸. The record says the Hanafi view is not given here from Hanafi books.

Three kinds of witness stand behind this lesson. The account of how the translation movement began comes from Ibn al-Nadim alone, and the record says that other sources confirming or discussing it are not recorded here ⁹. For al-Biruni and India the records give his readers, not his own words: the Encyclopaedia of Islam article by D. J. Boilot, and the editor of al-Qanun al-Mas'udi, who quotes Sachau and Yaqut ^5 6. For the aqiqa, the rulings are reported by named scholars and schools, and the record marks what it has not read in their own books. Ask of each witness how close it stood to what it reports.

When ideas cross from one language or people to another, is more lost than gained? Using al-Jahiz's objections to translation and the exchange the article reports of al-Biruni, how would you answer the strongest argument against your view?

• The translation movement: Ibn al-Nadim's account of its beginnings, the Banu Shakir and their translators, and al-Jahiz's critique.
• Al-Biruni: his life between Khwarazm, Ghazna and India, and the works the article lists.
• The aqiqa: a birth rite as the jurists describe it, with the differences of school and of place.