• DOI:10.1080/00210862.2010.495592
• Corpus ID: 162241136

Omar Khayyam: Poet, Rebel, Astronomer

@article{Aminrazavi2010OmarKP,
  title={Omar Khayyam: Poet, Rebel, Astronomer},
  author={Mehdi Amin Razavi Aminrazavi},
  journal={Iranian Studies},
  year={2010},
  volume={43},
  pages={569 - 571}
}

• M. Aminrazavi
• Published 10 August 2010
• Art
• Iranian Studies

As a life-long admirer of Omar Khayyam, who spent many years unearthing evidence concerning his life and thought, the result of which was my book, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam, I was delighted to see the publication of yet another work on Omar Khayyam’s life and contributions. I was further intrigued by the book’s bold claim to be “the most accurate account ever told of Khayyam’s life” (p. ix). I was deeply disappointed to discover that in a blend of few facts and much fiction, Teimourian transforms Khayyam into a Rostam, the Persian Hercules and the symbol of Iranian nationalism who single-handedly attempted to fight the evil Arabs, Turks, and Muslims as well as any other impurities who threatened to pollute the Persian culture. The necessity of furthering this characterization turns Omar Khayyam into a closet Zoroastrian, while his alleged teacher, Bahmanyer, the author of a major work on Islamic philosophy entitled Al-Tahsil, becomes a “proud Zorastrian mathematician” (p. 20), a claim with absolutely no textual evidence to support it. The argument that is proposed here is simple and dualistic: pre-Islamic Zoroastrian Persia was a utopia completely corrupted by the insidious influence of the Arabs. The author’s world is divided into the duality of good Persians and evil Arabs; the great Zorastrian religion and the evil Islam. “We may speculate endlessly,” the author claims “on what glories Iran might have achieved if its intellectual development had not been interrupted by Islam” (p. 18). The fact that Muslims became translators and transmitters of Greek philosophy and science and excelled in scientific discoveries throughout the Middle Ages falls by the wayside. From a factual point of view, the book is riddled with inaccuracies: Khayyam’s father, a poor tent maker (incidentally, Khayyam means tent maker) morphs into a wealthy physician; his teachers and associates become Zoroastrians; and he himself is portrayed as a wealthy landowner. Not only are the inaccuracies willful and plentiful, the form of the book is constantly disrupted by the inclusion of historically irrelevant materials. The author discusses the inner dynamics of the Crab Nebula for eight or nine pages and discusses Roman war in Marv, Marco Polo, Michael Psellus, and Romanus IV among others, creating a pattern which continues throughout the work. The book contains about fifty pages of European history which could easily have been omitted with no consequence to Omar Khayyam. There have been exquisite fictional works based on the life of Omar Khayyam, such as Amin Maalouf’s Samarkhand, but unlike Teimourian, these authors make it clear that their intention is to write a work of literature. Like a hungry guest who goes to a feast waiting for the main dish that never arrives, this reader wondered where the book was going. The chapters entitled “The Libraries of