Customer Reviews

Rediscovery of Hakim Omar Khayyam : The Great Persian Mathematician, Astronomer, Scientist, Philosopher, Poet and Eternal Role Model

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How can you describe 246 pages of the most delightful writing in a paragraph? It is impossible. I can only say a few words that describe this wonderful book. It is an ongoing story, when you think all is good something happens. It is one of those books you soar through without noticing how much you have read. It is a happy and sad story, it is a calm and adventurous story, it has a very interesting plot, and I highly recommend it.

Universally Khayyam is known as the book's title describes but there is a clear contradiction between Khayyam's poems and the quality of a Mathematician, scientist, jurisprudent,.... According to the late philosopher Muhammad Taghi Jafari Tabrizi citing from a book from Dr. Taghi Arani ( one of the 52 jailed by Reza Shah) Khayyam was the poet and Khayyami was the Mathematician, scientist,..... Two different individuals with two opposing qualities.

The later book on Khayyam, "The Wine of Wisdom" by Mehi Aminrazavi, is an improvement on this earnest but clumsy and strangely blinkered biography.

The points made are those which are somewhat irritably repeated ad nauseam by so many modern Persian scholars: that Khayyam was a great scientist but only a minor poet, that Westerners do not see the full picture, that the language of the Rubaiyyat is figurative and we should not assume that the wine, women and parties celebrated by Khayyam are anything more than metaphors for a far more austere message -- and so forth.

Above all, the authors attack the FitzGerald translations as bawdy ramblings, scribbled in rancid Victorian juices which never flowed from Khayyam's thousand-year-old but still-translucent grapes. To them, FitzGerald has sullied the purity of a devout Muslim scientist by exalting a few speculative elements in his writing and encouraging us to believe that Khayyam was a fatalist, an agnostic, a sensualist and a sot.

Unhappily, both Aminrazavi and Parsa seem unable to understand the English of the FitzGerald poem, which is complex and vast in scope, and (like the poetry of Tennyson and Wordsworth, FitzGerald's idols) only simple to the simple reader.

Like most English readers who have taken the trouble to read subsequent translations of the Rubaiyyat, both in poetry and prose, and in other languages, I reach the conclusion that FitzGerald's versions (especially the First Edition) have never been improved upon -- and the secondary conclusion that they do not betray the themes and thoughts of Khayyam in any substantive way.

That which is universal in Khayyam's poetry belongs to all the world. Attempts to show us that he was a great scientist as well as a great poet are very welcome. The argument that his quatrains constitute a severe thesis on Islamic theology smacks of the six impossible things that modern Iranians (like the White Queen in "Alice in Wonderland") are called upon to believe every day before breakfast.