Persian Literature – Part Three: Omar Khayyam, by Farhang Jahanpour

By Farhang Jahanpour

Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)

Omar Khayyam was a polymath, scientist, astronomer, philosopher and poet. Whereas he is universally known as one of Islam’s greatest scientists and mathematicians, especially for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations and for devising a calendar that proved to be a more accurate computation of time than the Gregorian calendar proposed five centuries later by Pope Gregory XIII, here we will mainly deal with his poetry and philosophy.

It should be added that Omar Khayyam was not a professional poet in the sense that he was not a court poet and did not live by his poetry. Certainly, many of the hundreds of quatrains attributed to him in some later collections were imitations and were not written by him, but there is no doubt that he was the author of many of the older quatrains.

The oldest manuscript of his collected Quatrains, kept in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which was copied in 856/1460 and which served as the source for Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat, has 158 Ruba’is. Later collections contain many more quatrains. A manuscript in Lucknow, published in 1794, contains as many as 770 Ruba’is, presumably many of which are spurious.

This has led some scholars to doubt the authenticity of any of the quatrains as poems written by Khayyam. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that many of the quatrains quoted in old manuscripts or literary and historical works were indeed composed by Khayyam. It has been suggested that Khayyam read some of the quatrains that he had composed at the end of his lectures on philosophical or scientific topics in order to illustrate or sum up the points that he was making.

The earliest reference to him as a poet is found in his biography, written by Muhammad ibn Hamed Isfahani (born 1125), written only 43 years after Omar’s death. There are references to his poetry by other medieval historians, such as Shahrzuri (1201) and Al-Qifti (1255). There are also many quotations from Omar in early works of biography or early anthologies. These include works of Razi (ca. 1160-1210), Juvayni (ca. 1226–1283), and Jajarmi (died 1287).

Edward FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) have been described as one of the most successful and the most popular translations of poetry from any language. There have been numerous translations of his short, pithy quatrains, but almost every decade, some new translations come to the market.[1]

In less than a century after its publication in England, there were at least 32 translations into English, 16 into French, 12 into German, 11 into Urdu, eight into Arabic, five into Italian, four into Turkish, four into Russian, as well as into Danish, Swedish, Spanish and many other languages. It proved to be one of the most popular translations of all time. At the height of its popularity, the Rubaiyat went through 60 editions in England and 80 editions in the United States in two decades, and by 1925, Fitzgerald’s translation went through 139 new editions in England. The Rubaiyat has remained popular to the present time.

The introduction of Omar Khayyam’s poetry to the West gave rise to “The Cult of the Rubaiyat”, especially in Great Britain and the United States. As early as 1892, some of his admirers founded the Omar Khayyam Club of London, which was soon followed in the United States. The Club published many books on Khayyam, and it became a gathering place for many famous scholars, literary men and artists, such as Edward Heron-Allen, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley and W. B. Yeats, to name but a few.

Tennyson had no doubts about the literary merits of the Rubaiyat and of FitzGerald’s translation, which he praised as

… golden Eastern lay

Than which I know no version done

In English more divinely well;

A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it, that large infidel

Your Omar; and your Omar drew

Full-handed plaudits from our best

In modern letters…[2]

In addition to the literary value and beauty of the Rubaiyat, it is their message of deep philosophical thinking and overt agnosticism that has no precedent up to the time when they were composed over 900 years ago.

Scholars have differed in their interpretations of Omar Khayyam. Some scholars, such as Arthur Christensen, Richard N. Frye, E. D. Ross and E.H. Whinfield, have described his philosophical attitude as akin to nihilism, pessimism, fatalism or Epicureanism. The great scholar of Persian literature, Jan Rypka, has even described him as an atheist. Others, such as Idries Shah, Omar Ali Shah and Robert Graves, have implausibly interpreted his poems as expressions of Sufi ideas.

I believe that Robert FitzGerald, who stresses Omar Khayyam’s religious scepticism, comes closer to reality, though Khayyam’s original Persian quatrains have a more philosophical tone that is sometimes lost in FitzGerald’s Epicurean version. In his preface to his translation of the Rubaiyat, FitzGerald denied any divine allegory in Khayyam’s poems. He wrote: “His wine is the veritable Juice of the Grape: his Tavern, where it was to be had: his Saki the Flesh and Blood that poured it out for him.”[3]

While this interpretation of Khayyam’s poems is closer to reality than ascribing mystical or metaphysical meanings to them, it ignores the much deeper philosophical dimension of the original poems. Khayyam’s references to wine and drinking are not an encouragement to getting drunk and having a good time, but point to a desire to go beyond religious and philosophical certitude and to acquire a feeling of bewilderment and being impressed by the complexity of the universe. It is also a rejection of religious dogmatism that sees religion as merely the observance of dietary rules and regulations and the blind observance of certain rituals.

Like any freethinking philosopher, Khayyam asks many unanswered questions for which religion does not seem to have an answer:

This circle within which we come and go

Has neither origin nor final end.

Will no one ever tell us truthfully

Whence we have come, or whither do we go?

or

Our elements were merged at His command;

Why then did He disperse them once again?

For if the blend was good, why break it up?

If it was bad, whose was the fault but His?

There is a tendency among some scholars to see all Persian poets as mystics, but this is a very narrow and restricted view of Persian literature. While the poems of Sana’i, Attar and Rumi are clearly based on mystical interpretations of Islam, the works of Sa’di should more correctly be seen as ethical and didactic, those of Ferdowsi as epic, the poems of Hafiz as lyrical, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as the products of a deep philosophical mind, which questions all religious beliefs without necessarily proposing an alternative.

In modern terminology, Khayyam can be most accurately described as an agnostic. None of his quatrains remotely confirms the existence of God or the afterlife. As the leading Iranian novelist Sadeq Hedayat stated: “While Khayyam believes in the transmutation and transformation of the human body, he does not believe in a separate soul; if we are lucky, our bodily particles would be used in the making of a jug of wine.”[4]

Khayyam rejects Islamic fatalism or the belief that our destiny is decided by heavenly bodies, and calls on us to take responsibility for our actions and take our destiny into our own hands:

The good and bad that are in human nature,
the joy and grief that are in fate and destiny–
do not attribute them to the movement of heavenly bodies;
for, according to the path of science, the stars are a thousand times
more helpless than you.

Khayyam was critical of his contemporaries, who were too afraid of expressing the truth as they saw it. In a revealing note, he wrote:

“We are living in such a time when the people of learning are rejected, and only a few of them are left who are capable of engaging in discussion and scientific research. Our philosophers spend all their time mixing the truth with falsehood, and are interested in nothing but outward show. Such little learning that they have, they spend on material ends. When they see a man sincere and unremitting in his search for the truth, one who will have nothing to do with falsehood and pretence, they mock and despise him.” [5]

To see how far ahead of his time he was and how revolutionary these verses were even in 19th-century Britain, it is enough to look at the reaction of FitzGerald’s teacher, Professor Edward B. Cowell, who first introduced him to a Persian copy of the Rubaiyat. Right to the end of his life, Cowell felt sorry for having introduced Fitzgerald to Omar Khayyam’s sacrilegious poems. After Fitzgerald’s death, in a letter to Edward Heron-Allen, Cowell wrote: “I unwittingly incurred a grave responsibility when I introduced his poems to my old friend in 1856. I admire Omar as I admire Lucretius, but I cannot take him as a guide. In these grave matters, I prefer to go to Nazareth, not to Naishapur.”[6]

Khayyam was centuries ahead of his time in boldly questioning many religious beliefs and expressing the complexity and profundity of the universe. His cynicism and philosophical outlook also form a part of the Iranian psyche, alongside Ferdowsi’s heroic, Rumi’s mystical, Sa’di’s ethical or Hafiz’s lyrical outlook.

---

[1] The latest is by my scholarly friend Professor Juan Cole, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from Persian (Tauris, 2020).

[2] Tennyson, A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Routledge, 1989), p. 632.

[3] D. Schenker, Fugitive Articulation: An Introduction to “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam”. Victorian Poetry, 19(1), 49-64.

[4] Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The life and literature of an Iranian writer (I.B. Tauris, London, 1991), p. 138.

[5] Quoted in Ali Dashti, In Search of Omar Khayyam, translated by L. P. Elwell-Sutton (Routledge, 1971), p. 78

[6] Quoted by John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History (Caravan Books, Delmar, New York, 1977), p. 171.