The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c13.s6.64

c13.s6.64

Arabic culture was in those days the connecting link between Asia and Europe. Alberuni was thus functioning in Moslem Asia and beyond, indeed, in the entire Christian world in much the same manner as his great Chinese predecessors of the seventh century, Yuan Chwang and Itsing, in China and Japan, so far as the propagation of Hindu culture is concerned. This Moslem mathematician of Khiva is an important landmark and agent in the establishment of Greater India. His services to the *charaiveti*, the dynamic march, of Hindu culture are immense. Not the least paradoxical feature in this evolution consists in the fact that while his masters of the Ghazni House were laying the foundations of a Moslem *rāj* in India his scientific and philosophical researches in Hindu culture were contributing to the Hinduization of the Moslem world and, through the Moslems, of the culture of Europe in exactly the same friendly spirit as had been shown by the Barmak ministry and others during the days "of good Harun Alrashid."