Omar Khayyam - 3

Views on religion

Despite strong Islamic training, there have been widely divergent views on Khayyam. According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr no other Iranian writer/scholar is viewed in such extremely differing ways. At one end of the spectrum there are night clubs named after Khayyam and he is seen as an agnostic hedonist. On the other end of the spectrum, he is seen as a mystical Sufi poet influenced platonic traditions.

Robertson (1914) believes that that Omar Khayyam himself was undevout and had no sympathy with popular religion, but the verse: "Enjoy wine and women and don't be afraid, God has compassion," suggests that he wasn't an atheist. He further believes that it is almost certain that Khayyam objected to the notion that every particular event and phenomenon was the result of divine intervention. Nor did he believe in an afterlife with a Judgment Day or rewards and punishments. Instead, he supported the view that laws of nature explained all phenomena of observed life. One hostile orthodox account of him shows him as "versed in all the wisdom of the Greeks" and as insistent that studying science on Greek lines is necessary. Roberston (1914) further opines that Khayyam came into conflict with religious officials several times, and had to explain his views on Islam on multiple occasions; there is even one story about a treacherous pupil who tried to bring him into public odium. The contemporary Ibn al Kifti wrote that Omar Khayyam "performed pilgrimages not from piety but from fear" of his contemporaries who divined his unbelief.

Although a great number of quatrains erroneously attributed to Khayyam manifest a more colorful irreligiousness and hedonism, nevertheless, the number of his original quatrains that advocate laws of nature and deny the idea of resurrection and eternal life readily outweigh others that express the slightest devotion or praise to God or Islamic beliefs. The following two quatrains are representative of numerous others that serve to reject many tenets of Islamic dogma:

O cleric, we are more active than you,
Even so drunk, we are more attentive than you,
You drink the blood of men, we drink the blood of grapes [wine],
Be fair, which one of us is more bloodthirsty?

خيام اگر ز باده مستى خوش باش
با ماه رخى اگر نشستى خوش باش
چون عاقبت كار جهان نيستى است
انگار كه نيستى، چو هستى خوش باش

Which translates in Fitzgerald’s work as?

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in — Yes —
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be — Nothing — Thou shalt not be less.

A more literal translation could read:

If with wine you are drunk be happy,
If seated with a moon-faced (beautiful), be happy,
Since the end purpose of the universe is nothing-ness;
Hence picture your nothing-ness, then while you are, be happy!

آنانكه ز پيش رفتهاند اى ساقى
درخاك غرور خفتهاند اى ساقى
رو باده خور و حقيقت از من بشنو
باد است هرآنچه گفتهاند اى ساقى

which Fitzgerald has boldly interpreted as:

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly — are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

A literal translation, in an ironic echo of "all is vanity", could read:

Those who have gone forth, thou cup-bearer,
Have fallen upon the dust of pride, thou cup-bearer,
Drink wine and hear from me the truth:
(Hot) air is all that they have said, thou cup-bearer.

But some specialists, like Seyyed Hossein Nasr who looks at the available philosophical works of Omar Khayyam, maintain that it is really reductive to just look at the poems (which are sometimes doubtful) to establish his personal views about God or religion; in fact, he even wrote a treatise entitled "al-Khutbat al-gharrå˘" (The Splendid Sermon) on the praise of God, where he holds orthodox views, agreeing with Avicenna on Divine Unity. In fact, this treatise is not an exception, and S.H. Nasr gives an example where he identified himself as a Sufi, after criticizing different methods of knowing God, preferring the intuition over the rational (opting for the so-called "kashf", or unveiling, method):

"... Fourth, the Sufis, who do not seek knowledge by ratiocination or discursive thinking, but by purgation of their inner being and the purifying of their dispositions. They cleanse the rational soul of the impurities of nature and bodily form, until it becomes pure substance. When it then comes face to face with the spiritual world, the forms of that world become truly reflected in it, without any doubt or ambiguity.

This is the best of all ways, because it is known to the servant of God that there is no reflection better than the Divine Presence and in that state there are no obstacles or veils in between. Whatever man lacks is due to the impurity of his nature. If the veil be lifted and the screen and obstacle removed, the truth of things as they are will become manifest and known. And the Master of creatures [the Prophet Muhammad]—upon whom be peace—indicated this when he said: “Truly, during the days of your existence, inspirations come from God. Do you not want to follow them?” Tell unto reasoners that, for the lovers of God [gnostics], intuition is guide, not discursive thought."
—‘Umar Khayyam

The same author goes on by giving other philosophical writings which are totally compatible with the religion of Islam, as the "al-Risålah fil-wujud" (Treatise on Being), written in Arabic, which begin with Quranic verses and asserting that all things come from God, and there is an order in these things. In another work, "Risålah jawåban li-thalåth maså˘il" (Treatise of Response to Three Questions), he gives a response to question on, for instance, the becoming of the soul post-mortem. S.H. Nasr even gives some poetry where he is perfectly in favor of Islamic orthodoxy, but also expressing mystical views (God's goodness, the ephemerical state of this life, ...):

Thou hast said that Thou wilt torment me,
But I shall fear not such a warning.
For where Thou art, there can be no torment,
And where Thou art not, how can such a place exist?

The rotating wheel of heaven within which we wonder,
Is an imaginal lamp of which we have knowledge by similitude.
The sun is the candle and the world the lamp,
We are like forms revolving within it.

A drop of water falls in an ocean wide,
A grain of dust becomes with earth allied;
What doth thy coming, going here denote?
A fly appeared a while, then invisible he became.

Giving some reasons of the misunderstanding about Omar Khayyam in the West, but also elsewhere, S.H. Nasr concludes by saying that if a correct study of the authentical Rubaiyat is done, but along with the philosophical works, or even the spiritual biography entitled Sayr wa sulak (Spiritual Wayfaring), we can no longer view the man as a simple hedonistic wine-lover, or even an early skeptic, but, by looking at the entire man, a profound mystical thinker and scientist whose works are more important than some doubtful verses.

Philosopher

Khayyam himself rejects to be associated with the title falsafi- (lit. philosopher) in the sense of Aristotelian one and stressed he wishes "to know who I am". In the context of philosophers he was labeled by some of his contemporaries as "detached from divine blessings".

However it is now established that Khayyam taught for decades the philosophy of Aviccena, especially "the Book of Healing", in his home town Nishapur, till his death. In an incident he had been requested to comment on a disagreement between Aviccena and a philosopher called Abu'l-Barakat (known also as Nathanel) who had criticized Aviccena strongly. Khayyam is said to have answered "[he] does not even understand the sense of the words of Avicenna, how can he oppose what he does not know?"

Khayyam the philosopher could be understood from two rather distinct sources. One is through his Rubaiyat and the other through his own works in light of the intellectual and social conditions of his time. The latter could be informed by the evaluations of Khayyam’s works by scholars and philosophers such as Bayhaqi, Nezami Aruzi, and Zamakhshari and also Sufi poets and writers Attar Nishapuri and Najmeddin Razi.

As a mathematician, Khayyam has made fundamental contributions to the Philosophy of mathematics especially in the context of Persian Mathematics and Persian philosophy with which most of the other Persian scientists and philosophers such as Avicenna, Biruni, and Tusi are associated. There are at least three basic mathematical ideas of strong philosophical dimensions that can be associated with Khayyam.

1. Mathematical order: From where does this order issue, and why does it correspond to the world of nature? His answer is in one of his philosophical "treatises on being". Khayyam’s answer is that "the Divine Origin of all existence not only emanates wojud or being, by virtue of which all things gain reality, but It is also the source of order that is inseparable from the very act of existence."

2. The significance of postulates (i.e. axiom) in geometry and the necessity for the mathematician to rely upon philosophy and hence the importance of the relation of any particular science to prime philosophy. This is the philosophical background to Khayyam's total rejection of any attempt to "prove" the parallel postulate and in turn his refusal to bring motion into the attempt to prove this postulate as had Ibn al-Haytham because Khayyam associated motion with the world of matter and wanted to keep it away from the purely intelligible and immaterial world of geometry.

3. Clear distinction made by Khayyam, on the basis of the work of earlier Persian philosophers such as Avicenna, between natural bodies and mathematical bodies. The first is defined as a body that is in the category of substance and that stands by itself, and hence a subject of natural sciences, while the second, also called “volume”, is of the category of accidents (attributes) that do not subsist by themselves in the external world and hence is the concern of mathematics. Khayyam was very careful to respect the boundaries of each discipline and criticized Ibn al-Haytham in his proof of the parallel postulate precisely because he had broken this rule and had brought a subject belonging to natural philosophy, that is, motion, which belongs to natural bodies, into the domain of geometry, which deals with mathematical bodies.