Al-Biruni’s Kitab al-Hind and the ethical cartographies of knowledge

This article revisits the legacy of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni’s Kitab al-Hind (ca. 1030 CE) through the lenses of cultural geography and Islamic intellectual history. Rather than treating al-Biruni as a linear antecedent of modern geography or anthropology, we argue that his work constitutes a methodological model rooted in the ethics of translation, plural rationality, and epistemic humility. By situating the Kitab al-Hind within its Islamic cosmological and political context, we demonstrate that Al-Biruni’s engagement with Hindu knowledge systems, and his critique of caste-based exclusions, models an ethics of inter-epistemic translation. We further trace how modern receptions, particularly in Eurocentric scholarship, recast his legacy within secularist binaries, obscuring the relational ethics that anchor his method. Rather than recuperating al-Biruni as a token precursor, we propose that his work reorients geography: shifting it from a discipline of description to one of ethical encounter, plural reasoning, and epistemic care.