Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam a Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet (1048-1131) whose quatrains, known in the West through Edward FitzGerald's celebrated Victorian translation, made him one of the most familiar of all Eastern writers. His scientific work was highly regarded in the medieval Islamic world and his verse endures as an expression of sceptical, sensuous reflection on mortality.

Life and Historical Context

Omar Khayyam was born in 1048 in Nishapur, in the province of Khorasan in present-day Iran, and his name suggests a family connection with the craft of tent-making. He received an excellent education in the mathematical and philosophical sciences of his day, and he is placed by tradition in the intellectual circle of the Seljuk era. He lived in a turbulent age, between the decline of older dynasties and the rise of the Seljuk Turks, a world of courts, patronage and shifting alliances.

According to later accounts he spent much of his working life at the court of Malik-Shah, where he was employed among the learned men supported by the vizier Nizam al-Mulk. He travelled for study and work, and he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, but the greater part of his life was passed in Nishapur and the eastern cities of Persia. He died in 1131, and the legends that gathered around him, of an eternally youthful poet and a sharp-tongued doubter, reflect his reputation as much as the sober historical record.

Mathematics and the Sciences

Khayyam was one of the outstanding mathematicians of the medieval Islamic world. In his Algebra he classified and solved cubic equations by means of geometry, using the intersection of conic sections, and he made important contributions to the theory of equations that paved the way for later algebraic advances in the region and in Europe. He also worked on the problem of parallel lines and on the foundations of geometry, treating questions that would occupy mathematicians for centuries afterward.

His commentary on the difficulties of Euclid's elements examined the assumptions underlying classical geometry, and some historians see in these inquiries a distant anticipation of the methods of non-Euclidean geometry. As an astronomer he took part in the reform of the calendar under the patronage of Malik-Shah, producing observations and calculations that yielded a solar calendar of remarkable accuracy, in some respects comparable to the Gregorian reform introduced five centuries later. He also wrote on music theory and on physical questions of his day.

The Quatrains

Khayyam is best known in the West as the author of the Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains or four-line poems. Whether all the poems attributed to him are genuinely his is disputed, for the number of verses ascribed to him grew enormously over the centuries, and many are likely to be the work of later poets who used his name. The genuine quatrains address themes of transience, pleasure and doubt, and their tone moves between irony and tenderness, between complaint and acceptance.

They urge the reader to drink wine, to seize the passing moment and to question the promises of piety and the arguments of the theologians, and they dwell on the inevitability of death and the silence of the dead. The poems are epigrammatic and concise, and their Persian is elegant and direct. Though they express attitudes that sat within established traditions of Persian literature, their concentration on the fragility of life and the futility of metaphysical certainty gave them a distinctive voice that later readers found haunting and modern.

FitzGerald and the Western Image

Omar Khayyam became famous in the English-speaking world through Edward FitzGerald's translation, first published anonymously in 1859. FitzGerald freely rearranged and adapted the quatrains into a single, coherent poem, and his version so transformed the material that it is often considered a work of English literature in its own right. FitzGerald's Rubaiyat was initially ignored, but it found admirers among the Pre-Raphaelites and the Victorian reading public, and it became one of the best-selling poems of the nineteenth century.

Its images, the loaf of bread, the jug of wine, the book of verses beneath the bough, entered common English speech and imagination. The success of that translation shaped the Western idea of Khayyam as a hedonistic freethinker and a melancholy epicurean, an image that does not entirely match the wandering mystic or devout scientist whom some Iranian readers have claimed. This friction between Persian scholarship and English literary taste has made him a striking case study in cross-cultural reception.

Reputation and Influence

In Iran Khayyam is honoured chiefly as a mathematician and astronomer, and his poetry, though beloved, has often been read with suspicion by religious authorities. Modern Iranian scholars have worked to separate the authentic quatrains from the mass of later attributions and to present him within the full context of Islamic science and philosophy. In the West his influence has been unusually broad for a medieval Eastern writer, and FitzGerald's verses inspired generations of writers, artists and translators.

The Rubaiyat was illustrated, quoted, parodied and adapted in countless forms, and its verses appear on buildings, in anthologies and in the popular imagination as an emblem of carpe diem. He thus occupies two distinct places in world culture at once: a serious contributor to the mathematics and astronomy of medieval Islam, and, through a Victorian translation, a poet of pleasure and doubt whose quatrains have been read by millions who know nothing of Persian. Both images continue to shape his extraordinary afterlife.

See also

• Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Edward FitzGerald
• Persian literature
• Islamic mathematics