Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

106 • The Making of Islamic Sciencemeasured way, where there is no excess and no want; and forsustenance has made food the principal cause, and throughwhich each body grows on all sides, so that the food, after beingdigested, helps it (to sustain itself).God has made plants content themselves with little food, foodthat is not consumed rapidly… water seeps in and traversesto their roots. Air, heated by the sun, absorbs moisture fromtheir branches, and transports it upwards. Whatever is thusacquired from below is transported to the branches and causesthem to grow. And they produce what they are created for, beit the generation of leaves, or flowers, or fruits. (al-Biruni, tr.1989, 3-4)Humans may find “fault” in nature, but it is really humanshortsightedness that construes a function of nature as a “fault,” for“it only serves to show that the Creator who had designed somethingdeviating from the general tenor of things is infinitely sublime,beyond everything which we poor sinners may conceive and predicateof Him” (Nasr 1993, 124).Some time toward the end of the tenth century or early in theeleventh, al-Biruni corresponded with Ibn Sina on various aspectsof the physical sciences and Aristotle’s ideas. This correspondence,containing eighteen questions and their responses, not only countersthe notion Islamic scientific tradition was only the work of a fewindividuals working in isolation, but also provides insights intothe independence of al-Biruni, who calls into question many wellestablishedAristotelian notions, often using his own observationsand experiments as proofs (al-Biruni, tr. 2001-6, 91). A case inpoint is the sixth question in this correspondence, in which al-Biruni objects to the Aristotelian understanding of the process ofsolidification of water upon cooling. “I have broken many bottles[by freezing them],” he tells Ibn Sina, “and they all break outward,rather than collapse inwardly.” What he leads to is the lower densityof water in the solid state than in the liquid state, which is why thevolume of water increases upon freezing and flasks break outwardly.This was in contrast to Ibn Sina’s views (based on Aristotle). This isa remarkable insight into the nature of the water molecule from the