750 to 1000 AD        

Alberuni’s India refers to a close contact between India and the Muslim world. Baghdad was at that time the centre of the Muslim world and Indian culture reached it directly & through Iran. Indian literature was first translated into Persian and then into Arabic. The best eg of this furnished by the fables of Kalila and Dimna based on Panchatantra and probably the most famous treatise was Charaka-samhita was first known to the Muslim court in this way. The intercourse is noticeable during the reign of Al-Mansur and Harun-Al-Rashid. Since Sindh was under the control of Al-Mansur, several Indian embassies came to his court. These embassies were accompanied by Indian scholars who taught the Arabs maths and astronomy amongst other subjects. Al-Biruni tells us that the ‘star-cycles’ as known in the canon of Alfazari and Yakub Ibn Tarik were derived from an Indian who came to Bagdad.

The scholars who came with these embassies brought several works on mathematics including the Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta and the Khandakhadyaka of Brahmagupta. With their help these works were translated into Arabic by Arab scholars and it was thus that the Arabs first became acquainted with the scientific system of astronomy. It was probably through these scholars that Indian numerals were first definitely introduced to the Arabs. It is well known how this system, known as the decimal notation based on the place value of the first nine numbers and the use of zero simplified and revolutionized the Science of Mathematics all over the world. Whether Europe derived this knowledge from the Arabs or from India is a disputed question.

A Syrian scholar who lived in a convent on the Euphrates about the middle of the 7th century a.d. paid the Indians a tribute ‘subtle discoveries in the science of astronomy, discoveries that are more indigenous than those of the Greeks and Babylonians’.

A European scholar said ‘In Science too, the debt of Europe to India has been considerable. There is, in the first place, the great fact that the Indians invented the numerical figures all over the world. The influence which the decimal system of reckoning dependant on those figures has had not only on mathematics but on the progress of civilization can hardly been over-estimated. During the 8th and 9th centuries the Indians became teachers in arithmetic and algebra to the Arabs and through them to the nations of the West’.

During the caliphate of Harun Al-Rashid contact was promoted by the efforts of the ministers of the Barak family. The founder of this family was a Buddhist high priest who had converted to Islam yet retained leanings towards their old culture. They encouraged Indian scholars to visit Baghdad and engaged them to translate Sanskrit books on medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, philosophy etc into Arabic. Arab scholars were sent to India to learn the knowledge first hand.

We learn from several Arab works written between the 10th and 13th century a.d. that several Indian works on medicine, therapeutics were translated into Arabic during 786 to 809 a.d. These include Charka, Susruta, Nidana, and Ashtanga of Vagbhatta.