Hello, friend.
It's good to have you back.
Last time we talked, I told you about Bartolomé de las Casas---that Spanish priest who crossed an ocean and found his conscience waiting for him on the other side. He saw people his own culture had decided weren't fully human, and he spent the rest of his life insisting they were wrong. It cost him everything familiar. But he couldn't unsee what he'd seen.
Today I want to tell you about another man who crossed a divide. Not an ocean, but something just as vast---the space between worlds that see God differently, that speak in different tongues, that have decided the other side is simply, fundamentally wrong.
His name was Al-Biruni.
He arrived in India with an army. But somewhere along the way, he made a choice that still echoes: he decided to become a student instead of a conqueror. He learned their language. He read their sacred texts. He asked questions.
And he listened to the answers.
Picture this with me.
It's a courtyard somewhere in northern India, maybe 1018, maybe 1020. The exact year doesn't matter as much as the moment itself. And to be honest I have never been really good with numbers.
A man sits cross-legged on a woven mat. He's forty-four years old, forty-five---somewhere in that country where youth has finished but old age hasn't quite arrived. His name is Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, and he's bent over a manuscript, his finger tracing Sanskrit characters he's still learning to read.
Across from him, a Hindu scholar is explaining a verse from an ancient text about the movements of planets. The scholar's voice is patient. He's watched this Persian stranger struggle with verb conjugations for months now, watched him fill page after page with questions.
Around them, beyond the courtyard walls, the evidence of how Biruni came here: cities still rebuilding from Sultan Mahmud's raids, communities scattered, temples damaged or destroyed. Biruni arrived with that army. He had no choice in the matter---scholars didn't refuse sultans. But he had a choice about what to do once he got here.
He chose this. The mat. The manuscript. The questions.
I watched him sometimes, though he never saw me. I saw him writing in four, five languages---Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, translating ideas from one world into another. I saw him asking Hindu priests about their calendars, their mathematics, their understanding of the divine. Not asking to prove them wrong. Asking to understand.
There was something sacred in it. In that courtyard, in that choice---to sit down as a student in a land his people were conquering. To learn the language of people his culture called idol-worshipers. To write down their ideas exactly as they explained them, with care, with attention, with something that looked a lot like respect.
The book he was working on would take him thirteen years to finish. But the real work---the work of crossing that space between worlds---that started the moment he opened his mouth and said, in halting, careful Sanskrit: Teach me.
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni was born around 973 in Kath, a city on the edge of the known world---the outskirts of Khwarazm, in what's now Uzbekistan. His very name meant "outsider" or "from the outskirts." It suited him.
By the time he was twenty-five, he'd already made a name for himself as a scholar of astronomy, mathematics, and languages. He could read Persian, Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Hebrew. He studied the movements of stars, the properties of metals, the histories of nations. He wrote about calendars and chronology, trying to make sense of how different cultures measured time.
But Khwarazm was unstable. Dynasties rose and fell. Biruni's patrons were overthrown. He fled to Bukhara, then to the court of a regional ruler in northern Persia. He corresponded with other great minds of his age---including Avicenna, the famous philosopher-physician. They argued about whether the universe had a beginning. Biruni said yes. Avicenna wasn't so sure.
Then, in 1017, everything changed.
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni---a powerful ruler building an empire through conquest---captured the city where Biruni was living. Mahmud collected scholars the way some men collected jewels. He wanted the best minds of his age at his court in Ghazni, in what's now Afghanistan. Biruni had no choice. He was forty-four years old, and suddenly he belonged to a sultan with ambitions.
Mahmud's ambitions included India.
Starting in the 990s and continuing for decades, Mahmud launched raid after raid into the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes for plunder. Sometimes for territory. Sometimes to destroy Hindu temples and bring back their wealth. The raids were brutal. Cities burned. People were killed or enslaved. Treasuries were emptied.
And Biruni went with him.
Not as a warrior---he was a scholar, a court astrologer---but he was there. He saw what happened. He knew how he'd arrived in this land: in the wake of violence, as part of a conquering force that the local people had every reason to hate and fear.
But then he did something unexpected.
He stayed. Not just physically---he had to stay, he was Mahmud's man---but mentally, spiritually. Instead of remaining in the conqueror's camp, certain of his own culture's superiority, he became curious. He started asking questions. He wanted to understand these people, this place, this civilization that his own sultan was tearing apart.
He found Hindu scholars willing to teach him. It took time---they were suspicious, and who could blame them? Muslims had brought nothing but destruction. But Biruni was persistent, and he was genuine. He learned Sanskrit. Not just enough to get by, but enough to read their sacred texts in the original language. He studied the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas, mathematical treatises, astronomical tables.
He asked about their calendar, their festivals, their understanding of God. He watched their rituals. He interviewed priests and philosophers. He took notes---endless, meticulous notes---in multiple languages.
And around 1030, after thirteen years of research, he finished a book. He called it Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind ---which translates roughly as "An Inquiry into India" or "Verifying what India says, whether rational or despised."
In the introduction, he explained his method with remarkable clarity: "I shall place before the reader the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are, and I shall mention in connection with them similar theories of the Greeks in order to show the relationship existing between them."
Exactly as they are. Not as he wished them to be. Not filtered through his own assumptions about what was right or wrong. He wanted to understand them on their own terms.
It was scholarship, yes. But it was also something more---a kind of spiritual discipline. The discipline of listening. Of setting aside certainty long enough to learn.
You have to understand how radical this was.
In Biruni's world---in the eleventh century, in the courts of Muslim sultans, in the aftermath of holy wars---there were right answers and wrong answers about God. Muslims believed in one God, invisible and absolute. Many Hindus worshiped multiple deities, carved their images in stone, offered them flowers and incense. To a devout Muslim, this looked like the worst kind of error: idol worship, shirk, the unforgivable sin of putting something else in God's place.
And from the Hindu side? Muslims were invaders. Destroyers of temples. Killers of priests. People who ate meat and didn't understand purity, who broke sacred images and mocked what was holy.
The line between the two worlds was drawn in blood and conviction.
And into that divide, Biruni walked with a notebook and questions.
He didn't abandon his own faith---he remained a Muslim his entire life, arguing passionately for Islamic positions in theology. He believed the universe had a beginning, created by God. He defended that view against philosophers like Avicenna who weren't so sure. He was no relativist, no spiritual tourist sampling religions like dishes at a feast.
But he also refused to be satisfied with caricatures.
He made a distinction that sounds condescending to our ears but was surprisingly open-minded for his time: he divided Hindus into the educated and the uneducated. The educated ones, he said, were essentially monotheists---they understood that behind all the different deities was one ultimate reality, one divine essence. The images and rituals were symbols, not the thing itself. The uneducated masses, he admitted, often did worship the statues as gods.
But then---and this is what I found remarkable---he turned the same critical eye on his own people. Some Muslims, he pointed out, had anthropomorphic ideas about God too. Some Islamic sects imagined God with human characteristics. Error wasn't unique to Hindus. It was a human problem, not a Hindu one.
He acknowledged Hindu achievements openly, even when they challenged Islamic assumptions. Indian mathematicians had developed concepts his own culture was still grasping. Indian astronomers had made observations that refined Greek theories. He translated their work, studied their methods, gave them credit.
And he was honest about why this work was so hard.
He wrote frankly about the legacy of violence: "The Hindus had suffered under Muslim raids. They became suspicious of all foreigners, not just Muslims. They considered us impure and violent, and they did not want to share their knowledge with us."
He didn't excuse it. He didn't defend Mahmud's raids or pretend the conquest was justified because it brought civilization. He simply named the truth: his people had given the Hindus every reason to distrust him.
And yet he kept asking. Kept learning. Kept trying to build something fragile and precious across that chasm---understanding.
It wasn't tolerance, exactly---that word is too thin, too detached. And it wasn't conversion or synthesis. It was something else. A spiritual practice disguised as scholarship: the discipline of seeing another person's world the way they saw it. Of honoring the truth in their seeking, even when you didn't share their conclusions.
In a world organized around certainty and conquest, he chose curiosity.
In a world divided into us and them, he sat down and learned their language.
That was the spiritual meaning, right there in that courtyard. Not in a temple or a mosque, not in prayer or ritual, but in the simple, sacred act of asking a question---and meaning it.
What Biruni gave the world wasn't just a book about India.
He gave us a method. A way of crossing boundaries without erasing them. A demonstration that you could be absolutely committed to your own truth and still treat someone else's truth with dignity and care.
This was new---or at least, it was rare enough to be revolutionary.
Before Biruni, most scholars who wrote about other cultures did it from the outside, through the lens of their own assumptions. They described what seemed strange or wrong or barbaric, measured other civilizations against their own and found them wanting. Biruni did something different. He went inside. He learned the language, read the original texts, asked the practitioners themselves what they believed and why. He didn't just observe---he participated in understanding.
Later scholars would call him the "Father of Comparative Religion" and the "Father of Indology." The titles are a little grandiose, a little Western, but they point to something real. He created a template: if you want to understand a people, learn their language, read their books, listen to their scholars. Don't assume you already know what they think. Ask.
His work did something else too---it built bridges in both directions.
Through his translations and writings, Indian mathematical and astronomical knowledge became available to Persian and Arabic scholars. Concepts traveled west that might not have otherwise. And in the other direction, he helped Indian scholars understand Islamic astronomy, Greek philosophy, Persian chronology. He was a translator not just of words but of worldviews.
I saw this pattern again, centuries later.
I saw it when medieval Muslim scholars in Baghdad and Córdoba translated Aristotle and Plato from Greek into Arabic, preserving knowledge that Christian Europe had lost and would later reclaim. I saw it when Jesuit missionaries in China---men like Matteo Ricci---learned Mandarin and Confucian classics, trying to understand Chinese thought from within before they tried to speak about their own faith. I saw it when anthropologists in the twentieth century began living with the communities they studied, learning their languages, sitting at their feet.
Not all of these efforts were pure. Some were tangled up with colonialism, with the desire to convert or control. But the thread was there---the thread Biruni had pulled: genuine understanding requires genuine humility.
What endures from his work isn't just the specific facts he recorded about eleventh-century India, though those matter to historians. What endures is the possibility he demonstrated.
The possibility that difference doesn't have to mean enmity.
That you can cross a divide---even one carved by violence, even one marked by profound disagreement about the nature of God---and find common ground. Not by pretending the differences don't exist, not by flattening everything into "we all believe the same thing really," but by recognizing something deeper: that every culture, every tradition, every people is part of humanity's larger search for truth.
Biruni believed Islam had the clearest answers. He said so plainly in his writings. But he also believed that Hindus were asking real questions, pursuing real knowledge, reaching toward real truth in their own way. He could hold both of those thoughts at once---commitment and openness, certainty and curiosity.
That balance, that ability to say "I believe this absolutely" and also "teach me what you know"---that was his gift to the world's spiritual imagination.
It's a gift we're still learning to receive.
You know the divisions I'm talking about.
The family members who won't speak to each other anymore because of how they voted. The online arguments that spiral into nothing but heat and hurt. The way we've sorted ourselves into camps---the right people and the wrong people, the enlightened ones and the ignorant ones, us and them.
I've watched this pattern for a long time, across centuries and continents. We carve the world into us and them, right and wrong, worthy and unworthy. And then we stand on our side of the line, certain, defending our ground.
It's exhausting, isn't it? Being right all the time. Being at war all the time.
There's another way. And it's not buried in the past with Al-Biruni---it's alive right now, being practiced by people all around you.
The researcher who spends years living in a community completely different from her own, learning their language, asking their elders to teach her. The neighbor who crosses the political divide in his own street to ask genuine questions and then---this is the hard part---actually listens to the answers. The young person learning the language of refugees in their city, not to fix them or save them, but to understand them. The teacher sitting down with a student whose whole worldview seems alien, asking: help me see what you see.
This isn't naïve. It's not pretending differences don't matter or that everyone's right about everything. It's something harder and more real than that.
It's the practiced discipline of seeing the person across from you as fully human.
Not "they're wrong, but I'll be polite." Deeper than that. Recognizing that they're asking real questions. Seeking real truth. Trying to live good lives with the light they have. You don't have to agree with their answers to honor their seeking. You don't have to abandon your own truth to make room for theirs.
Think about the best conversations you've ever had. The ones that changed something in you, opened something. When did they happen? Usually when someone asked you a real question and then stayed present for your answer. When you felt seen---not as a position to defeat, not as a problem to solve, but as a person. A whole person, with reasons and stories and struggles and dignity.
That recognition---that moment of really seeing each other---it's already embedded in how wisdom actually works. It's not something we have to invent. It's something we remember.
And here's what I want you to know: this is happening. Right now, while everything else feels like it's falling apart, people are building these bridges. One conversation at a time. One genuine question at a time. Learning each other's languages, literal and metaphorical. Sitting down on the mat like Biruni did and saying: teach me.
It doesn't fix everything. It doesn't erase the real differences or solve every conflict. But it shifts something. It opens something. It reminds us that we're all part of one human story---all of us struggling and seeking and trying to understand this strange, beautiful, difficult world we share.
You live in that world. The one where this is possible. Where divides can be crossed. Where curiosity can be stronger than certainty. Where the discipline of really seeing each other---of asking and listening---can create something that didn't exist before.
It's already happening.
You can be part of it too.
But let me tell you something else I've noticed, something that might help you see what's really happening right now.
While the news shows you everything breaking apart---and yes, things are breaking apart, institutions crumbling, old certainties collapsing, divisions deepening---there's another story happening at the same time. Quieter. Harder to see. But just as real.
A new world is being built.
Not someday. Not after everything falls apart and we finally get it right. Now. Right now. Under the radar. In small acts and quiet rooms and unlikely partnerships.
I see it in the community organizations bringing together people who've been taught to fear each other, teaching them to solve local problems through consultation instead of conflict. I see it in the young people who refuse to inherit their parents' prejudices, who are weaving friendships across every old boundary. I see it in the scientists and artists and teachers who understand their work as service to humanity's wholeness, not just their own advancement.
I see it in the conversations happening right now where someone asks a genuine question across a divide and someone else answers honestly. Where understanding actually happens.
This is the work Biruni was doing in that courtyard---but it's not just about him anymore. It's about a pattern that's spreading, a possibility that's becoming real. The possibility of a world where our differences make us richer instead of poorer. Where curiosity is stronger than fear. Where we learn each other's languages---all of them, the ones made of words and the ones made of experience.
So here's what I'm asking you to notice: Where do you see this new world being built around you?
Who are the bridge-builders in your life? The ones asking questions instead of taking sides? The ones learning languages, literal or metaphorical, to understand someone different from themselves? The ones treating every person---every single person---as though they carry something true and valuable?
And here's the deeper question: Where might you be one of them?
Not because you have to save the world---you don't. But because this is how the new world gets built. One conversation at a time. One act of genuine curiosity. One moment of seeing someone across a divide and recognizing: there's a human being there, with dignity, with truth, with questions as real as mine.
You're living in both worlds right now---the one that's breaking apart and the one that's being born. That's not a burden. It's an invitation.
Pay attention to what's being built. Notice it. Honor it. Join it where you can.
The work that Biruni started in that courtyard thirteen centuries ago---it's your work now too.
Next time, I want to tell you about a scholar in Song Dynasty China who believed the entire universe was woven from a single pattern---a rational order that connected stars and rivers and human hearts. His name was Zhu Xi, and he spent his life asking one essential question: How do we live rightly in a world where everything is connected to everything else?
His answer would shape millions of minds for centuries. And it might surprise you how much it sounds like what we need right now.
Until then, keep noticing. Keep asking. Keep building those bridges, one question at a time.
The world that's being born needs you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.