Did Max Weber plagiarize from Biruni?

Looking at the history of social thought from Samarkand, we said that Biruni should be placed alongside Ibn Khaldun. We also pointed out a striking affinity between Biruni's method, which tries to grasp another society from within its own world of meaning, and Weber's interpretive sociology. We assessed this affinity, however, not as a relationship of influence but as a methodological kinship that two thinkers reached in different centuries.

After my piece was published, my colleague from the Department of Sociology at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Prof. Dr. Mustafa Orçan, with whom I was chatting, told me about his article titled "The Caste System in Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni Before Max Weber." I read it, and I am glad that I did.

Orçan places Biruni's and Weber's assessments of India, and especially of the caste system, side by side. This comparison raises a disturbing but necessary question: Did Weber take some of his ideas about India and the caste system from Biruni? And if he did, why did he never cite him?

Of course, with the information we have today we cannot give a definitive "yes" to this question. Orçan does not present it as a proven case of plagiarism either. But the dates, the similarities and the silence that he sets out inevitably call for the question.

Biruni completed Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind (Verification of What Belongs to India) around the year 1030. He was not content to look at India from the outside. He learned Sanskrit, talked with Indian scholars, read their sacred texts, and observed the differences of language and practice in different regions. In today's terms, he combined the study of written sources with field research that approaches participant observation. While examining India's religion, philosophy, geography, calendar and astronomy, he also treated the caste system as one of the central institutions of social life.

He described the social strata, from the Brahmins to the Kshatriyas, from the Vaishyas to the Shudras and the groups left outside the castes. He showed that these strata were not merely a ranking of prestige; that they determined occupations, the division of labor, forms of marriage, the possibilities of eating together, areas of residence and everyday contact. He drew attention to how religion, the state, occupations and social hierarchy feed one another. He saw the relationship between preventing the castes from mixing and occupations becoming hereditary.

These things were being written in the eleventh century, when sociology did not yet even have a name.

About nine centuries later, in his Hinduismus und Buddhismus, published in 1916-1917, Max Weber examined the caste system in its relations with religion, economic life and social organization. Weber too explained that caste was not merely a social ranking, that it formed a system woven from rules of occupation, status, religious purity, marriage, food and everyday relations. He emphasized the relationship between caste and occupation, and regarded castes as occupational associations resembling the guilds of tradesmen and craftsmen.

Orçan's comparison shows that the headings the two texts share are too many to be dismissed as coincidence: religion-based stratification, the division of occupations by caste, the prevention of intermarriage and commensality between castes, groups regarded as "clean" and "unclean," lower castes living outside the villages, the relationship between religious law and social order...

Of course the two works are not the same. Biruni's view is far more holistic. He tries to understand caste together with the geography, astronomy, mythology, calendar, mathematics, law and everyday life of Indian society. Weber, by contrast, treats the caste system mostly in the context of the effect of religious beliefs on economic behavior and on the development of capitalism. Weber has modern censuses and statistics at his disposal. Biruni's superiority is that he was present in India, learned its language, and spoke directly with the people of the society he studied. Weber did not go to India and did not learn Sanskrit; he based his work on sacred texts, law books, censuses and the Indological literature in Europe.

Biruni's book on India was made accessible to the European scholarly world in the late nineteenth century by the German orientalist Eduard Sachau. When the Arabic edition and the English translation of the work were published in the late 1880s, Weber was in his early twenties. By 1916, when Weber wrote his work on India, the book had been in European academic circulation for about thirty years.

Moreover, Sachau was no ordinary, obscure translator. He worked at the University of Berlin and was one of the leading German orientalists of his day on Eastern languages and cultures. Under these circumstances, is it possible that Weber was in no way aware of Biruni's book?

It is possible; but even that is thought-provoking in itself. For if a researcher is conducting a comprehensive study of India's religious and social structure, places the caste system at the center of his work, yet fails to see one of the most comprehensive classic studies of India published in the academic milieu in which he lives, there is a serious problem of literature here. In such a case the issue is not Weber's drawing on Biruni, but the European academy's not finding a knowledge heritage outside itself worth seeing.

The second possibility is graver: Weber saw Biruni's work, drew on it directly or indirectly, but did not mention his name. For this to be proven, Weber's notes, letters, library records and the Indological sources he used would have to be investigated in detail. To say "Weber plagiarized Biruni" solely on the basis of similarities of subject and expression would be scholarly haste.

But the lack of conclusive evidence so far does not prevent us from asking the question. For ideas do not always have to pass directly from book to book. A piece of knowledge may have passed first into the works of orientalists, from there into the censuses of colonial administration, and then into the concepts of European sociology. In such a circulation the original source becomes invisible; by the time the knowledge reaches the European academy, the name of the Muslim or other Eastern scholar who produced it has been erased from the text. The European Enlightenment heritage is full of such plagiarisms from Muslims or other Eastern scholars.

Of course, here, before asking whether Weber personally read Biruni, we need to look at the extent to which the European Indology and British colonial reports that Weber used were fed by Biruni.

Of course this matter does not require us to deny Weber's contribution to sociology and to discard him. Without doubt Weber reinterpreted the caste system within his own conceptual framework; he related it to status groups, economic ethics, traditionalism and the conditions for the development of capitalism. But developing something theoretically does not mean having discovered a subject first. Acknowledging the priority of the observations Biruni set out about nine centuries earlier does not diminish Weber's value; it only completes the incompletely written pages of the history of social thought.

Western-centric history of science often takes as its starting point not when an idea was first stated, but when it was discovered in Europe. Knowledge produced centuries earlier in another language and civilization enters the history of science under the name of a Western thinker once he restates it. Thus not only people but ideas too are colonized, cut off from their source, put into circulation under a new name, and the civilization they came from is made invisible.

In fact, Orçan's article does not easily declare Weber a "plagiarist"; on the contrary, it calls for re-investigating the sources of the history of science. In Weber's context it presents us with two possibilities:

If Weber did not know Biruni, this shows a serious ignorance and insularity of European social science. If he knew and drew on him but did not cite him, the matter turns into a much graver academic and epistemological problem.

Truth be told, there is also a third and optimistic possibility: that Biruni's ideas mixed into European Indology and reached Weber with the name of their source forgotten. Perhaps this is the strongest possibility. For, as far as we are familiar with it, the colonial order of knowledge does not usually reject wholesale the knowledge it takes from the East; it separates it from its source, renames it and appropriates it.

The Biruni we remembered in Samarkand thus opens the door to questioning anew the history, the sources and the founders of sociology. Of course, at this point we are not satisfied with the question "Can Biruni be considered Weber's precursor?" and we pursue the more disturbing question:

How aware of Biruni was Weber? If he was not aware, why not; if he was aware, why did he never mention his name?

Note: What we can say with confidence historically is that Eduard Sachau published Biruni's work and translated it into English in 1887-1888, and that the book was accessible in Europe about thirty years before Weber's study of India. Still, no document showing that Weber read the work directly has yet been produced. A copy of Sachau's 1888 translation can be viewed on the Internet Archive.