The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian 9780755600526, 9780755600519, 9780755600533, 9780755600557

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
Rubáiyát
Epilogue: Persian Literature and the Rubáiyát
New Persian
Mongols
The Mongol Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
The Ilkhanid underworld
Sufism and secularism
Persian humanism
Lonely hearts and sexuality
Khayyam as frame author
The Yerbudaki manuscript
NOTES
INDEX

Citation preview

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

i

ii

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM A New Translation from the Persian

based on the edition of Mahmud Yerbudaki with a historical epilogue by

Juan Cole

iii

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Juan Cole 2020 Juan Cole has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Vector © LongQuattro/iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-0-7556-0052-6 978-0-7556-0051-9 978-0-7556-0055-7 978-0-7556-0054-0

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction Rubáiyát

1

19

Epilogue: Persian Literature and the Rubáiyát

71

Notes 149 Index 161

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve been thinking about carrying out this translation for a long time. I bought a Persian collection of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in 1976 during a student visit to Tehran, and it struck me then that the originals still had things to say to a contemporary audience, and that some of the verses were more interesting, and more challenging, than its most celebrated translator, Edward FitzGerald, allowed. Since then I have accumulated many debts. Of course, I am most indebted of all to Iradj Bagherzade, my publisher, for believing in the project, and for his canny editorial suggestions, as well as all the help of editor Lizzy Collier. The encouragement of my agent, Brettne Bloom, has been crucial. In March of 2013, I held a Fellowship in Iranian Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris for this project and I proffer thanks to my colleagues in Paris, including Fabrizio Speciale and Eve Feuillebois at the Sorbonne and Denis Hermann at CRNS, for their intellectual hospitality and friendship. I am also grateful to Konrad Ng and the staff of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Arts in Honolulu for a residency in December of 2016. I wish to honor the memory of the late Amin Banani, with whom I studied classical Persian literature at UCLA (though

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

vii

unfortunately he did not live to react to this translation). I experimented with some translations of the Omarian poetry at my blog, Informed Comment, and the enthusiastic response of readers gave me the confidence to go forward. To Jonathan Freedman and Khaled Mattawa goes my gratitude for publishing some of my early renderings in The Michigan Quarterly Review, and so encouraging me in this project. Anthony A. Lee read my draft translation and made many helpful suggestions and Jenna Krajeski, former poetry editor at The Nation, kindly cheered me on. Every poet needs a muse, and my beloved wife, Shahin, is mine. The system of transliteration used here for Arabic and Persian is that of the US Library of Congress. This new translation benefited from the work of the many, mainly British, scholars who puzzled over the Rubáiyát over the past century and a half and made great strides in our interpretation of them. I grew up on the FitzGerald version, and while I have struck out on my own path, it was perhaps impossible for me entirely to escape the influence of the master. E. H. Whinfield carried out a translation of over 500 poems in the Khayyami tradition, and I benefited from his erudition.1 Edward Heron-Allen deserves recognition for his nineteenth-century facsimile edition of the Bodleian manuscript and his own literal rendering and extensive notes.2 A. J. Arberry explored FitzGerald’s sources and corrected some

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

misreadings by earlier scholars.3 The work of Peter Avery, John Bowen, L. P. Elwell-Sutton, and Ali Dashti has also illuminated many dark corners of these verses and their origins. Although Robert Graves’s own retranslation was deeply flawed for reasons unrelated to his talents as a writer, he was a great poet and I benefited from some of his insights.4 Juan Cole Ann Arbor, MI

Introduction

A loose 1859 rendering by the Victorian gentleman scholar Edward FitzGerald (1810–83) made the Persian quatrains or “Rubáiyát” attributed to the Iranian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) of Nishapur worldfamous.1 FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát was initially discovered by poets and artists of the pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Algernon Swinburne, and William Morris, and it deeply influenced their work in the 1860s and after. The slight book thereafter took by storm a prudish Victorian world unaccustomed to its frank sensuality, celebration of wine, lovers and song, doubts about the afterlife, and agnosticism or even atheism. The message of the poems, both in the sometimes coy original Persian and in FitzGerald’s less circumspect interpretation, is that life has no obvious meaning and that it is heartbreakingly short. Death is near and we might not live to exhale the breath we just took in. 1

2

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

The afterlife is a fairytale for children. The hard, revolving turquoise sky is gradually crushing all our friends, inexorably, as though it were the mortar and the earth its pestle. The only way to get past this existential unfairness is to enjoy life, to love someone, and to get intimate with good wine. On the other hand, there is no reason to be mean-spirited to other people. Persian literature specialists for the most part have concluded that Omar Khayyam did not write this poetry. The origins of the Persian quatrain (ruba‘i) are controversial. The word ruba‘i derives from the Arabic word for “four.” This genre of Persian verse has four lines to a stanza (two verses with each consisting of two hemistiches). Most historians see it as a development of the 900s CE and as part of a revival of Persian literature centuries after the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran in the 600s CE. The poems attributed to Khayyam for the most part were actually composed by many hands in the 1200s through 1400s, during and after the Mongol era, and so formed contributions to a wellestablished genre. The skeptical find it suspicious that for over a century after his death Khayyam was not known as a Persian poet, even to those who knew him and wrote about him. If he engaged in scandalous versifying in Persian, how likely is it that none of Khayyam’s acquaintances or earliest biographers should have been aware of it? Dick Davis, one of the foremost scholars of Persian literature, concluded: “For what it is worth, and I admit it is not worth much because everything that can be said about

INTRODUCTION

3

the attribution of these poems is speculative, I rather doubt that the historical Khayyam wrote poems in Persian at all.”2 There is also a problem of voice. The poems are sometimes authored by persons of a distinctly lower social class than Khayyam. The actual Khayyam was born and educated in Nishapur in eastern Iran, showing a special interest in mathematics, science, and astronomy. He then went to Samarqand, where he furthered his mathematical studies and authored a treatise on ways to solve algebra problems through geometry. Such was his growing renown that the Seljuk sultan, Malik-Shah, invited him to serve as court astronomer in Isfahan. Khayyam there critiqued Euclid and also helped create a new and more accurate calendar, adopted by the court. In 1092 MalikShah died, and Khayyam fell out with his widow, such that he felt it wise to go off on pilgrimage to Mecca. When one of MalikShah’s sons, Ahmad Sanjar, came to the throne in 1118 and switched the capital to Merv in the east, Khayyam was recalled to service for a while and turned to further researches in mathematics. He spent his last days in his birthplace, Nishapur. While a court astronomer for the Seljuk empire at Isfahan and then Merv, Khayyam was said to be paid the princely sum of 10,000 dinars a year. The Rubáiyát later attributed to the astronomer condemn the haughtiness and opulence of the elite. They depict a world of hard drinking, of whoring and gaming, and association with lower-class tavern-goers that was miles

4

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

away from the astronomer’s observatory or the sumptuous Seljuk palaces. The poetry is often set among rogues and rascals in rundown establishments. FitzGerald’s polite diction hid the poetry’s grittiness and the rough language the men use for one another (rind or rapscallion/lush; divanih or crazy). What we now call “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam” is an anthology of verse that appeared over centuries, initially anonymously or attributed for the most part to other authors. The diversity of the original poets represented in the corpus that grew up is apparent in their differing vocabulary and even values. Western writers on this verse have long been confused that some of the poems seem cynical while others are tinged by the piety of Sufi mysticism. The simplicity of the four-line quatrain makes the stylistic variations less important than they would be in longer odes. It should not matter to our enjoyment of this magnificent poetry that it was produced by a crowd of artisans, world-weary notables, saucy women, and disreputable wandering Sufi mystics over the centuries. The practice of attributing verses to a supposed author after his death was common in the medieval Middle East. Anthologists also falsely ascribed pious Persian quatrains to the Sufi mystic Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr (967–1049), from what is now Turkmenistan in modern Iran’s northeast. Yet an early biographer of Abu Sa‘id flatly said he wrote no verse.3 Many of the “authors” of medieval Iran were no such thing. Their names were deployed

INTRODUCTION

5

by editors and copyists to give authority to and to organize and classify certain kinds of poetry, whether predominantly mystical or primarily secular. Likewise, many bards in various cities over hundreds of years composed the tales comprising the Thousand and One Nights, but they attributed them to a “frame author,” Scheherazade. Khayyam was adopted as such a frame author by subsequent rakish poets, who employed a common voice and referred to themselves in the quatrains as “Khayyam.” Why did libertine poets publish their work under Khayyam’s name in particular? Scientists were stereotyped as skeptics and courtiers as libertines, so it may have amused the poets to use him as the frame author for verse they viewed as a little dangerous. The poetry was likely ascribed to the elite scientist Khayyam not because he frequented run-down establishments on the edge of town in pursuit of a drink, but because the poetry is often skeptical of religious verities, and scientists, too, were known to question the latter. One of the poems attributed to Khayyam here was also ascribed to the medieval philosopher and medical genius, Avicenna (d. 1037), and he probably did not write it, either. Moreover, putting one’s own name on unorthodox ideas and calls to hedonism was unwise in many times and places in the medieval Muslim world. Just as we can continue to read the Thousand and One Nights with pleasure even though we know it is a miscellany of folk literature, the same thing is true of the Rubáiyát.

6

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Every generation deserves new renderings of the classics. FitzGerald’s verses are often lovely and memorable, and are justly celebrated. One argument for a new translation, however, is that FitzGerald did not so much translate as improvise based on the original, or, rather, originals. Further, the Victorian style, with its archaic language and euphemisms, has drawbacks for conveying the Rubáiyát.4 The Persian poems attributed to Khayyam are in a simple, direct, irreverent, and sometimes coarse language. While to his own mind he was attempting to make the poetry accessible to his contemporaries, many of the words used by FitzGerald have a distancing effect, appealing to the exotic or the ancient, whereas the original verses are marked by immediacy. This book is not an academic work of technical translation, since previous scholars have carried out that task.5 I have nevertheless tried to stay as close to the original as possible, while putting the verse into contemporary idiomatic English. This endeavor necessarily involved some compromises. All translation moves away from the original to some extent, of course, as is recognized by the Italian proverb, traduttore traditore—the translator is a traitor. It is now largely forgotten that FitzGerald’s reimagining of the Rubáiyát was the most popular book of poetry in the Englishspeaking world from the late nineteenth century into the era of the Cold War, the Beatles, and Vietnam. It is a commonplace that the Japanese haiku had a powerful impact on English-language

INTRODUCTION

7

poetry and culture.6 That the Persian quatrain was even more influential in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, however, has gradually dropped out of public consciousness.7 Nevertheless, most modern literary figures of note felt the poem’s influence, and many became deeply attached to it as an aid to self-secularization in a world that was still then deeply Christian. At the level of high culture, some of the book’s popularity was driven in the 1890s by the establishment of Omar Khayyam clubs in Britain and the United States, whose elite members were insatiable in seeking out Khayyam and FitzGerald materials and memorabilia, and who shared in the fantasy world created by the poem. Clement K. Shorter, a participant, wrote of the London club: There can be no doubt, however, that a new vitality was given to the interest in FitzGerald’s great poem by the foundation of the Omar Khayyám Club on October 13, 1892, when twelve friends sat down to their first dinner together and called it into being. These friends included Mr. Justin Huntly McCarthy, Mr. William Simpson, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, Mr. William Watson, and Mr. Arthur Hacker, A.R.A., who designed a menu for the occasion. A dinner that took place in January of the following year had a very much larger attendance, for there were present Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. William Heinemann, Mr. Bernard

8

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Quaritch, and Mr. Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A. From that day to this the club has grown in numbers, until it has included among its members and guests nearly every man of distinction in the literary life of England, and numbers of men eminent in the public life of the country.8 Members later included Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne, William Holman Hunt, and Thomas Hardy. Member Edward Clodd, a banker and popularizer of anthropology, called himself a “humble disciple” of Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, both of whom he knew, and promoted what he called rationalistic philosophy.9 Not all club members were as militantly irreligious as Clodd, but neither was he an outlier. Club attendees displayed another sort of reverence, sometimes visiting the resting-place of Edward FitzGerald in Woodbridge. There, Clodd had arranged for a rose bush grown from hips collected in Nishapur at the alleged tomb of Khayyam himself to be transplanted at the head of FitzGerald’s grave.10 Such rituals and weaving of real-world connections between the poets were ways of participating in the world of the Rubáiyát. These meetings might be dismissed as merely a form of socializing that no one took very seriously. There is evidence, however, that for some of the members, the poem became a source of deep meaning. Thomas Hardy, the novelist and poet, was an ex-evangelical who had become an unbeliever. The author

INTRODUCTION

9

of Far from the Madding Crowd held that the “Cause of things” must be unmoral: neither moral nor immoral. On his deathbed in 1928, Hardy asked his wife Florence to read him a stanza from the Rubáiyát: Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And who with Eden didst devise the Snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give – and take! Nothing better encapsulated the idea of the “unmorality” of the “Cause of things” than the Rubáiyát.11 Arthur Conan Doyle puzzled his readers in 1892 by putting Omarian sentiments in the mouth of his famous detective: What is the meaning of it, Watson? . . . What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is so far from an answer as ever.12 Given Holmes’s materialism, readers were astounded by this departure into metaphysics. But in the context of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, scientistic materialism and existential despair were twins. Likewise, Conan Doyle’s conviction that “we have much to hope from the flowers” because the rose’s “smell and

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10

colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it” is Omarian, seeing in the beauties of nature signs of a munificent, even if godless universe.13 That the ally of these Victorians in this quest for a non-religious understanding of the world should have been a medieval Iranian Muslim was an irony not lost on most of them. In FitzGerald’s version, these poems became a literary sensation over decades that inspired fanatically devoted reading groups. By 1900 a new edition was coming out virtually daily. They were studied and memorized by millions at the turn of the twentieth century and for decades after, and became a part of popular culture in Europe and the Americas—inspiring everything from modern dance and stage performances to films to Omar Khayyam-branded perfume and cigarettes. The poetry provided the theme of the 1905 Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Mark Twain admitted: “No poem had given me so much pleasure before.” He later wrote: “it is the only poem I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for 28 years.”14 Novelists of the Victorian era, such as Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper (who jointly wrote under the pen name Michael Field), also felt their influence. The quatrains had a profound impact on poetic modernism (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost).15 W. B. Yeats addressed the London Omar Khayyam Club, of which Thomas Hardy was a prominent member. They also worked their magic on playwrights (Theodore Dreiser,

INTRODUCTION

11

Eugene O’Neill) and on pioneering writers of High Fantasy (Robert E. Howard, in addition to William Morris). The father of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges translated them into Spanish and they had a profound impact on the young Borges himself, who went on to consider them in an insightful essay. The works of the founder of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac, including his classic On the Road, are suffused with the themes of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. The poems offered new conceptions of masculinity and femininity that attracted figures as diverse as Charles Eliot Norton, composer Liza Lehmann, dancer Isadora Duncan, and Ernest Hemingway. In an age of debate over rationality and religion, they authorized a freewheeling skepticism. The young poet Wallace Stevens wrote in his journal in 1906: “Modern people have never failed to crown the poet who gave them poetic thought—and modern people have had to crown Hafiz and Omar—just as the ancients crowned Shelley, Browning and Tennyson.”16 He went on to imply that this supremacy was because the Persian poets sought not just “moods,” “figures of speech and impressions,” but truth itself: “We admit now that Truth is the warrior and Beauty only his tender hide.” T. S. Eliot admitted that he began writing poetry under the influence of Omar Khayyam: I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of FitzGerald’s

12

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Omar, which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me. It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours.17 The themes of the Rubáiyát echoed in popular culture, as well. With its exotic settings and sentiments, it especially appealed to and inspired writers of High Fantasy such as William Morris. While the association may seem incongruous, it was the favorite poem of Texan Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, who termed it one of the more powerful pieces of literature.18 Indeed, there is a sense in which Conan is himself from a prehistoric Iranian people, the Cimmerians, depicted as ancestors both of the Gaels and of the historical Cimmerians (themselves Iranians) of Anatolia. The Cimmerian, a man of wide knowledge and multiple languages, is less of a brute than commonly thought. The chief of his pantheon, Crom, is as careless of humans and as capricious as the deity of the Rubáiyát, as he explains in “Queen of the Black Coast” (Weird Tales, 1934): “What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die.” Howard has his warrior continue: “He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul.” As for life and death, the barbarian avers, “there is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people.” Howard’s creation faces this

INTRODUCTION

13

bleak destiny not only with grim determination but also a good deal of carousing with women and strong drink. Although Howard’s protagonist had a martial bent, much of the rest of his universe is recognizably Omarian. FitzGerald’s translation was popular among the beatniks and hippies of the 1950s and 1960s. Beat author Jack Kerouac was virtually obsessed with the poem, filling notebook entries with observations on it. He suggested to San Francisco poet and Zen Buddhist Philip Whalen that he “stick to Khayyam (a real poet, a grapey poet).” In other works, he liberally quoted Khayyam, as on his bewilderment at what wine sellers get in return for their wares that is nearly as valuable as the original. It is likely that the libertine protagonist of Kerouac’s classic novel On the Road, Sal Paradise, is meant to evoke Khayyam. Indeed, in his earlier stream of consciousness novel Visions of Cody, Kerouac called the prototype character for Sal Paradise “the Khayyam.”19 The independent influence of the Rubáiyát on the 1960s and early 1970s youth culture can also be discerned. A late nineteenth-century woodcut showing a skull with flowers, illustrating the FitzGerald line “The Flower that once has blown forever dies,” was chosen for the cover of a 1971 Grateful Dead live album and became the band’s icon; it may well be that the band’s very name is Omarian.20 The Persian quatrain evolved in the tenth century, possibly under Chinese and Turkic influence (see the Epilogue, below). It

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

14

originally had an aaaa rhyme scheme. Later poets reduced the difficulties thus posed a bit by allowing an aaba pattern. I do not attempt to replicate this rhyming scheme here. If you are interested, as I am, in the meaning of the original, any translation with English meter and rhyme is too much of a straightjacket, and forces the translator into compromises I would rather not make. When I read the Omarian poetry it often begs to break out of its formal cage and spread across the page in exuberance. I hold that in English the sense of the quatrains, ironically enough, is often best conveyed if put into free verse or a conversational iambic meter (though of varying foot lengths). In my view, a full 158 quatrains of iambic pentameter would have palled fairly rapidly, and that he used this meter throughout was one of the things for which the great poet Robert Graves faulted FitzGerald. In keeping with the philosophy of the Middle Eastern anthologists, I suggest that variation between free verse and blank verse freshens the palate. Moreover, since we now know that many poets contributed to this corpus, it is legitimate to bring out their varying styles with different poetic strategies. I have marked the free verse renderings with irregular tabbing, while the blank verse translations are justified on the left. FitzGerald used two Persian manuscripts of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, one of them late and from India, with many Indian contributions. The older, found in the Bodleian Library

INTRODUCTION

15

at Oxford University, had been collected in Iran by Sir Gore Ouseley, who served as Britain’s first modern ambassador to the Iranian court from 1810 to 1814.21 The manuscript had been compiled by an otherwise unknown scribe, Mahmud Yerbudaki, and written out in the southwestern city of Shiraz in 1460. It is the Yerbudaki edition that I am translating here, and which I am attempting to convey faithfully. Unlike FitzGerald, I have translated all of the poems in the Bodleian manuscript and have retained their original order (it was alphabetical in the Arabic script). Medieval Middle Eastern anthologists thought that variety is the spice of life, and so often gave readers a somewhat random collection of texts, lest they pall from having a uniform theme. The only exception is that I have not included the very first quatrain in the book. Mahmud Yerbudaki, the fifteenth-century compiler, started his collection with a theologically orthodox poem on the first page, which expresses repentance. It is likely that this piece is an invention and was designed to throw casual inquisitors off the trail of the poetry’s skepticism and libertinism. It is out of alphabetical order, suggesting that it was added after the primary selection of quatrains had been made and they had been organized. Anyone of conservative tastes who just picked it up and saw that first stanza might put it down, thinking it nothing out of the ordinary. This is the beginning poem, which has the form of a prayer to God:

16

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Though I made from my service to You no necklace of pearls, and though I never wiped sin’s dust from off my face – yet I do not despair of Your kindness – because I never have affirmed that One is Two. This verse is likely intended to defend the author from having Zoroastrian sympathies. The old pre-Islamic religion of Iran, Zoroastrianism, saw the world as the arena for a contest between the great, good God Ahura Mazda and an evil god, Ahriman. Outsiders considered this theology to be dualistic, but Zoroastrians themselves point out that at the end of history, Ahura Mazda wins out over the demonic principle, so that if time is taken into account, the system is actually monotheistic. Muslim theologians in Iran often viewed unconventional ideas as remnants of Zoroastrian heresy. Note that because I dropped this stanza, my translation contains 157 quatrains, not 158 as in the original manuscript. In this rendering, I have recast the poetry as contemporary in voice, and so I have attempted to avoid archaic terms and objects. Purists will cavil, but like FitzGerald I feel it is more important to have the poetry be accessible to contemporaries than for this translation to be pedantic. Too strong an emphasis on the difference of our culture and customs from those of the past can, after all, feed into Orientalism and an insistence on Middle Eastern culture as “other” rather than “self.” There are no sakis or

INTRODUCTION

17

wenches or lutes here. I use “server” for “cup bearer” (sāqī) and bottle for “wineskin” (though long-necked bottles do also occur in some of the originals). I use “mandolin” for the stringed musical instrument to which the poetry refers, on the grounds that this instrument, which is still played in the Appalachia where some of my ancestors lived, is a direct descendant of the Middle Eastern lute. The recent popularity in the West of Shiraz wine, as it is called in South Africa and Australia in particular, was welcome to me, since any translator of this kind of verse is desperate for a synonym for wine after a while. While the legend that today’s Shiraz grape was brought to the Cape from Iran by Dutch merchants in the 1600s is probably not true, that area of Iran was a wine-growing region when this poetry was written, so it seems appropriate to have the poetry speak of drinking Shiraz. It is a nice reminder of the long and glorious wine-producing history of now-puritan Iran.

18

Rubáiyát

1 If I confide my secrets to you in a dive, that’s better than to pray without you in a shrine. You’re the First and you’re the Last, so you can send us all to hell . . . or cherish us for what we are.

2 Knock off your scheming and your boastful tales; if possible, avoid upbraiding drunks. If from now on you want a peaceful life, Do not ill-treat the lowest of the low.

19

20

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

3 Rein in yourself and don’t cut others down; don’t blister people in your anger’s flames. If you have hopes for everlasting rest, Yes, feel the pain but don’t lash out in rage.

4 Since we can’t trust tomorrow, find a way to fill this lovelorn heart with joy: Drink up in the light of the moon-- a moon that someday will look for us . . . and not find us.

5 They call the scriptures the exalted word, but they recite them once in a long while. The label on a vessel of red wine— now that they’re always reading out aloud.

RUBÁIYÁT

21

6 Here we shiver on stools with our wine and that broken-down old stove. We’ve lost all hope of mercy, and all fear of torment. Soul and heart, cup and cloak—all a sacrifice for that one drink. Now we’re free of earth and air, and fire and water.

7 If you could look with wisdom’s eye you’d see: The person that you count on is your foe. It’s better in these days to make few friends, and always keep your distance when you speak.

8 This clay mug once longed, like me—a heartsick lover— for his beloved’s face. The handle of this earthen cup was once an arm, draped around the neck of someone he adored.

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

22

9 Too bad if your heart isn’t scorched, if there’s no one you’re pining for, who makes it leap. That day on which love does not ache in you is the most wasted day of your whole life.

10 Since today is the season of my youth, I want some wine, since that’s what makes me happy. Don’t scorn me—although it is harsh, it is good. It is bitter because it is my life.

11 Today your hand has no power over tomorrow; and to worry about your future brings nothing but more hurt. So don’t waste this breath you’re drawing, if you haven’t gone insane It’s unclear what value “the rest of your life” will have down the road.

RUBÁIYÁT

23

12 Now that the world verges on being happy, the high-spirited plan to make merry outside. Each branch is putting out shoots as white as the hand of Moses, and every breeze wafts the life-giving breath of Jesus.

13 If your quest has borne no fruit, it’s because you’re not on the straight and narrow. Those who’ve grasped the branch of truth know that today is just like yesterday; and the world’s first day is like tomorrow.

14 At first, I sought the pen of destiny, and the eternal tablet it etched on, and hell and heaven in the world beyond. My sage then said: “Look for all four within!”

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

24

15 Get up quick and bring me some wine—this is no time for talk! Tonight, your lush lips are my daily bread. Pour me some Shiraz as red as your blushing cheeks. My past repentance is as tangled as your curls

16 The spring breeze on a rose’s cheek spreads joy. The face you glimpse beyond the blooms grants bliss. No words about last winter can bring cheer; don’t speak of yesterday—rejoice today.

17 For how long will I waste my time, then, laying bricks atop the sea? I’m done with those idolaters who throng to temples and to shrines. Who says Khayyam is doomed to hell? Who ever saw the netherworld? Which one of you has clambered up to paradise and then returned?

RUBÁIYÁT

18 Not even a drunk would try to sunder the graceful stem and bowl of a wine glass. As for the shapely hands and feet of a temptress, for whom are they crafted? And whose hatred in the end shatters them?

19 Like cascading waters, or a desert squall, another day of my life has fled. But I never feel regret for two days: The one that hasn’t yet arrived and the one that long since passed.

20 Since my advent here on that first day wasn’t up to me, but my unwilling departure has been firmly decreed— get up now, get ready, and bring me a drink, since I’m going to blot out the sorrows of this world with wine.

25

26

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

21 Khayyam, you’ve woven tents of wisdom, but stumbled into the campfire of grief and suddenly burned up. The blades of fate have cut the guy ropes of your life, and the broker of hopes has sold it off for song.

22 Khayyam, why beat yourself up over your lapses? What’s the advantage, large or small, in regret? Whoever hasn’t sinned can’t be forgiven. Forgiveness came for sinning—so why drown in remorse?

23 In monasteries, temples and retreats they fear hellfire and look for paradise. But those who know the mysteries of God don’t let those seeds be planted in their hearts

RUBÁIYÁT

27

24 If an earthly angel offered me a cup of wine as we two sat along the river bank in spring— I’d be worse than any dog (pardon my language) if I ever thought again about the paradise above.

25 Look out, for you will shed the spirit. You will go behind the curtain of God’s mysteries. Take a sip of wine, since you don’t know where you came from; and be happy, since you don’t know where you’re going.

26 Deep in my dream, I heard a sage cry out: “What joy has slumber ever caused to bloom? Why do a thing that looks so much like death? Go drinking! Lifetimes soon will pass in sleep!”

28

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

27 My heart said, “I am eager to gain hidden knowledge. Teach it to me if you know how!” I said, “The alphabet’s first letter is . . .” She cut me off: “Say no more. If you’re in the house already, just one letter is enough.”

28 You cannot pierce the veil of mystery, or grasp this strange arrangement of the world: You do not have a home save in black earth! Start drinking, since this story isn’t short.

29 Be sure to hide your secrets from lowlifes, And keep your mysteries from simpletons. Take extra care when you must deal with crowds, and never let them see what’s in your eyes.

RUBÁIYÁT

30 The moving pen ignores the good and bad, since long ago it sketched the universe, decreeing what would be before all time— Our efforts cannot strike a single line!

31 I’m lolling with a stunning beauty and some friends in springtime on a grassy riverbank. So pass around the wine, since morning drunks are independent of both mosque and church.

32 The sky’s a belt made of our weary forms; the river swells with our deluge of tears. Hellfire erupted from our hollow pain, and heaven rose up from our peace of mind.

29

30

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

33 You say the garden of Eden with heavenly virgins delights us; I say it’s the nectar of the grape that delights us. Insist on cash on the barrelhead and don’t sell on credit: Brother, drumming sounds more pleasant when heard from afar.

34 Here, have a drink, since you’ll be sleeping for a long time underground, without a best friend or soul mate or lover. Be careful to tell no one this hidden secret: that not every withered lily will bloom again.

35 Have a noble red, for it assures an everlasting life; That is what’s left of your youth: It’s the season of roses and carousing with tipsy friends— Be happy for a moment; this is life.

RUBÁIYÁT

36 Give me some wine to soothe my wounded heart— It’s a dear friend to those enthralled by love. For me the dregs of just one sip outshine all things contained in the vast heavens’ vault.

37 I like a glass of wine, but critics from all sides complain that it’s against our faith. But, since we know that wine’s the enemy, what could be wrong with drinking from its blood?

38 Wine is molten rubies and the bottle is a deep, deep mine. The chalice is a body and the spirits are its soul. This crystal glass that laughs with wine is just a tear that hides within its being the heart’s own blood.

31

32

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

39 I have no idea if my creator will lift me up to heaven or hurl me down to hell. A crust of bread, a lover, and a cup of wine— that’s all I need. Keep the promises of heaven for yourself.

40 Don’t blame the stars for virtues or for faults, or for the joy and grief decreed by fate! For science holds the planets all to be A thousand times more helpless than are we.

41 If you inscribe love’s story on your heart, you’ll never waste a moment of your life. You’ll either make an effort to please God or you’ll relax and raise a glass of wine.

RUBÁIYÁT

33

42 Each rose is tinted by the gore shed on the field by antique fallen emperors, and every violet takes its color from a beauty mark on a slain sweetheart’s cheek.

43 Take care, for tumult has shaken the age. Shun over-confidence, for fate has sharpened its sabre blade. If destiny strews your path with delicious sweets, step around that poisoned trap.

44 A bottle of Shiraz and the lips of a lover, on the edge of a meadow – are like cash in hand for me—and for you, credit toward paradise. They’ve wagered that some go to heaven, and some to hell. But whoever went to hell? And whoever came back from paradise?

34

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

45 The wild white rose reflects the fairness of your cheek, and China’s idols were the model for your face. Your flirting eyes once taught the king of Babylon his strategy for knight and bishop, rook and queen.

46 When life has run its course, no matter spent in Baghdad or Kabul—and whether sweet or bitter as it drained: Drink up! For once we’ve gone, the moon will still grow full, then dim.

47 Not those who sit and sip the purest wine, nor those who always bow themselves in prayer— none of them treads dry land, they’re all at sea! Just one’s awake, the rest fell deep asleep.

48 This restless mind that looks for happiness tells you a hundred times a day that you should pause a while—and realize you’re not a lily that is plucked, then blooms again.

RUBÁIYÁT

35

49 The prisoners of reason have vanished into the misery of being and nothingness! Choose instead the nectar of a nice plump grape; for know-nothings eat the grape as raisins, and so shrivel up themselves.

50 The heavens earned no profit on my birth; my death won’t aid their beauty or grandeur. Then why have they decreed this coming and this going? Neither ear has ever heard.

51 In the path of love we must purify ourselves; We must die in the talons of fate. Hey, sweetheart with the bottle, don’t just stand there! Fill my cup, since I am on my way to being dust.

36

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

52 Now that nothing is left of good times but the name; and, save for the wine itself, not a single old drinking friend’s around any more— don’t turn down the joy of the vintage you’re offered, for I see your hand is empty save for the glass.

53 The judgment of fate’s pen cannot be changed, and grieving causes only further pain. For even if you brood throughout your life, you can’t affect your destiny one bit.

54 My heart, the quest for union with God is beset by disorders. Don’t busy yourself for a while with love. Seek instead the company of mystics, and so gain acceptance by those whom God accepts.

RUBÁIYÁT

37

55 Those who shine in the heavens for a fragment of eternity come and go and come again with time. In the hem of the sky and the pockets of the earth are a people who will go on being born as long as God does not die.

56 Those whose deeds grow out of their hypocrisy want to separate the body from the soul. I’ll carry on my crown a jug of wine, Even if they threaten to lop off my head.

57 The heavenly bodies that dwell in the sky perplex even the sage. Don’t lose the thread of wisdom— since those very stars you think decree your fate wander in bewilderment.

38

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

58 I’m not the sort of man to fear my death; to me that half seems better than this half; for God has only loaned this life to us; I’ll turn it in when its due date has come.

59 The caravan of life astounds as it goes by; so seize this wondrous moment! Barkeep, why grieve about the future fate of friends? Bring out your finest vintage—since the night is disappearing.

60 Your love has trapped this aged head of mine; if not, my hand would put this wine glass down. My mind repented but you tempted me; time ripped the clothes that patience wove for me.

61 Although red wine has made a fool of me, I won’t be parted from it while I live. Wine sellers deeply puzzle me: What could they find to buy that’s better than their wares?

RUBÁIYÁT

39

62 Why were you so kind and generous at first? What was that flirting, and those good times, all about? Now it seems you simply want to break my heart; What sin did I commit? What was all that?

63 May my head be full of lust for luscious angels, and may my hand hold tight a wine glass all year long. They say to me, “May God lead you to repent!” But he won’t do it by himself, and I won’t do it by myself; keep it far away from me.

64 In taprooms, you wash up for prayers with wine. For never can a tarnished name be cleared. Rejoice! We’ve torn this secret veil of ours so badly there is no hope of repair.

40

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

65 I saw a man on his veranda, stomping his boots and scraping them to get off the clay. The clay addressed him in a mystic tongue: “Settle down! You too are in for being tromped on—just like me.”

66 A day in spring, and gentle rain has washed the flowers’ faces. Nightingales sing in old Persian to the sallow yellow rose: “You’d get some color from a sip of wine!”

67 Before your doom can ambush you, order up a pure rosé. For you’re not gold, you old fool— that they’ll bury you in the ground, then dig you up again.

RUBÁIYÁT

41

68 Don’t try to grab this tumbler from my hand; I’ll dye my sallow cheeks bright ruby red. Then when I die, use wine to wash my corpse and weave my final shroud from dried grape vines.

69 My king! The stars appointed you to rule and dressed for you the caparisoned steed of empire. Your golden-hoofed stallion charged ahead, and gilded with its sparks the battle plain.

70 Platonic love does not bedazzle; like a burned-out campfire, it gives no heat. A passionate lover through years, and days can’t rest or sit, can’t eat or sleep.

42

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

71 No one has solved the secrets of eternity; no one has set foot outside the circle. Whether I consider masters or apprentices— all who are born of a mother are helpless

72 Give up desire for this world—live content! Don’t think about this era’s good and bad. Quick, grab a wine glass and a lover’s curls. Life’s fading and the day will soon be done.

73 I pour a pale rosé into a lily cup as violet clouds spew yellow jasmine blossoms. The heavens rain down narcissus petals from the darkening sky. You could say they sprinkle blooms into the garden.

RUBÁIYÁT

74 I like to drink, but my peers do not care. Before time was, the Maker saw that I would hit the bottle—and if I quit now I’d make a fool of the All-knowing God.

75 Don’t let sadness dig its hooks in you; don’t let misery eat up your days; don’t give up on books, or lovers’ lips or sitting along the riverbank— until they drag you down beneath the ground.

76 Red wine will cure a multitude of ills and oust all thoughts of seventy-two sects. Do not avoid the alchemist, for his elixir will transmute your life to gold.

43

44

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

77 The ban on drinking wine depends upon who drinks, how much, and in what company. Where all the right conditions are met, then if cultured people do not drink, who should?

78 Have some wine, since your body will anyway crumble beneath the earth and they’ll shape your clay into mugs and wine cups. Liberate yourself from heaven and from hell— no sage would be fooled by such fables.

79 Now’s the season when the gales of spring bedeck the world; our eyes blink awake when clouds weep down on them. Moses turns hands white as blossoms on the bough and Jesus resurrects the dead a-moldering in the grave.

RUBÁIYÁT

80 The leftovers the barkeep pours away touch off a blaze of grief in living eyes. You fool! You think the dregs mere dreck; but wine cures your heart of a hundred agonies.

81 The tulip’s face attracts the morning dew and in the garden purple petals kneel. In fairness, rosebuds gladden my heart most when they lift up their hems about themselves.

82 The next time that you drink together, friends, just raise a glass to toast this absentee; and when you pass the finest wine around, please turn a goblet upside down for me.

83 My friends, when you agree to meet, take pleasure in how good you all look! And when the barkeep brings out a dry Shiraz Say a prayer in remembrance of this poor nobody.

45

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

46

84 One glass of spirits is worth a hundred hearts, a hundred faiths. I’d trade the whole of China for a swig of wine. Save for an aggressive red, no other bitter thing is worth a thousand sweet souls.

85 To follow in his path you must forsake both wife and child; a real man has no kin! All things that be, will bar your way. Throw off your chains—how else to tread a blocked up path?

86 Bring me that ruby in a crystal clear glass, that close friend and soul mate of all the worthy! Since you know that this world of dust lasts only as long as a sudden breeze, then bring me wine.

RUBÁIYÁT

87 Get up and bring me the treatment for an aching heart— that liquid rose with its strong bouquet. If you want the compound antidote to misery, then bring a mandolin with wine that’s sapphire red.

88 I browsed a crafts exhibit yesterday and saw a potter pummeling fresh clay. That lump, as in a vision, said to him, “Please lighten up! For I was once like you.”

89 Drink of the wine that is eternal life. Draw interest on the capital of youthful delight. It burns like fire, but it makes you sad, just like the elixir of life. So drink!

47

48

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

90 Flout all Traditions and forget the Law! But don’t deprive the poor of your small gifts, or slander people or break hearts: That’s how you really get to heaven! So bring wine!

91 The wine is bright rose red and its cup is pink, perhaps; Within the crystal jewelry box lies a clear ruby, perhaps. Carnelian gems are dissolved in water, perhaps; the moon is a veil over the sun, perhaps.

92 Whenever I repented, I backslid; I’ve closed the door of honour and of shame; don’t blame me if I’ve gone out of my mind, for I’m blind drunk on passion once again!

RUBÁIYÁT

49

93 It’s cold reality, not metaphor: We’re only pieces in the heavens’ game. Let’s play upon the cosmic checkerboard, ’til one by one we’re put back in the box.

94 This world’s not real, it’s just a simile; why be disturbed by all this pain and need? Accept your destiny: The moving pen has written, and it won’t revise for you!

95 The shadow of the clouds still veils the rose’s face. My heart and character still have a taste for drink. Don’t go to sleep for there’s no place for slumber here: My darling, bring some wine—the sun is up again.

96 Throw dirt in heaven’s face; have a drink and spend some hours with someone pretty. What place is this for worship or for prayer? For, of all who died, not one came back!

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

50

97 Fill my cup, since day is about to break—blinding white: Learn something about colour from ruby wine. Bring two mandolins and light up the revelry; Strum one of them and set the other on fire!

98 I have begun again my wicked ways. For heaven’s sake, let me give up my prayers, for everywhere a wine glass stands, I’m there— and stretching toward it like a bottle’s neck.

99 Overwhelmed with desire, I pressed my lips to the lip of that bottle and asked it the secret to a long life. It gave its mouth to mine and whispered: Have some wine, since once you’re gone, you won’t be back.

RUBÁIYÁT

51

100 I’ll give you a tip if you’ll let me bend your ear: Don’t put on robes of deceit for the sake of God. The afterlife is nothing but endless time, but this world lasts for just an instant. So don’t sell eternity for a mere moment of piety.

101 If you are drunk on wine, Khayyam, be glad— or if some beauty’s in your lap, be glad! For you will be as nothing in the end: Imagine that, while you exist—be glad.

102 Last night I stumbled into a dark pottery workshop and saw about two thousand pots lined up in silence. But then suddenly one pot cried out hysterically, “Where did the potter, and his clerks, and that big crowd of shoppers go?”

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

52

103 From the spirits that they call free-run wine —the cure for a ruined heart, they call it— pour out two or three brimming glasses and bring them to me. And why do they term it devil water when it is angel juice?

104 Look at my virtues one by one, and pardon my sins ten at once. Pray, overlook each past trespass and leave the reckoning to God. Don’t let strong winds and heavy gales fan flames of hatred in your heart. Forgive me in the name of the tomb of the Messenger of God.

105 Wine in a tumbler is an airy soul; It possesses the body of its vessel like a spirit. Gross matter is not fit to be the friend of wine save for its glass, which is both dense and fine.

RUBÁIYÁT

53

106 Where can we find the end of eternity, when did preexistence begin? There’s nothing like the good times when you’re drinking hard. Both theory and practice pass my understanding. To every calculation, wine comes as the solution.

107 The turning heavens that bewilder us are the projector for a shadow play. The world’s a lantern floodlit by the sun and we are cut-outs that go round and round.

108 I cannot always halt my carnal self; but what to do? I suffer so for all my deeds; but what to do? I know you’ll treat me leniently, given my shame that you have seen those acts; but what to do?

54

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

109 Let me get up and seek out free-run wine; I’ll put an apple blush into my cheeks. I’ll knock this useless intellect out with a drunken fist across its pasty face.

110 For just how long will we be prisoners of everyday reason? Under eternity, what does it matter if we live for a year or for a day? Pass around a cup of wine before we turn into the clay that’s worked into that very cup!

111 Since we won’t be living for long in this cloister , lacking a lover and wine-server would be torture. How long will sages debate if this world is eternal or created? Once I have left it, why should I care, either way?

RUBÁIYÁT

55

112 For your love I would bear a hundred strands of blame; and if I broke this vow I’d pay the price. If I proved faithful to your cruelties, it would hurt less than to endure alone until the Judgment Day.

113 Since this world is fleeting, I just keep at my art— full of cheer, I raise a glass of sparkling wine. They say, ‘May your God bring you to repent.’ But no God of mine would do that, and even if He did, I would not give in.

114 Although I went in need into the mosque, I did not have my daily prayers in mind! Instead, I made off with a prayer rug; When it grew threadbare, I came back again.

56

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

115 When I have been crushed by the heel of fate and uprooted from all hope of life— make nothing from my clay but a wine cup— for when they fill it, maybe I’ll revive.

116 My heart can’t tell bait from trap. It urges me toward the mosque and to the wine glass, too. Even so, we all three remain—my beloved, a fine vintage and I. It’s better to be street smart in a drinkery than to be naive in a cloister.

117 The sun’s just up, so for a moment let me sip this pale rosé, and smash against a stone the flask of shame and honour—then give up our lifelong hopes, and stroke our lovers’ curls, and strum our mandolins.

RUBÁIYÁT

57

118 I’ve chosen my corner and two crusts of bread over this world. I’ve cast away ambition for high office and its pomp. I’ve purchased poverty with my very life and soul, and in my need have seen the height of luxury.

119 I know the outward facts of being and nothingness, and I know the inner essence of high and low. Despite all my knowledge, I would be ashamed if I recognized a stage higher than drunkenness.

120 A master taught us in our childhood years; our new skills made us happy for a while. And now just look at what’s become of us: We came like water and left like the wind.

58

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

121 If you could know the secrets of this world, you’d feel its cares and happiness as one. The good and bad of this earth will one day wind to an end, in healing or in pain

122 As far as you can, spend your time with rascals; reduce the house of prayer and fasting to rubble. Listen to the truth spoken by Omar Khayyam— have some wine, commit a little larceny, and be good to people.

123 Since the only things a person in this wasteland gains are pain and death, the light of heart are those who take off soonest; and the ones at peace are those who never even came here.

RUBÁIYÁT

59

124 Mystic, throw off that fine robe, embroidered with faces— don’t sacrifice your flesh to it. Go toss a worn out throw-rug over your shoulders and under those old threads, beat the drum of empire.

125 Look at the wicked deeds of turning skies, which crushed our friends and emptied out the world. If possible, unite your inner self. Give up the past and future: Be here now.

126 To paint the town red with beautiful people is better than false piety. If lovers and drinkers are bound for hell, then no one will ever see the face of heaven

60

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

127 My joyful heart cannot be cloaked by grief or good times crushed beneath the grindstone’s pain. Since no one has an inkling of what’s next, let us amuse ourselves with wine and love.

128 These turning heavens scheme our destruction— yours and mine They plot our murders—yours and mine. So sit with me on this green grass, my sweet, since now it won’t be long before this meadow will be growing from the dust of you and me.

129 What good is our coming and our going? And for the warp of our existence, where is the weft? The beauties of this world are burned up from head to toe and turned to dust; but where’s the smoke?

RUBÁIYÁT

61

130 Better to dodge the study of disciplines and curl your fingers in the locks of a lover’s head – much better! Before the times can spill your blood, Drain the bottle’s gore into a glass—much better!

131 I went into the wine house, having grown a moustache, and said goodbye to both the worlds—of good and of bad. If both these globes fall like balls into the alley, look for me and you’ll find me passed out like a drunk.

132 Take all things in moderation save for wine; it’s best when served in a festive tent by tipsy beauties. I’d advise hitting the bottle, then taking to the road, and some debauchery. The horoscope says to gulp wine as the planets proceed from the moon to Pisces.

62

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

133 The sky, a turquoise cup turned upside down, has trapped the wise in helplessness. Look1 at the friendship of the bottle and wine glass—and how their blood flows lip to lip.

134 See how the gales have ripped the rose’s skirt; before, its beauty drove the songbirds wild! While it lives, shelter under the rosebush, before the tempest tramples it to dust.

135 How long will I obsess about what I have or what I don’t? Or whether I’ll spend a life of joy or not? So pour me a bold Shiraz, since no one knows if I’ll get to exhale this breath that I am drawing in.

RUBÁIYÁT

63

136 Don’t surrender to the bleakness of this age of injustice, and don’t remind us of the heartaches of those no longer living. Save your heart for an angel with jasmine breasts: Never lack for wine, don’t ruin your life.

137 Do not give up because you’ve grown so old. Don’t take another step unless you’re drunk. Before they make a goblet of your skull— Raise high a bottle, and then down a shot.

138 One drop of a fine old vintage is better than a new-won kingdom. it’s best to avoid all paths that do not lead to wine— a cup of it surpasses the empire of Fereydun, and the lid of a wine jar outstrips the crown of Kai-Khusrow

64

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

139 Bartender, those who swept this floor before, are sleeping in the dust of arrogance. Drink up and listen to the truth from me: Since everything they told us was hot air!

140 You broke my jug of wine, O Lord. You’ve shut the door of joy on me, O Lord. You spilled my pure wine on the ground. Strike me dead! how very strange you are, my Lord.

141 Signs of the zodiac: You give something to every jackass. You hand them fancy baths, millworks, and canals— while noble souls must gamble, in hopes of winning their nightly bread. Who would give a fart for such a constellation?

RUBÁIYÁT

65

142 My heart, you’ll never grasp the hidden mysteries or understand the points discussed by learned souls. So make a heaven down below of wine and cup, because you may not reach that other paradise.

143 You always inhale smoke from the kitchen of this world How long will you suffer the cares of being and non-being? Why would you want capital if its revenues are in decline? Who would want the principal, since you’re eating up the profits?

144 My heart, if you shake the dust from off your body your now-cleansed spirit can soar into the heavens Your seat is a throne; then be ashamed that you come to dwell in the empire of this earth.

66

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

145 I smashed my clay wine mug against a stone last night, delighting at this act of senseless violence. Then in a mystic tongue the clay complained to me: “I once was just like you; one day you’ll be like me.”

146 My love, pick up an earthen cup and a jug of wine and walk with me among the flowers of the river bank. For the hateful rolling turquoise sky has crushed loved ones into clay cups a hundred times, and into jugs a hundred times.

147 Along the road I walk, you’ve placed a thousand traps. You say you’ll trip me up if I fall into one. But not one atom does a thing you don’t command; You issue your order, and then condemn my sins!

RUBÁIYÁT

67

148 A book of poetry, some ruby wine, and you, and half a loaf of bread—I don’t need any more; when you and I are curled up in the the great outdoors, our bliss outshines the glories of an emperor.

149 Don’t give way to fruitless heartache—be happy! Although you walk an unfair path, live justly. For in the end this world is nothingness. Imagine your nothingness, and live free.

150 Whenever I look, in whichever direction, a stream from eternity flows into my garden. The desert is like heaven now, since hell’s gone missing. Sit in paradise next to a beauty with the face of an angel!

68

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

151 Be glad, they grew your profits yesterday: Your hopes and dreams came true in every way. Live happily, since yesterday, before you asked, they set tomorrow’s fate for you.

152 Pour me a tulip-red nectar and spill the bottle’s blood from its long throat— because today, save for my cup of wine, I have no friend with inner purity.

153 The turning heavens whispered secretly in my heart’s ear: “You know from me the command that was decreed.” But if I were given a free hand as I went round and round, I’d save myself from this vertigo.

RUBÁIYÁT

69

154 If we could find a little loaf of bread, and get hold of a roast of lamb and wine, and we were snuggling in the wilderness— we’d put to shame the pomp of any court.

155 If that day comes when you acquire a crate of wine— drink up at every banquet, every gathering! Because the one who made the world could not care less, if I should wear a moustache or you sport a beard.

156 If I had a choice of whether to be born, I wouldn’t have come. But likewise if I had the choice to die, when would I do that? Given that this world is dust, wouldn’t it have been better had I never been born, or died, or ever was?

70

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

157 The time of fasting has passed, and good times are here again— the time to raise a bottle high. Don’t worry, the porters are bringing more! So end the Rubáiyát. Copied by hand by this servant, who stands in need of the mercy of the eternal king—Sheikh Mahmud Yerbudaki. Finished during the last three days of the month of Safar, in 865 [Dec. 13–15, 1460 AD] according to the calendar of the Prophet, upon whom be peace, benedictions, and honour, in the capital, Shiraz. May God, the Exalted, protect it from want.

Epilogue: Persian Literature and the Rubáiyát Juan Cole

Since The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam is not what most readers expect from the literature of the medieval Muslim world, questions have swirled since the Victorian era as to where these quatrains came from. Many authors attempting to investigate this subject were misled by the assumption that they were the work of a single author in the late Seljuk Empire (1037–1194) that ruled what is now Iran, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia, that is, that they were the oeuvre of the great mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131). Instead, it is now clear that they were produced by many hands, over several centuries. Victorian 71

72

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

authors argued over whether they were Epicurean and secular or were instead allegorical and a manifestation of mystical, Sufi Islam. The answer, of course, is that some poems in the corpus are secular-minded, and others (a minority in the Yerbudaki anthology) are from mystical Sufi circles. That this body of poetry developed over centuries and was contributed to by many poets makes it, if anything, more important and more representative of key cultural themes than if it had a single author in one time and place. Our modern fetish of “the author” blinds us to this insight.

New Persian The Greeks and later Europeans called Iran “Persia,” and its inhabitants “Persians”, after the southwestern province of what the Greeks called Persis (Fars or Pars among the locals). This was because the empire and military power which became their greatest adversary was centered in Persis, with its royal capital which they named Persepolis—its 2,500-year-old ruins still known by that name in the West today. Meanwhile Iranians all along called it “the polity of Iran” (Ēranshahr). The Persians began coming as tribal invaders through the Caucasus into the western Iranian plateau in the 800s BCE and ultimately took over the Elamite Empire. In ancient times, Persians produced the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), which sought to conquer

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

73

the Greek world and was ultimately defeated by the Macedonian Greek Alexander, and later the Parthian state (247 BC–224 CE) and the Sasanid Empire (224 CE–651 CE), both of which were fierce rivals of Rome. In some eras Iran ruled as far afield as Egypt and the Ionian islands in the west and northern India in the east. At some point in this thousand years of Persian Empire, people had adopted the teachings of the prophet Zarathustra (the Greeks corrupted his name to “Zoroaster”), who asserted that life is a struggle between truth and falsehood, light and dark, good and evil. His Gathas or scriptures are in Old Persian, which is related to Sanskrit. According to these scriptures, the great god Ahura Mazda personified truth and good, and was opposed by a lesser satanic figure, Ahriman. In the distant future, Zarathustra taught, a savior would arise and the good deity would prove completely victorious, and the dead would be resurrected. Some scholars have seen Zoroastrianism as a form of dualism, since there is a god of good and a god of evil. But adherents deny this notion, pointing out that the god of good ultimately wins out and so is ultimately sovereign. (In medieval Christianity, it should be remembered, Satan was also viewed as extremely powerful.) Since the prophet was called Zoroaster by the Greeks, in English his religion is known as Zoroastrianism. At one time that religion was one of the world’s major faiths, and it deeply influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

74

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Some of the ideas in the Omarian poems may go back to preIslamic Iranian culture, although not to its theological doctrines or conventional morality. The impatience with hypocrisy, that is, being anything less than completely truthful, is a Zoroastrian value. The emphasis on wine, as well, could derive in part from old Iranian court culture. A Russian archeologist found an inscription in an ancient Iranian language on a bowl in Central Asia from the 700s CE that said something like “The one who cannot discern harm will also never see any wealth at all. Then, drink, O man!”1 The combination of an aphorism about what traits of character make for poverty or prosperity, with an injunction to drink wine, seems similar to the discourse of the much later Omarian poetry. Thus, some of these ideas and conventions may well derive from Iranian culture, based on Pahlavi or Sogdian precursors. To Iran’s west were pagan Arabic-speaking pastoralists and villagers, who in the 500s of the Common Era developed a magnificent poetic tradition of odes that went on to influence the Rubáiyát. Some of their verse complains about the capriciousness of time or fate (dahr), which comes across as an impersonal deity.2 The authors of this pagan verse take pride in drinking to excess and in spending all their money on wine, as a sign of generosity to their drinking companions and as a manly response to the oppressions of fate (often the night of carousing precedes a brutal battle). A scholar of these odes points to the sanguinary

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

75

imagery sometimes visible in the wine scene as a result: “When the jar is empty, we raise our wineskin,/ open up its neck vein,/ and how it bleeds,” wrote Maymun ibn Qays al-A‘sha.3 This trope of drinking wine as a form of bloodshed and vampirism became a stock image in the later Omarian Rubáiyát. The poets also glory in a Falstaffian renown, although without the latter’s comic edge, since a reputation for being able to drink other warriors under the table is all that a man can expect to survive his death. “Winepride” (fakhr) is central to this ethos. Later Muslim writers referred to this pagan Arab era and its ethos as the “Age of Ignorance” or the “Age of Lack of Restraint” (al-jahiliyah). Many of the later Omarian Rubáiyát are little more than explorations, in a different language and hundreds of years later, of these pagan Arab themes, of the morning draft of wine proffered by the slave-girl (or -boy) with whom the warrior slept the previous night, of the great evening banquet and wine feast on which he spent his last dinar to show his generosity of spirit, of his ability to out-drink his fellows, of the looming menace of death hanging over the entire tableau (urbane Persian poets of later centuries substituted the fickleness of fate for the prospect of tribal carnage). The Persian quatrain often treated the wine and love scenes common in the pre-Islamic Arabic ode, becoming a detached, pointed fragment of that larger vessel. In the early 600s CE, a new prophetic religion, Islam, arose in west Arabia on the Sasanian frontier. The new faith saw itself as

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

76

another chapter of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, with the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) a prophetic successor to the holy figures of the Bible. Adopted by Arab tribes who excelled in the desert guerrilla raid, the new religion was carried by them as they undertook an astonishing series of seventh-century conquests that made them masters of the Near Eastern and North African reaches of the old Roman Empire and of all of Iran. In the centuries after the Arab Muslim conquest, most Iranians gradually embraced Islam. The lower castes probably saw the egalitarian new religion as an escape from rigid social hierarchies. But although Persian culture went into decline in favor of Arabophone Islam, the old myths and fables, and the old language, continued to be cultivated by provincial landed elites. Even after the advent of Islam, some Muslim poets celebrated wine drinking with enthusiasm. (The Muslim scripture, the Qur’an, disapproves of drinking, but sets no punishment for it; a Muslim legal tradition developed that frowned on or sometimes attempted to ban alcohol, but poets often defied this puritanism.) In part, the poets’ exuberance was an homage to the great bards of the previous, pagan Arab era. In part, however, it likely was solicited by some of the Umayyad kings and their courtiers, and, later, some of the Abbasid notables, since they routinely threw wine parties for court companions. The early Muslim “caliphates,” ruled by supposed vicars of the Prophet Muhammad, were

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

77

seldom very pious in reality. In the eastern desert of Jordan there are still remnants of Umayyad pleasure places, which attest to these fetes. The walls of Qusayr Amra are sometimes pornographic, showing naked and half-clothed women. Some are bathers, others singers, musicians, attendants, or dancers. One is clothed only in a bikini-type bottom and jewelry, showing off firm breasts, a slender waist, and ample hips.4 The Umayyad king Al-Walid b. ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 705–15) was notorious for his wine banquets, his poetry praising “the daughter of the grape,” and his interest in fine Iranian vintages.5 These practices were hardly peculiar to him among Umayyad rulers and their successors, the Abbasids (750–1258). The ruler appointed officers of state such as the first minister (wazir), scribes, treasurers, and chamberlains. In addition, however, a gaggle of informal courtiers gathered at the palace, including writers, poets, musicians, entertainers, and dancing girls. Most were not allowed to become very close to the monarch, but a select few became his intimates. The institution of the court companion (nadim) was a new one in Baghdad in the early 800s. Earlier Abbasid rulers had insisted on keeping courtiers behind a veil when they held evening drinking parties, in accordance with Iranian, Sasanid custom. Later rulers, however, removed such barriers and enjoyed greater intimacy with the poets and hangers-on they invited to their private affairs.6 In the Abbasid era, Abu Nuwas (756–814) was a renowned court companion.

78

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

His wine poetry celebrates the vagaries of time-fate (dahr) (a pre-Islamic Arab idea), tavern-going, the camaraderie of men drinking together, and the beauty of female singers, lute players, and dancing girls, as well as of the slender young men or saqis who served the precious liquid. After the Muslim conquest of Iran, there was a notorious “two centuries of silence” during which new Persian-language writing was scarce. Then from the late 800s and through the 900s, Iranian Muslim landholders of eastern Iran and Central Asia revived Persian as a literary language and used it to recast ancient Persian myths, fables, and tales. The resuscitated language, which has a simpler grammar than the Pahlavi or Middle Persian of late antiquity and adopts a significant amount of Arabic vocabulary, is known as New Persian.7 This language became a vehicle for the reemergence of Iranian cultural pride. Court wine poetry, a long tradition in pre-Islamic Iran, formed a significant proportion of writing in the new medium. Poets such as Rudaki (858–941) and Manuchehri (d. 1040) discussed techniques of wine making and wrote of great revels at eastern courts such as those of the Samanids (819–999) in Bukhara and the Ghaznavids (977–1186) in Afghanistan. Rudaki described, as recounted by one specialist in Persian literature, how the royal hall was festooned with fine carpets, shining decorations, and floral arrangements. The first minister and the military commanders sat in one row, the magnates of the kingdom in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

79

another, while the sultan sat on his throne. This court verse speaks of how an orchestra prepared its instruments and, the ancient poet said, a thousand youth, faces fair as the full moon and heads crowned with myrtle, stood in attendance. Handsome cup bearers, themselves scions of old Central Asian royal houses, kept wine goblets full. After the guests had been served several rounds, the king himself took a chalice from a “black-eyed beauty” and toasted to the prince of another royal house.8 The Persian quatrain (ruba‘i) also grew up as part of this return to indigenous culture by elites in eastern Iran who had been conquered by the Arab Muslims. It should be clear, however, that the quatrains differed markedly from this royal Persian tradition of wine verse. The court poetry, unlike the Omarian poems and their pre-Islamic and Abbasid predecessors, does not treat wine as a palliative for the caprices of an uncaring and relentless time-fate, nor is the wine-frenzy or grim resignation of the lone warrior prominent. There is no subjective or existential aspect to the verses. Rather, in the older tradition, wine is a symbol of the extravagance and opulence of the eastern courts. Scholars have noted a divide in the history of Persian literature. The 900s through 1100s were dominated by court poetry, which lauded kings and celebrated the pomp and opulence of their courts in a relatively impersonal and monumental way. Thereafter, in part because of massive political upheavals, poetry turned personal.

80

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

The early Rubáiyát welled up as oral, anonymous poetry, whether by elite hands or tradesmen, from the tenth century onward, forming part of the phenomenon of New Persian literature. From time to time they would get written down and either marked as anonymous or ascribed to a historical figure. While anthologists later attributed pious New Persian quatrains to mystics such as Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr (967–1049), from what is now Turkmenistan in modern Iran’s northeast, this attribution is doubtful. One of Abu Sa‘id’s early biographers flatly said he wrote no verse.9 That is, it was not only the astronomer Omar Khayyam to whom an entire corpus of poetry was fancifully ascribed by later editors, but also mystics such as Abu Sa‘id. Many of the “authors” of medieval Iran were no such thing. Their names were deployed by editors and copyists to give authority to and to organize and classify certain kinds of poetry, whether predominantly mystical or primarily secular.10 As for the New Persian quatrain itself, some scholars have looked east for the development of this form. The quatrain in Persian as well as in Central Asian Turkic languages may well have been formed indirectly on the model of its Chinese counterpart. The great Italian scholar Alessandro Bausani (1921– 88), a prodigy who knew Chinese and many other languages, pointed to the similarity of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) quatrain to the Persian Rubáiyát.11 This Chinese form was imitated by Central Asian Turks, who may have transmitted it to the Iranians.

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

81

Since the Chinese quatrain influenced the Japanese predecessors of the haiku, it is possible, if Bausani is correct, that the Persian Rubáiyát and the haiku have a common ancestor. It is also possible that Chinese and Turkic poetry influenced, along with the Arabic heritage, the substance of the unconventional Persian quatrains. The canon of classical Chinese poetry included verses like these: Man’s life lived within this world, Is like the sojourning of a hurried traveller. A cup of wine together will make us glad, And a little friendship is no little matter.12 Along with themes imbibed from pre-Islamic and Abbasid Arabic poetry, then, the quatrains attributed to Khayyam may have incorporated pan-Asian themes of stoic resignation in the face of temperamental fate, pessimism about an afterlife, and a faith in wine and erotic adventures as palliatives to the cheerlessness of human reality. Chinese influence in Iran continued into the medieval period, both directly as Iran became more or less a province of Mongol-ruled China, and via the Silk Road.13 In miniature painting in this era, the East Asian influence is so strong that landscapes and other features are clearly Chinese in inspiration. It is also possible, of course, that the authors of the unconventional quatrains independently invented some of these

82

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

themes—I cannot here do more than speculate about possible Chinese influences. But in my view, knowing what we know of the Chinese cultural and technological impact on Iran, it would be odd, as Bausani suggested, if there had not also been a literary dimension to this relationship.

Mongols Iran was ruled for nearly two centuries by the Turkic Seljuk Empire (1037–1194) after Central Asian armies had come west. The sultans of this dynasty were Sunni Muslims and they quickly adopted Persian as their language of administration. Sunni clerics grew powerful in that era, and at least in the cities strove to impose their notion of Muslim orthodoxy. Had a settled, puritan, Muslim state been established in Iran after the decline of the Seljuks , perhaps the Omarian style of Rubáiyát might have been suppressed, manuscripts burned, and its devotees severely punished. Instead, the shackles of doctrinal conformity were themselves shattered. In 1219, nearly a century after the death of the Sunni Muslim scientist Omar Khayyam, Genghis Khan sent a Buddhist Mongol army into eastern Iranian domains, taking among other cities Nishapur, the astronomer’s birthplace. The Mongol invasion was part of a general movement of nomads from East Asia into the

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

83

Middle East all through the medieval period. Most of these pastoralists were Turkic tribes from Inner Asia, not very different in most ways from the Mongols. These pastoralists were specialists in using marginal land that could not be farmed to raise sheep, goats, and other mobile animals by exploiting its occasional pasture. This style of life militated against a literate education and so they often developed gnostic or mythological religious ideas based on oral tradition, unconstrained by texts or book learning. That they wandered around on horseback, hunting and herding livestock for a living and were excellent archers made them a natural cavalry and gave them the ability to overthrow settled empires from time to time. The Inner Asian arid zone in which pastoralists exploited marginal land unsuited for agriculture to find pasturage for their roaming herds constantly threatened the settled civilizations on its periphery (China, North India, Iran, Iraq, northern Syria, Anatolia, even Russia) with invasion and political turmoil. Their presence made Central Asia different from places such as Egypt to the west, which were able to develop institutions and court-backed orthodoxies with continuity over many centuries. From the early 1220s Tabriz and both sides of the Aras river or Azerbaijan (today’s Iranian provinces of East and West Azerbaijan plus the independent republic of the same name) were forced to recognize the suzerainty of the Mongols, who fought on up into what is today Georgia and Armenia. After a

84

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

decade and a half of back-and-forth conquest and resistance, the area was subjected to direct Mongol rule in 1239 under the commander Arghun Agha, who reported back to Ögedei Khan (r. 1229–41) and his successors among the Great Khans. Those Khans were also subduing Russia, Korea, and Song China from their capital of Karakorum. The Iranian metropolis of Tabriz avoided being sacked and depopulated, since its governors repeatedly paid tribute to avoid this fate, and Tabriz remained a center of high culture. Mongol commanders of between 1,000 and 10,000 men, known as moyons, were given the great estates of the former landed class in the hinterland of this metropolis.14 Free spirits in northwestern Iran, whether Sufi mystics or libertines, were liberated by Buddhist rule and produced the kind of poetry later associated with Khayyam. The Mongols thus came into Iran from the early 1220s and by the late 1230s held the bulk of the country. From this base, in 1258, Hülegü (r.  1256–65) and his armies took Baghdad and ended the Abbasid caliphate. In order to avoid shedding the blood of the last caliph, which they thought would bring bad luck, the Mongols rolled him up in a carpet and pounded him to death. So ended five hundred years of a dynasty claiming to be vicars of the Prophet Muhammad, although by that time they had largely lost any secular power. The end of the caliphate may also have allowed the flourishing of humanist and secular literature in the Muslim world, since there was no longer any central religious authority.

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

85

Not only was the caliphate gone, but for centuries thereafter Inner Asian pastoralists would form governments in Iran and neighboring areas, bringing their pan-Asian humanism to the fore. Bausani and the British Persianist Peter Avery both saw the Rubáiyát as a frontier literature.15 The “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam” thus began in an age when East Asian Buddhists ruled Iran. Its attention to the ephemerality of life may have been reinforced by Buddhist philosophy. Whereas heterodox poetry may have been orally transmitted in previous epochs, in the Mongol period poets and their compilers, freed from many restraints of clerical orthodoxy, were able to share around their manuscripts. It appears that Mongol Tabriz was an especially important site for the transmission and production of this material. Unconventional quatrains from previous eras were prized and cultivated by distinct social groups during the Mongol period, with new ones being composed. Some of these were ascribed to Khayyam in this era. While Mongol rule probably liberated cities such as Tabriz from many conventional constraints, the Mongol notables themselves early on seemed to be more comfortable with their nomadic Mongol ways and lived on the plains outside the cities they had conquered, tending their now rural feudal states from their tents in which they continued to live. The Mongol rulers, as they learned Persian, would have delighted in the themes of the Persian wine poems and celebrations of tent parties with dancing girls and music. The

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

86

Flemish monk and traveler Willem van Ruysbroeck, known in English as William of Rubruck (c. 1210–70), described their revelries: . . . they have wine brought unto them from farre countries. In summer time they care not for any drinke, but Cosmos [qumis, i.e. fermented mare’s milk]. And it standeth alwaies within the entrance of his doore, and next unto it stands a minstrell with his fidle . . . And when the master of the house begins to drinke, one of his servants cryeth out with a lowde voice HA, and the minstrell playes upon his fidle. And when they make any great solemne feast, they all of them clap their hands & daunce to the noyse of the musique, the men before their master and the women before their mistresse . . . Then drinke they all around both men and women: and sometimes they carowse for the victory very filthily and drunkenly.16 Mongol women rode horses like men, mixed with men at parties, engaged in public erotic dancing, and clearly had great freedom of movement. Mongols employed female servers of alcoholic beverages as well as men, so that in this context the saqi or cup bearer was not always male. Iran under the Mongols sounds like a physical manifestation of the unconventional quatrains. One historian wrote that when the Mongols settled down, they took up wine (more easily stored for long periods

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

87

than fermented mare’s milk) with even greater abandon, being idle. He added: In Iran, taverns and brothels flourished under Mongol (Il-Khanid) rule (1256–1336), their business intertwined to the point where the two were often indistinguishable. Public drunkenness in urban areas had a negative effect on law and order, with drunks harassing people in bazaars and getting into brawls that caused injuries and fatalities.17 Persian chroniclers of a more prudish mindset sniffed that Mongol rulers such as Gaykhatu (r.  1291–5) were addicted to wine, women, and young men.18 In other words, Gaykhatu sounds rather Omarian. The early Mongols were Buddhists and promoted Buddhism in Iran, although they never declared it the official religion. Hülegü built three Buddhist temples, one in Armenia and two in Iran. An Armenian chronicler said that Hülegü called together a large number of skilled workmen, who constructed a great temple for “enormous idols.” He was said to prostrate himself “many times a day” and kiss the ground before the leader of the Buddhist lamas. Three subsequent Mongol rulers of Iran also strongly supported Buddhism, and large numbers of monks and mendicants made their way to Iran in that era.19 Buddhist scriptures stress that there are no stable entities (and no human souls), only ever-changing processes. The Buddhist sense of the

88

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

fleeting nature of life and of the objects people often senselessly crave pervades the Omarian poetry. Iranian Muslim thinkers debated Buddhists in the Mongol period and showed knowledge of the Buddhist scriptures.20 Mongol rulers also held interfaith gatherings for the purpose of discussing various religious traditions. Despite their devotion to Buddhism, the Mongols made their court at Tabriz and then Maragheh in northwestern Iran religiously pluralistic. Hülegü convened a council of thirty wise men in Baghdad to advise him, composed of five Arabs, five Iranians, five Greek Orthodox Christians, five Jews, five other Christians, and five Zoroastrians. He only went to war after consulting them and after they had cast a horoscope. The Muslim clergy in Baghdad were constrained to sign a legal edict declaring that a just non-Muslim ruler was better than an unjust Muslim one.21 The Mongol era in Iran, from the 1220s to the mid-fourteenth century, witnessed the growth of several social sites in which the Omarian verses were likely produced and transmitted. Two of them, socially high and low, were milieus in which purely secular writing could be done, with no cloak of allegory, metaphor, or mystical spirituality. The first secular setting was the Mongol court and its bureaucracy (the Divan), which employed specialists in Persian literature to write letters and chancery documents and to pen panegyrics praising the ruler. It also became a magnet for

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

89

“academics, scientists, poets, artists and philosophers of the east and the west hailing from a multitude of backgrounds and faiths.”22 Outside the government, urban poets often received prizes and patronage from Mongol notables. Iranian bureaucrats and litterateurs did not abandon Islam, but many did forsake a legalistic approach to the religion, experimenting with new cultural forms. For most of the Mongol period in Iran, whether in the capital at Tabriz or in satellite courts of Mongol princes in the provinces, the poets and literary figures employed by the state or patronized by the commanders were free—and likely encouraged—to pursue secular themes closer to those common in China than to Muslim norms in capitals such as Cairo to the west. The Mongols, despite how destructive their military conquests had been of urban institutions, were great patrons of the civilized arts once they settled in as rulers. They also established an astronomical observatory at Maragheh, promoting science. Some of its observations made their way to Copernicus and became a basis for his theory that the earth orbits the sun. Since Khayyam himself had been an astronomer and mathematician, this East Asian investment in the discipline may have revived his fame. Over time Mongol notables, under a vague influence of Chinese pragmatism, may well have found Iranian secular literature more appealing than Muslim pietism and so played a role in pulling it forward and seeing that it was preserved.

90

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Literary figures found it easier to carve out a secular sphere of life in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iran than in previous centuries. The Mongols brought into Muslim statecraft the East Asian principle that the temporal ruler is a legislator. Genghis Khan’s serial oral decrees (the tradition or Yasa) and rulers’ statutory legislation (jasaq) became a source of law in Iran alongside customary practices and the sharia of the seminarians. Mongols appear to have adopted from China the concepts of heaven or divine appointment and wang, the physical manifestation in this world of heaven’s sovereignty.23 Many subsequent Muslim rulers felt that they could overrule the regulations of Islamic law as elaborated by the clerics and jurists, for reasons of state. That the ruler was viewed as having the prerogative to legislate, and to contradict the clergy on the law, created a space of secularity in the post-Mongol states, including, later, the Ottomans and Mughals.24 In this space, irreligious court poetry could survive, and the claims clerics made in the Seljuk period on a prerogative to police wine drinking often became implausible. That later dynasties often sought to clothe themselves in the legitimacy of descent from the Mongols may also have led them to imitate Mongol court practices and wine-pride. (Drinking wine was often justified on the grounds that it was good for the health and therefore consonant with the spirit, if not the letter, of Islam.) The chronicles of medieval and early modern Islam are replete with accounts of alcoholic Muslim

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

91

sovereigns who regularly threw racy banquets, in the same way that the Mongols did. Mongol values seeped into Persian literature. The Mongol notables brought with them ideas such as the impersonal “heaven” (Mongol Tenggeri, Turkic Tanri, Chinese Tian) that directed the fate of human beings and appointed rulers.25 This notion was perhaps translated by Iranians with reference to the old pre-Islamic Arab idea of dahr or impersonal time-fate. They also appreciated wine poetry. In one classical Chinese poem, Tao Yuanming (365–427) complains that his sons are lazy or dim-witted and that his life has not turned out as he expected. He concludes: “If Heaven treats me like this,/ What can I do but fill my cup?”26 At the same time, the Buddhist lamas of the Mongols taught the impermanence of the world. By this time there was a long tradition of Persian humanism and secularism. As patrons of culture and funders of poetic production, the Mongols may well have chosen out for praise and support that Persian poetry most influenced by pre-Islamic themes of timefate (dahr), the inscrutable actions of heaven (falak), and wine drinking (khamriyat)—themes that had analogues in their own literary traditions. Some of this literature had been produced in the Seljuk period, in the 1000s and 1100s, and anthologists revived it; some was newly written. In short, the Mongols and their Iranian courtiers may well have impelled a big revival of earlier libertine (jahiliyah) themes

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

92

such as the wine frenzy celebrated in pre-Islamic odes or the libertine style of life commemorated by the Abbasid courtier Abu Nuwas. In the decades before they converted to Islam, the Mongol rulers would not have cared in the least that the Muslim seminarians abhorred this secular Muslim counterculture and would have countenanced no heresy trials by qadis, or Muslim court judges, who were constructing the medieval sharia. Even after they began embracing Islam, few princes and chieftains were likely sticklers for orthodoxy. The often secular Persian bureaucratic class would have acted as an intermediary for the solicitation of this kind of culture. Some of the skepticism and the desolation in the poetry may have derived from the life experience of Iranians in this tumultuous era full of death and alien conquest. The impermanence of life and the arbitrariness of heaven was apparent to all who lived through the Great Massacres conducted by Mongol armies. It was natural for unsettled Iranians to wonder in the thirteenth century why they had been put on earth, to feel life’s meaninglessness, and to question God’s justice and even his existence. One Persian poet employed by the Mongol state in Iran was Pur-Baha’, known for his irreverence and even obscenities, and for sprinkling his Persian praises of the Mongols with nowobscure Mongol vocabulary. His poetry refers to beautiful women as houris (the virginal females promised to believers in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

93

heaven), but otherwise has little Islamic about it, speaking of Fortune (dawlat) guiding the fates of human beings rather than referencing “God.”27 This secular culture became a court tradition that continued even as the Mongols embraced Islam, and even under successor states such as the Turkic Timurids in Central Asia or the Mughals in India. Ata-Malik Juvayni (1226–83), from a family of bureaucrats that served the Mongol state, attributed a quatrain to Omar Khayyam in his great chronicle of Mongol rule, A Chronicle of World Conquest.28 The brutal bloodshed of the Mongol hordes in Khurasan near Nishapur (the actual Khayyam’s birthplace) reminded Juvayni of this poem: Not even a drunk would try to sunder the graceful stem and bowl of a wine glass. As for the shapely hands and feet of a temptress, for whom are they crafted? And whose hatred in the end shatters them? The quatrain here said to be Khayyam’s, which was also ascribed to other authors, points to the cruelty of the death that God imposes on the creatures he supposedly lovingly fashioned and wonders whether the same deity is capable of both fond creation and vicious destruction. It is possible that this poem contains a Zoroastrian, dualist critique of Islam’s monotheistic approach to theodicy or

94

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

divine justice. Zoroastrianism attributed falsehood and death to Ahriman, the god of evil, and all things good to Ahura Mazda. The piece is saying, in part, that the Muslim monotheist assertion that God is a loving creator and all-powerful is contradicted by the horrible disfiguring deaths that his creatures often meet. This poem could be a sign of covert continued Zoroastrian dualism in Khurasan or eastern Iran centuries after the Muslim conquest. It could also, however, just be a critique of the inscrutability of fate, in the style of pre-Islamic Arab verse. Juvayni also quotes another Omarian quatrain elsewhere in his history, but does not ascribe it to the astronomer. As Francois de Blois wrote, “In the Mongol period ‘Khaiyam’ is no longer a historical person but a genre.”29 The historian Abd Allah “Vassaf ” Shirazi (fl. 1299–1323) even used a quatrain ascribed to Khayyam in his obituary for the Mongol ruler Ghazan, in which he said that under the feet of every fool is clay containing the remains of past beauties.30 The stanza is reminiscent of FitzGerald’s 1:18: “I sometimes think that never blows so red/ The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; / That every Hyacinth the Garden wears/ Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.” To be sure, Vassaf had the grace not to mention any buried Caesars in his obituary, but did quote very similar sentiments about buried lovely heads. Historians living during the Mongol era appear to have thought that unconventional verse recalling the themes of life’s impermanence, in the way of the pre-Islamic poets or Abu al-A`la al-Ma’arri

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

95

(973–1057), was especially suited to quotation about the predations of the Mongols and their own deaths. Although Mongol rule in much of Iran actually stretched from the early 1220s through to the mid-1300s, the historical convention is to speak of the state established by Hülegü in Iran as the “Il-Khanids” (“Chieftains of the Tribe”), which is typically dated 1256 to 1335. (Mongol successor states such as the House of Jalayir and the House of Inju ruled parts of Iran until the Timurid Empire was established in 1370.) For textual history, Sayyid ‘Ali Mir-Afzali has assembled the Omarian quatrains that appear in manuscripts from about 1250 to about 1400 CE, either attributed to Omar Khayyam early on or as anonymous compositions that were ascribed to him only in later centuries.31 We can now begin to trace the appearance and long-term popularity of these quatrains in various parts of the Muslim world—regions of Iran, India, the Ottoman Empire and so forth—over centuries. Likewise, we can study reception history: the ways in which audiences responded to these works. If it is true, as Umberto Eco has argued, that every form of literature calls forth its own readership, the Omarian poetry created sites of appreciation in diverse social circles such as the royal court, the guild gathering or workplace (people often recited poetry while working), the tavern, the Sufi chanting circle, and the underworld of macho youth gangs or beggars’ societies.32

96

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Only four quatrains were ever attributed to Khayyam before the Il-Khanid state, all of them in the first third of the thirteenth century, and these were also attributed to other figures such as the philosopher Avicenna. Between Hülegü ‘s establishment of the Il-Khanid Empire in 1256 and the death of its last strong emperor, Abu Sa‘id Bahadur Khan (r.  1316–35), according to Mir-Afzali anthologists ascribed fifty-one discrete quatrains to Omar Khayyam by name.33 Juvayni’s citation was one of these. What was the Mongol-era image of the astronomer?

The Mongol Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam A fifth of these Mongol-era verses projected on Khayyam the themes made famous by al-Ma‘arri: that life is short and our fate is to die and become dust and clay. Another fifth focus on the Abu Nuwas tradition of praising wine as a source of wisdom, joy, and fulfillment in life. Yet another fifth discuss the inscrutability of life, our inability to understand it, and its bleakness. Nearly another fifth complain of the injustice of God or the relentless, deadly revolutions of the vault of heaven. Ten percent recommend wine drinking as the proper response to the inexorability of fate and death, in the way of the pre-Islamic poets of the “Age of Ignorance.” The rest address miscellaneous themes such as the beauty of nature. One of these poems (which does not appear in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

97

the later Yerbudaki manuscript and therefore is not among the quatrains in this book) actually uses the technical vocabulary of Jahili verse and is the only one of this Mongol-era batch with Khayyam’s name on it explicitly to deny the afterlife: Since in Time/Fate (Dahr) the call of the rose is renewed, my idol issues her dictum that wine is best. Abandon all thought of houris and celestial palaces, and of heaven and hell—for they are empty words.34 The Mongol Khayyam was a dour philosopher, grumpy about the meaninglessness of life, its shortness, and the prison of predestination. It is rare for the verses ascribed to him, however, to deny the afterlife (only one of the fifty-one does so), whereas this theme was prominent and striking in the FitzGerald translation. Only a third of the poems attributed to him in the Mongol period celebrated wine, and there is little love poetry. The romantic Khayyam of “underneath the bough,” who so excited twentieth-century English speakers, is rather absent. None of these thirteenth-century quatrains attacks astrology, a common theme in later stanzas ascribed to the astronomer, and so there is less play on his scientific skepticism. Likewise, there is little Sufi mysticism here. Only one poem mentions the figure of the Qalandar or wandering mystic (in the real Khayyam’s lifetime, this figure had not yet become iconic). Another celebrates the sacrificing of one’s reputation by wine drinking, a theme of Sufis

98

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

wishing to avoid the pride of high esteem in society for their piety. There is otherwise no anticlericalism or antinomianism—that is, the poetry does not generally reject socially established morality, save for the pride in being able to drink great quantities of wine. One of the sources for Rubáiyát in the Mongol period is the compendium of Jamal Khalil Shirvani, which was published in manuscript in Tabriz around 1256, some twenty years after direct Mongol rule began there under Arghun Agha. The poets to whom he ascribed these quatrains had for the most part been active in the previous, Seljuk Empire, although some older contemporaries of Shirvani such as the Sufi Awhad al-Din Kirmani (d. 1237) are represented as well. He included a fair amount of anonymous verse, some of which may also have been contemporary—that is, Mongol—literature, and the anonymity of which may have been intended in some instances to protect the reputation of poets he knew in Tabriz. One anonymous quatrain urges the server to pour out wine to people of all descriptions, “For in the path of lovers, whether people of faith or unbelief,/ their souls are of equal worth, cupbearer!”35 This is a radically secular assertion and in my view it is no accident that its author hid his or her identity since, even in a Mongol-ruled city, poets had to deal with other, sometimes hidebound, Muslims. It would make sense, moreover, if this pluralistic poem had been composed by an Iranian contemporary of Shirvani’s, living under a Mongol, Buddhist government. At the time Shirvani’s

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

99

manuscript was promulgated, Hülegü was holding his multifaith convocations, with Muslims, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists debating one another. Clearly, many of the themes in the unconventional, secular quatrain literature existed in the earlier Seljuk period, in the 1000s and 1100s, but they may have had to remain oral because of hard-line clerical opposition. That Shirvani could publish in writing this massive volume of over 4,000 quatrains, some of them unorthodox, was possibly permitted by Buddhist rule. Certainly, the quatrain quoted above in pre-Islamic style would have angered the professional clergy of the Seljuk period, 1037– 1194. But by the time Shirvani promulgated his manuscript in 1256, after four decades of Mongol activity in northwestern Iran, the clerics’ power had been deeply weakened. Another caveat is that the earliest manuscript we have for the Shirvani compendium dates from 1331, copied by one Isma‘il Abhari and now held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. Since copyists in the medieval era often also shaped the work, we cannot be sure that the Istanbul manuscript faithfully reflects the original. Abhari may have added or subtracted material. There is, for instance, an appendix to the manuscript entitled something like “Omariana,” which gives a few quatrains attributed to the astronomer along with similar verses from other poets. It cannot be assumed to have been in the 1258 work. Abhari also includes toward the end of the manuscript a short appendix of “poetry

100

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

complaining about the vault of heaven,” which may also be late. Medieval Iranians held that the sky was a hard turquoise shell that crushed human beings with the weight of its revolutions. In other words, the vault of heaven functioned very similarly to the idea of time-fate in pre-Islamic poetry, against which the early Arabs had also railed. Indeed, one of these “vault of heaven” pieces is an explicit Dahr poem, lamenting the unhappiness and uselessness of life, which is attributed implausibly to the devout Sufi Awhad al-Din Kirmani.36 In his main text, Shirvani gave seventy-three wine quatrains, all of them in a style later considered typical of Khayyam, although only a handful of these were here ascribed to him. These quatrains are a font of medieval secularism, expressing in New Persian many of the sentiments of the pre-Islamic and Abu Nuwas traditions. While in Shirvani’s time the Mongols may not yet have learned to appreciate Persian, their bureaucracy was filled with Iranians who served their court and took advantage of their freedom from clerical strictures to construct an Iranian secularism. They hosted the kind of evening sessions in Tabriz at which this wine verse could usefully be quoted. As time went on, the Mongols themselves and later nomad dynasties in Iran did learn the language and this genre provided entertainment at their drinking banquets. Issues of attribution aside, Shirvani likely did preserve some of the private wine poetry of the late Seljuk state, which had faced

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

101

increasing pressure from the clerics to allow them to try cases of wine-bibbing in Islamic law courts. More verses in this style were composed in the Mongol period and published anonymously. By the 1250s when Shirvani published his compendium, any clerical strictures had become a less powerful consideration, since rule had passed decades before to the powerful Mongol moyons or Buddhist landholding notables. The previously largely oral Seljuk court tradition was revived, transmitted, and added to in the Mongol period and after. In manuscripts surviving from the late 1200s, the height of Mongol power in Iran, a handful of Omarian quatrains were published by other authors or editors. The 1295 Gleams of the Lamp (Lam‘at al-Siraj), written in the reign of the Mongol emperor of Iran, Gaykhatu, ascribes a handful of quatrains to Khayyam. One of them was later selected by Yerbudaki (my number 135): How long will I obsess about what I have or what I don’t? Or whether I’ll spend a life of joy or not? So pour me a bold Shiraz, since no one knows if I’ll get to exhale this breath that I am drawing in.37 This is secular poetry in the sense that there is nothing prayerful or otherworldly about its recommendation of resignation to

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

102

not knowing our fate (will we be happy or not, prosperous or not?). It advises wine intoxication as a way of calming down about these anxieties, and notes that no one is even assured of living past mid-breath. There is no sense of supernatural transcendence here, and no counsel save for acceptance and this-worldly inebriation. Gaykhatu was reputed to be a great drinker and carouser, and at the same time a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism. His lamas gave him the name Rinchen Dorje at an investiture ceremony.38 The themes in this poem, of the impermanence (Skr. anitya) of human life and the desirability of detachment from anxieties (Skr. duhkha) over owning things, are common Buddhist sentiments, although the recommended solution is not. Gaykhatu combined in himself the two themes in the poem, of Buddhist belief in the impermanence of the things of this world and the consolations of wine. While these subjects were hundreds of years old by then in Arabic and Persian poetry, the atmosphere of Gaykhatu’s reign may have led to their being written down and shared in manuscript. Even after many Mongols gradually converted to Islam around the turn of the fourteenth century, they retained for some time a Buddhist sensibility. Some of their mothers or cousins held out longer than others, and conversions are in any case always incomplete. Ghazan Khan (r. 1295–1304) was among the converts. But it is recorded that in 1304 he gave a eulogy

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

103

speech at the funeral for his late wife Karamun Khatun at which he said: The most difficult thing is to be born, to come into the world, because all trials and tribulations, all suffering and torment, are due to life. If there were no existence, there would be no difficulty. There is no greater repose for a human being in the world than death.39 This statement merely echoes the first pillar of the Buddhist four noble truths: that life is pain or dissatisfaction (Skr. duhkha). This sentiment is reflected in one of the quatrains that later appeared in the Yerbudaki manuscript (my number 123): Since the only things a person in this wasteland gains are pain and death, the light-hearted are those who take off soonest; and the ones at peace are those who never even came here. It is entirely possible that this quatrain was composed for a Buddhist or Buddhist-heritage patron in the Mongol era. Another compilation of Persian quatrains was made in the 1320s, late in the Mongol period in Iran, by the major anthologist Abu al-Majd Tabrizi. A bureaucrat working in the Mongol (IlKhanid) capital of Tabriz, he included in his collection a manuscript entitled The Final Word on the Poetry of the Rubaiyat,

104

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

with some 500 poems. The book focused on love poetry. This anthology only attributed three quatrains to Khayyam, although it contains many stanzas later fathered upon him by Yerbudaki, which Tabrizi explicitly labels “anonymous.”40 The Tabriz compendium shows that the unconventional quatrains continued to be popular in the Mongol period after the conversion of the rulers to Islam, but that anthologists had not yet, as of the early fourteenth century, attributed most such skeptical and libertine verse to Khayyam.

The Ilkhanid underworld Another social location for the generation of the Omarian poetry may have been street gangs dedicated to honor and manliness. In the early 1300s the celebrated Moroccan traveler Muhammad Ibn Battuta visited the Mongol-ruled Iranian city of Isfahan and described being hosted by such a youth group, two hundred strong, some of whom were artisans and others described as celibate young men from urban districts. They were said to hold elections for their leader, and to meet every evening to share the day’s earnings. Youth gangs in city neighborhoods were intertwined with artisans’ guilds, but had their own identity and activities.41 Some bands of young men appear sometimes to have been younger auxiliaries of the Iranian crafts guilds, while others were rooted in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

105

urban neighborhoods. The guilds were another form of temporal civil society and were administered by secular administrative courts in Iran rather than by religious qadis. The craftsmen, too, likely produced, performed, and transmitted the Persian quatrain traditions, whether conventional or unconventional. In addition, Middle Eastern towns and cities had a seedy underworld, including networks of beggars and petty criminals, some of whom probably cultivated poetry celebrating winepride and manly resignation to the humiliations of an erratic fate.42 This milieu likely produced the following poem, number 6 in my translation, which is later than the Mongol era: Here we shiver on stools with our wine and that broken-down old stove. We’ve lost all hope of mercy, and all fear of torment. Soul and heart, cup and cloak—all a sacrifice for that one drink. Now we’re free of earth and air, and fire and water. This lament comes from a poor alcoholic who has had to pawn his winter coat for his wine and is freezing in a broken-down wine house on the outskirts of the city away from respectable folk, which does not even have a functioning stove (Iran can have hard winters). Nevertheless, this poem says, the wino in this condition has achieved a kind of transcendence and gone beyond

106

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

the four elements of creation. It is not the sentiment of a wealthy court astronomer but of a worker down on his luck. There is nothing mystical about it, and no sign of religious faith, although there is a hint of secular transcendence. FitzGerald did not translate it, perhaps since he preferred happy drunks to mean ones. Whether at the top of the social hierarchy in the Mongol courts, then, or at the bottom among urban street gangs or networks of beggars and petty criminals, straightforwardly secular poetry was produced, cultivated, and appreciated. The eastern reaches of the Muslim Middle East were periodically shaken by these Central Asian conquerors all through the period from about the 800s CE and until the late eighteenth century. The Mongols were a new kind of worldempire, but they were part of a long-term impact of inner Asian pastoralism on the urban civilizations of what are now Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. These nomadic incursions weakened urban, literate orthodoxies and created spaces for imaginative subcultures. While Iran was hardly foreordained to turn Shi‘i after 1501 once the Safavids came to power, that it did so is hardly surprising given its frontier existence. A list of religious and cultural movements in Mamluk Egypt would be decidedly less colorful than those produced in the hothouse atmosphere in the east, which bordered on the wild and woolly steppes of Inner Asia. Since we know that Iran all through history but especially under the Mongols was intimately connected to China, including in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

107

ceramics, painting, and other areas of culture, it is not fanciful to suggest some mingling of sensibilities. The Inner and East Asian sensibilities of rulers likely played a role in promoting Omarian poetry and making it popular. Several generations of Persian poets tried to please the bureaucrats of the Mongol court and then, over time, the Mongol and Turkic rulers themselves with their verse. We can locate several social milieus that likely produced unconventional and secular-minded verse, including the Mongol state and its litterateurs, the youth gangs of urban quarters, the networks of beggars and petty criminals, and heterodox mystics.

Sufism and secularism The Mongol era in Iran also saw the rise of three new Muslim institutions where unconventional, anti-legalistic verse could flourish.43 These included Sufi brotherhoods, the physical edifices (khanqahs) where they gathered for rituals and social events, and the practice of young men becoming wandering dervishes or devotees of the mystical (or dissolute) path. The rise of these institutions created new spaces for the production, transmission, and cultivation of the unconventional quatrains. First, there was a flourishing of Sufi orders or brotherhoods, who created an allegorical language of inner fulfillment and the superiority of the spirit to the strict letter of the law.44 Under the

108

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Mongols, who did not generally concern themselves over the feelings of the legalistic clergy, the seminary and mosque were unable to repress these dissident movements. Sufis sought to climb a spiritual ladder of alternative states of consciousness and ethical insight, and spoke of attaining union with the divine beloved. They had a belief (not unlike that of later Quakers in the West) that inner light and inner insight were superior to scriptural literalism. One way some of the skeptical, love and wine poetry survived and flourished in literate Muslim society is that it took on a sacred aura. Most institutional Sufi orders were pious, “sober,” and this-worldly, becoming intertwined with social institutions such as the trade guilds and receiving patronage from rulers. They were led by Sufi masters, called in Persian “elders” (pir). Some orders emphasized self-denial and asceticism, and so held values opposite from those in the Omarian quatrains. These ascetics in the institutional urban orders were not, however, monks. Most Sufis also pursued a secular occupation and were good family men. Adherents would gather at the mosque on Thursday evenings and chant spiritual verses, or they might march in city parades on holy days. Some of the Omarian Rubáiyát treat mystical themes. Quatrain number 14 in my translation says: At first, I sought the pen of destiny, and the eternal tablet it etched out,

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

109

and hell and heaven in the world beyond. My sage then said: “Look for all four within!” This quatrain asserts that the chief Muslim symbols of divinity—the pen of the Almighty and the pre-existent tablet on which the word of God and the future of the world was written— are internal to the human soul. Some of the unconventional quatrains, then, came from circles of dissident believers who located spiritual values within, but who might not have rejected the meaningfulness of life, or doctrines such as the resurrection, and may not have been particularly given to hard drinking in taverns. Their sentiments would still have offended legalist clergy, however. The “inner light” Sufi themes in the Omarian collections are distinct from the more aggressively secular ones coming in part from the pre-Islamic and Abu Nuwas corpus of Arabic poetry and from irreligious poets of later times, although those Sufis who flouted Muslim law sometimes found a framework in which to unify all these memes. In the Seljuk era, Ahmad al-Ghazzali, brother of the famed scholastic Sufi thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (d. 1126), created what was called the “school of love.”45 Here is an example of verses attributed to him: “My love, serve the wine that/ perfects the spirit of the intellect;/ make me drunk, even though it’s forbidden, not permitted, until I become as nothing . . .”46 The poem turns metaphysical toward the

110

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

end, signaling that it is not secular writing, but much of it could as well have been put into the Omarian corpus. Those scholars, whether Muslims or Europeans, who privileged mosque orthodoxy as central to Muslim history have seen Abu Hamid as the pivotal thinker, because he is said to have reconciled Sufi mysticism and seminary disciplines such as law (fiqh). His brother, Ahmad al-Ghazzali was arguably more consequential, however, insofar as he was among those mystics credited by successors with having adapted the language of secular love poetry to religious uses, depicting God as the beloved in this scenario. After the Sufi “school of love” spread, love and wine poetry became dual-use. The import of these verses depended on the setting in which they were quoted. They could indicate a flight of religious ecstasy, but could be used in evening sessions by courtiers for secular purposes. They also provided camouflage to the Abu Nuwases of the Middle Ages. Secular-minded poets who got into trouble with the orthodox could always claim actually to be speaking allegorically. Religious Muslims could read the poetry, and pass it on, without embarrassment. The secular-minded could read it concretely and enjoy it as fleshly. As we have seen, these questions of how to read the Omarian quatrains perplexed Edward Cowell and Charles Eliot Norton in Victorian times. They inherited the camouflage in which much secular sentiment was wrapped in the medieval Muslim world. The Yerbudaki compendium has a

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

111

quatrain (54 in my translation) that remarks on this dual use of love poetry: My heart, the quest for union with God is beset by disorders. Don’t busy yourself for a while with love. Seek instead the company of mystics, and so gain acceptance by those whom God accepts. Along with the brotherhoods, another institution spread west from Central Asia in this period: the Sufi center or khanqah. These buildings served as meeting places and inns for the mystics, and may have been modeled originally on Buddhist monasteries in Central Asia. Importantly, they became an alternative center of religious authority to the mosque and the seminary. Most Sufis also went to mosque, but the clerics in charge of the mosques no longer had a monopoly on sacred space in the city. The khanqah was a place where Sufi orders could legitimately meet and organize away from the supervision of legalistic seminarians. One group that likely created and transmitted some of these unconventional quatrains was itinerant Sufi mystics, whether actually pious or charlatans who deployed mysticism as a justification for breaking Islamic law. Some brotherhoods of itinerant devotees or dervishes grew up in opposition to the settled orders, as a sort of medieval counterculture. In many

112

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

instances, those who joined appear to have been engaging in an adolescent rebellion. These groups that “dropped out” were in turn divided into pious ascetics on the one hand and lawless bands on the other. The latter rejected Muslim morality and norms as propounded by the madrasa-trained clergy. They argued that the normative self of mainstream Muslim society contained a fatal contradiction, since piety should lead to selflessness, whereas in reality flaunting piety in public leads to pride. Only by violating respectable mores and by drinking in public or being promiscuous, for instance, can the mystic truly humiliate the prideful self and come closer to God.47 (This logic runs throughout the Rubáiyát attributed to Omar Khayyam and struck FitzGerald as “strong” or “wicked.”) One historian of the unconventional dervish orders cautions against seeing them solely as a manifestation of popular religion or of the illiteracy of the masses, pointing to evidence that they were distinct in their values from other popular religious manifestations, and recruited from the literate middle and upper classes as well as among tradesmen.48 Religious attitudes in the medieval and early modern Middle East in any case should be seen on a spectrum from the irreverent to the pious. “Folk religion” is just one sort of piety, rather than a residual category into which everything can be stuffed except the seminary-produced works of formal urban, literate Islam. One of these unconventional orders was the Qalandariya. Individual dervishes took up a life of wandering in the eleventh

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

113

century, but were seemingly a minor phenomenon. They likely coalesced as orders and bands of itinerant Sufis from the middle of the thirteenth century. Some of the stanzas later ascribed to Khayyam originated in Qalandari circles. The Mongol invasions de-urbanized Iran, producing mass flight from the cities and an unsettled social situation in which young men might take to a life on the road. The major order of Qalandar wandering mystics in Iran was the Haydari. The nomad Mongol armies for the most part had not destroyed the cities, but they almost certainly left them with much smaller populations, given the widespread loot, pillage, and flight of inhabitants. There is no direct evidence that the wandering Sufis were directly influenced in their ideas by the shamans or Buddhist monks (Skr. bhiksu) that the Mongols brought along with them, but they may have emulated some practices of the latter. Wandering Buddhist monks who begged from believers were an ancient institution in Central Asia, and were visible as models in Mongol Iran.49 Some top Mongol rulers disliked the Qalandars, as any ruling establishment would (wanderers are often difficult to control). Others, however, patronized them. We know that the Juvayni clan of Iranian bureaucrats serving the Mongols had ties to Qalandars. Teguder (r. 1282–4), the first Mongol ruler in Iran to convert to Islam, had links to unconventional Sufis. The Mongol emperor Ghazan (r.  1295–1304) founded a khanqah and was favorably disposed to at least two Qalandar dervish groups, one

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

114

in Iraq and one that wandered from Iran to Jerusalem and was expelled by the Mamluk government before they returned to Iran’s Gilan province to fight for the Mongols. There are reports of some Mongols from outside the ruling dynasty of Il-Khans converting and adopting Qalandari beliefs and lifestyle, and they would have brought their own ideas into the tradition.50 Unconventional quatrains of the Omarian sort were part of that style of life. As bands of hearty young men, often with few compunctions, they could be dangerous, and some notables may have attempted to please them to avoid trouble. Something that sounds to me like a Qalandari brotherhood tried to make a coup against the Mongol ruler Ghazan late in 1303 by intriguing with a rival prince, alleging to him that they had the power to perform saintly miracles and could make the prince rich and powerful.51 Qalandars maintained that outward shows of Muslim piety and obedience to the law led to pride and thence to damnation, and that a truly selfless mystic had to court a ruined reputation by sinning in public. These sentiments are prominent in the quatrains that Yerbudaki later chose out and attributed to Khayyam. Reversals of status hierarchies by subcultures are common in history. The Amish and Mennonites, for instance, are appreciated by coreligionists for being “plain,” whereas socialites in urban high society gain status by being fashion plates. PurBaha’ described Qalandars of the Mongol period traveling in

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

115

bands as large as a hundred, wearing strips of goat hair, having shortened their beards by singeing them, wearing ear-rings and penis piercings, going naked and clutching themselves. Others wore clothes, including the woolen robes typical of Sufis (suf means wool in Arabic), but preferred white or black to the usual Sufi blue. All of them went barefoot.52 A prominent Iranian Qalandar of those times, Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi (1213–89) of Hamadan, spent much of his life wandering in what is now Pakistan, Turkey, and the Arab world.53 Three unconventional quatrains are attributed to ‘Iraqi that were said by other medieval anthologists to be the work of Khayyam. ‘Iraqi was among those mystics who maintained the belief that they could see God’s face in the handsome visages of young men. In the 1260s ‘Iraqi settled in Konya in Anatolia, then ruled by a vassal of the Mongols, Mu‘in al-Din Pavana. There he met the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi and studied the mystical philosophy of the Andalusian Muhyi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi with one of his prominent disciples. The flourishing of Sufi thought in Konya in this era may well have been owed to Mongol suzerainty, which weakened the legalistic Muslim establishment that often despised Ibn ‘Arabi and had doubts about Rumi. ‘Iraqi developed ties of patronage with Pavana and with the Juvayni clan of high Mongol administrators. When Pavana was disgraced, the Juvaynis intervened from Tabriz to protect ‘Iraqi from being ostracized along with him. It is therefore likely that some of

116

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

‘Iraqi’s poetry was written for the Persian-speaking elite of the Mongol Empire and reflected its tastes. In keeping with the general pluralistic and skeptical atmosphere of Mongol times, ‘Iraqi was as capable of dismissing heaven and hell as the more secular poets did. He wrote: Abandon the lamp of the mosque and the smoke of the fire-temple, Dismiss the afflictions of hell and the benefits of heaven. Attend to the Tablet on which the Master of the Pen in pre-Eternity wrote out all that there would be.54 This quatrain combines two themes prominent in the Omarian tradition and FitzGerald’s rendering. The first is a downplaying of the significance of paradise and the inferno (whether because they do not exist or because it is abject to pursue a moral life only out of selfish considerations such as avoiding torture or seeking heavenly delights). This is FitzGerald’s 2:66: “O threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!/ One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;/ One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;/ The Flower that once is blown for ever dies.” Admittedly, this poem of ‘Iraqi is less explicit, but this stanza has the same skeptical tone toward the popular Muslim conception of the next world. The other theme is the inescapable fate decreed before time, which is sometimes coupled with a conviction that God would not be so cruel as both to predestine the deeds of the creatures and to punish them for those deeds. FitzGerald’s famous

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

117

verse was: “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,/ Moves on; nor all thy Piety and Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it” (1:51). Both of these famed FitzGerald quatrains contain elements common in the unconventional poetry of the Mongol period, whether ascribed to Qalandars such as ‘Iraqi or to scientists such as Khayyam. As with the Sufi school of love in general, ‘Iraqi’s wine and love poetry was intended to be a spiritual allegory. It leant itself, however, to more literal uses, both by wine-bibbing antinomian Qalandars and by secular anthologists seeking verse for a soiree. Thus, he wrote: “My head is eager for wine and you, its server/ By drinking from your lips I attain eternal life.”55 These verses are a form of hyperbole and even blasphemy if read as secular love poetry for a young male server in a tavern, but are unexceptional if they serve as an allegory for love of God. Such ambiguous stanzas by mystics of the school of love were later excerpted by anthologists for Omarian compendiums. Here is another one of ‘Iraqi’s quatrains: An old man came out of the tavern heavy-hearted, a wine mug in his hand. He said, “Drink wine, for in this abject world, only the drunk can escape himself.”56 This kind of poem was in succeeding centuries increasingly misattributed to Khayyam for non-Sufi purposes. This version of

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

118

the trope has the advantage of making explicit the theme of escaping the self, which characterizes the Omarian corpus broadly. There is one very like it in the Calcutta manuscript FitzGerald’s friend Edward Byles Cowell sent from India, and which FitzGerald translated (1:42): And lately, by the Tavern Door agape, Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder, and He bid me taste of it; and ‘twas—the Grape! This is how I render the original: I staggered, drunk, outside a bar last night and saw a tipsy older man emerge, a bottle slung across his shoulder; and I said to him, “At your age, aren’t you ashamed before the Lord Almighty?” He laughed, “God is merciful: Here, have some wine!”57 The poem in the Cowell manuscript is about social convention and the shame of drinking, a shame magnified in the case of the elderly, who in Muslim culture ought to have gotten beyond sowing wild oats and settled down to a life of prayer and righteousness in preparation for their imminent departure from this world. The quatrain depicts a younger drunk’s encounter with a brazen old lush, who dismisses such concerns about

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

119

appearances on the grounds that God’s mercy is big enough to forgive mere wine-bibbing. FitzGerald appears to have misread the Persian piri (old man) as pari (fairy or supernatural being) and so he made the verse about a divine approbation for drinking wine and missed the point of the original. ‘Iraqi also addressed another common theme in the unconventional quatrain tradition, that of human nothingness. He wrote: Even if they read all the books that exist they cannot enter through the curtains of mystery. The treasure chest of the secret of nothingness astounds; On how to open it, everyone’s head spins.58 The assertion that human beings are bewildered at the meaning of life and have little hope of solving that riddle runs through all the later Omarian tradition and played a large role in FitzGerald’s work. As with many such tropes, it can be read secularly as an assertion of life’s meaninglessness or spiritually as a recognition of the limitations of the intellect. That some of the work of ‘Iraqi resembles the poems in the Omarian tradition can be shown by simple comparison, but there is another connection, as well. Several quatrains were attributed to both men.59 There is thus firm reason to think that some of the Omarian quatrains came out of Qalandari circles, where drinking wine was often seen as an essential aid to the spiritual quest.

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

120

A Qalandar probably composed number 86 in the Yerbudaki manuscript (85 in my translation) and ascribed it to the astronomer: To follow in his path you must forsake both wife and child; a real man has no kin! All things that be, will bar your way. Throw off your chains—how else to tread a blocked up path? Normative urban Islam had no monasticism, and this sentiment would not be common among settled courtiers such as the actual Khayyam, who lived in an ever-married Muslim society. But one could hardly pursue the life of a wandering dervish and also have a family. As part of their asceticism, some wandering Sufis shaved off all facial hair: head, eyebrows, beard, and moustache (which was called striking the “four blows”). An Iranian branch of the wandering dervishes, the Haydaris, in contrast, wore their mustaches extremely long. Perhaps controversies over these customs regarding facial hair were referred to in my number 155: If that day comes when you acquire a crate of wine— drink up at every banquet, every gathering! Because the one who made the world could not care less, whether I wear a moustache or you sport a beard.

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

121

Another poem in my translation of the Shiraz manuscript, number 118, likely came out of the milieu of renunciatory Sufism, which shared some ideals with their contemporaries, the Franciscans in Catholicism: I’ve chosen my corner and two crusts of bread over this world. I’ve cast away ambition for high office and its pomp. I’ve purchased poverty with my very life and soul, and in my need have seen the height of luxury. Even institutional Sufis could sympathize with verses like these. A story is told of the Sufi master of Ardabil in northern Iran, Safi al-Din Ishaq (d. 1334), who lived at the height of Mongol rule. The elderly mystic complained of a stink in his study and requested a disciple to find it and get rid of it. This man, Abd alMaliki Saravi, thought it might be the latrine and so he filled it in with dirt. But that measure did not do the trick. The Sufi master kept complaining of the stench. Finally Saravi removed everything from the study, including a gold dish given him by the Mongol princess Qutlugh Malik, daughter of Emperor Gaykhatu. It turned out to have been the origin of the smell. Safi al-Din confessed that he felt “restless” at being indebted to princes.60 Not all those who dropped out of conventional society to pursue the mystical path (or just to seek out good times without

122

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

responsibility) were poor. But they aspired to a detachment from the material world, which is why they were called dervishes, from the Persian darvish or poor person. The Qalandars often stayed at the khanqah or Sufi center when they arrived at a new town. The Mongol period marked the advent in the Middle East of hashish, so khanqahs also sometimes functioned as drug dens. I have long suspected, in fact, that to the extent that “wine” in Persian poetry is allegorical, it is often being used to symbolize hashish. Other drugs were sometimes mixed into wine. For decades, Iranian Muslims were for the first time ruled by non-Muslims. During and after the Mongol era, which lasted into the middle of the 1300s, poets were less likely to gain a perch at court, and the framework of Muslim orthodoxy was widely challenged. Poets turned to subjective preoccupations, exploring emotions, moods, and mysticism. Some fifty-one quatrains were ascribed to Omar Khayyam during the Mongol period, a century to two centuries after the death of the astronomer, probably by poets afraid of associating their own names with themes that many Muslims would consider blasphemous.

Persian humanism It has been argued that one response of the landed Iranian elite families to the Arab conquest (and perhaps the Mongol conquest

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

123

as well) was the development of a form of Persian humanism, not rooted in the Muslim scripture, the Qur’an, but in a complex of Persian ideas.61 While this argument has merit, I should underline that much in the Omarian corpus goes beyond mere Muslim humanism into a realm of skeptical or epicurean secularism, so I am making a slightly different argument. In contrast, many Persian Muslim humanists, such as the poet Saadi Shirazi (d. 1291 or 1292), were relatively orthodox believers. The “Omar Khayyam” poems, which clearly originated in several different social settings, treated the capriciousness of fate and God, the joys of wine and amorous love, the likelihood that a cold grave is all the afterlife human beings will be offered, and the puzzling lack of meaning in life. A major trope, deriving from the medieval north Syrian poet Abu al-A‘la al-Ma‘arri, is that human beings become clay earth once they die, so all the clay vessels made by potters are actually the substance of past people, and the earth on which we walk is the scattered atoms of what were once beautiful women and attractive young men. Some of the actual, anonymous authors were probably the courtiers of impious princes. Others were rough soldiers in barracks. Yet others were wandering Sufi mystics, whether sober and pious or lawless and antinomian. Some of these secularminded poets were what we would now call LGBTQ, and their sexual identity made them question the norms of Muslim religious law as taught by literal-minded, firmly heterosexual

124

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

jurists. (Often the lovers celebrated in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam are gay, although the lack of gender in Persian pronouns makes them ambiguous.) Finally, notable urban professional poets often adopted the voice and themes of these other producers of skeptical and libertine quatrains, especially that of the merry rogues among the wandering dervishes or supposed Sufi mystics. A conviction survives in the Middle East and South Asia that this poetry is allegorical in the mystical Sufi manner, with wine serving as a symbol of intoxication with the divine. It is a good cover story, and perhaps true of some of the stanzas that derived from a Sufi milieu. Many Sufi mystics did use “wine” in a metaphorical way, to refer to intoxication with the worship of God, a tradition that even a puritan such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini perpetuated. (Khomeini outlawed the real thing, having thousands of wine bottles broken.) Most of the Omarian poetry, however, is aggressively secular and the wine is real and bright and bold, and I’m afraid that for the most part God doesn’t enter into it.

Lonely hearts and sexuality The medieval Persian quatrains also bear witness to the existence of a lot of lonely (and confused) hearts. Conventional sexual morality in medieval formal Islam did not differ much from that

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

125

in Judaism and Christianity of that era, with sex outside marriage or slavery seen as a major sin. It is true that in Europe, the Roman imperial legal tradition’s preference for monogamy eventually won out, while the Middle East continued to permit polygamy, but by law the marriage contract was still the key to sex. These quatrains are unconcerned with such considerations and their values sound like the “free love” and “open relationships” of the modernity and post-modernity. While gender segregation was practiced in the Middle East in some eras and among certain social classes, opportunities for flirting with the opposite sex existed in medieval Iran. Cousins were often allowed to mix socially. Outside the family, pastoralist and urban working women could not afford to veil or be cooped up at home. At the palace or in notables’ mansions, female dancers and serving girls were employed. As for sneaking out to an isolated garden or riverbank or oasis on a mixed-gender assignation, that also was clearly possible. The first illustrated manuscript of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, dated 1506 in Herat, includes a miniature in the school of Behzad showing a girl and boy cuddling in a garden to dramatize one of the quatrains.62 Those who insisted that female seclusion made such heterosexual trysts unlikely just took the protestations of clerical Islam too seriously or failed to reckon with the greater mobility and refusal of veiling and seclusion among Mongol women, and after the Mongol era, among their fourteenth- and

126

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

fifteenth-century successors, namely the Turkic dynasties that came in from Central Asia. The miniature painters were in no doubt that assignations were arranged, and thought nothing of showing unrelated men in the presence of unveiled notable women. Muslim young women were not the only possible objects of heterosexual affection. There were Zoroastrian and Armenian female wine servers and entertainers in the public taverns. The modern painter Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1897–1975) of Lahore, who pioneered a neo-Mughal style, depicted a female saqi or wine server in a 1928 illustrated book of the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, and this work was collected by the London Omar Khayyam Society. The picture suggests that women in Muslim India sometimes performed this role.63 The Christian young woman who seduces the Muslim male is a trope in the literature of the medieval period. The Mongol-era mystical poet Farid alDin ‘Attar in his Conference of the Birds told the story of how one Sheikh San‘an fell in love with a Christian girl, and as a result converted to Christianity for a while, drinking wine with her and herding her swine, until he came to his senses.64 Nor was the love only heterosexual. As Michel Foucault explained with regard to ancient Greece, there was no specific gay identity in the premodern Middle East.65 At the level of elites, people were divided into penetrators and penetratees, with women and slave-boys or free young men falling into the latter category. It would have been shameful for a male notable to be

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

127

penetrated, but not for him to penetrate others of either sex (at least, these were the values outside the mosque). This poetry, like the Arabic verses of Abu Nuwas in the Abbasid period, refers to lovers without much concern as to their gender, but significant numbers of the poems are probably by men and about male lovers. As one scholar of medieval Muslim sexuality put it, “the contemporary Western reader who has never perhaps questioned his holistic conception of homosexuality finds it ‘sliced up’ into a multitude of role specializations, since medieval authors usually see no ‘community of desire’ between, for instance, the active and passive partners of homosexual intercourse.”66 In fact, many contemporary categories are challenged by these verse traditions. There is a sense in which, in Persian erotic poetry, the young male (amrad) is neither a man nor a woman. Indeed, women themselves were often not thought of as a completely different gender but as imperfect males.67 Again, while temporal polite society often accepted these liaisons, many heterosexual clerics would have objected to them, but often to no avail. Throughout the heyday of the Ottoman Empire and well into the nineteenth century, its notables continued these bisexual practices and continued to write love poetry to adolescent young men.68 The popularity of the Rubáiyát, whether mystical or profane, was clear from an anthologist of the Mongol period, Abu alMajd, who observed, in compiling his selection of these poems, that “all people prefer the quatrain to other types of poetry.” In

128

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

part it is because of the metrical simplicity of this genre. “Moreover, every new and surprising idea occurring in a ghazal [analogous to a sonnet], is also splendidly expressed in a quatrain.”69 That is, the form’s uncomplicated rhythms and haiku-like ability concisely to convey original thoughts both attracted a large popular audience. But I am arguing that in many cases the authors of the quatrains not only imported original thoughts from Persian lyric poetry but also brought on board centuries-old secular conceptions present in the works of the Abbasid rake Abu Nuwas and the pre-Islamic Arab poets.

Khayyam as frame author Over time the conceit grew up that the mathematician Omar Khayyam, having spent the day proposing a geometric method for solving cubic equations, sat about in the evening in drafty, crumbling wine houses on the outskirts of Isfahan reciting drunken, randy poetry and chasing serving wenches or young men. This unlikely scenario became what literary theorists call a frame narrative, and Khayyam a frame author. This literary device was hardly unusual. We know that the stories in The Thousand and One Nights were produced over centuries, in Baghdad, Cairo, and Aleppo, by now-anonymous storytellers (some of them are a reworking of Indian or other Asian tales).

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

129

But all of them are attributed to the mythical Persian princess Scheherazade, depicted as being under a death sentence she can only postpone by telling fascinating stories parceled into segments with cliff-hanger endings to be continued at a future story-telling session. She is the “frame” author for them. Likewise, the Syrian compiler Abu al-Wafa’ al-Mubashshir made a celebrated medieval collection of aphorisms and wise sayings in Arabic but gave them a narrative frame story to enliven them, and the work proved so popular that it entered into Spanish literature in translation as Bocados de Oro el qual conpuso el rrey Bonium, rrey de Persia (Morsels of Gold as composed by King Bonium, Monarch of Persia).70 Frame stories are common in folklore, and are found in ancient Sanskrit literature.71 Once academic Persian specialists understood, in the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the Rubáiyát are not the work of a single, identifiable author, they dropped them like a hot kebab. The German scholar H. H. Schaeder researched the Rubáiyát and concluded in 1934 that Omar Khayyam’s name “must be struck out of the history of Persian poetry.” This conclusion has seldom been accepted among Iranian scholars of Persian literature, many of whom continue to ascribe authorship to the historical Khayyam and who tend to interpret the Rubáiyát as Sufi mysticism.72 In the Western academy, the widespread conviction that the Rubáiyát are anonymous has caused it to be dropped from the canon. The

130

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

modern study of literature typically centers on the iconic “author,” who is included in a list (“canon”) of creators whose works are thought by professors important to teach and interpret. Anonymous works tend to be neglected by scholars, in part because it is difficult to contextualize or problematize them. Philosopher Michel Foucault explained another dimension of the focus on works by named authors. He argued that an author’s name is always a means to classification of works, allowing us to collect together certain texts and to define a relationship among them. It names a form of discourse, and determines what status to accord it.73 Anonymous works are harder to mobilize for these classificatory purposes. The whole idea of the author is less obvious and more ambiguous in this era than is usually realized. Why were works so often misattributed or anonymous? What did ascription of a work to an author do for the body of knowledge represented by that work? What we would think of as misattribution had several origins. Copying a book is a tedious task and it is easy to leave out a word or phrase. Anthologists would list quatrains by author, and after a rubric with the author’s name, would then mark each subsequent poem with the notation: “also by him [or her].” All it took was for a scribe’s eye to miss the introduction of a new author name, and all the poems in the list would look like they belonged to the previous poet. In other instances, compilers may have felt they recognized the spirit of some Sufi mystic or literary

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

131

phenomenon in an anonymous poem, and ascribed it based on that intuition. (Even some twentieth-century Iranian writers used this “method”!) That sometimes copyists were trying to make a living by compiling poetry and attributing it to a popular figure like Abu Sa‘id also cannot be ruled out. Some of the contributors to the Omarian corpus may have been poets with a reputation, whose poems were misattributed to the astronomer. Notable women were also held to have written quatrains in the Omarian style, including the astronomer’s younger contemporary, Mahsati Ganjavi (1089–after 1159), who is variously depicted by later biographers as having been a court scribe or a singer and musician. She was said to be a consort of the Seljuk ruler Sultan Ahmad Sanjar (r. 1118–53). Her type is of the skeptical, accomplished, and determinedly free woman.74 It is ironic to think that the Victorian men who found in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát a new vision of masculinity may occasionally have been reading a quatrain originally composed by a female Muslim free spirit. A much less murky example of New Persian literature is the epic Book of Kings (Shahnameh) of Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi (d. 1020), one of the longer poems ever written, which retells the fables of the pre-Islamic Iranian kings and princes. (Some of these tales are analogues to myths also present in the Rig-Veda in Sanskrit.) One of the poems chosen by Yerbudaki (number 138) refers to these legends: “a cup of it surpasses the empire of

132

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Fereydun, and the lid of a wine jar outstrips the crown of KaiKhusrow.” According to the myths retold in the Shahnameh, Jamshid established an era of great civilization and prosperity. He had a magic goblet, in which he could see all things. The “cup of Jamshid” is therefore a marvel. Jamshid was overthrown by the monster-king Zahhak, who had zombie snakes growing out of his shoulders that devoured the brains of young men. He in turn was unseated and chained by a young warrior, Fereydun, who established a just kingdom.75 (Fereydun is an analog to the Vedic warrior-god Indra and to the Norse god Thor, and Zahhak is the historicized Iranian counterpart of the Sanskrit Vritra or worldserpent that was slain by Indra, or the Midgard serpent of the Thor saga.) Kai-Khosrow was also a fabled monarch who was said to have given Iran decades of prosperity and justice. This verse is maintaining that a cup of wine, symbolizing the magic chalice of Jamshid, is preferable to the warring and mere quotidian rule of a Fereydun or Kai-Khosrow. Unlike Firdawsi’s Shahnameh, to which we can assign a single author and a time and place (although it is based on the manuscripts and tales of previous authors going back hundreds of years), the Rubáiyát are wrought up with a long folk process of such Persian reassertion. One of the poems in the Yerbudaki collection (number 66) refers to this linguistic feature, saying the wisdom of the nightingales is expressed in the older form of Persian, which we now call Pahlavi. Zoroastrian aphorisms and

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

133

works of moral counsel continued to be valued by many Iranians even after they became Muslim: A day in spring, and gentle rain has washed the flowers’ faces. Nightingales sing in old Persian to the sallow yellow rose: “You’d get some color from a sip of wine!” This quatrain is implicitly suggesting that the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian custom of drinking wine is better for the health than puritan Muslim teetotaling. (In medieval Persian literature, moreover, the Zoroastrian wine house proprietor is a stock figure.) Likely it was fear that Muslim authorities might see the poetry as a form of Zoroastrian heresy that led Yerbudaki to preface his volume with a poem that was out of order, which addressed God, saying: “yet I do not despair of Your kindness—/ because I never have affirmed that One is Two.” That is, the author admits to being a common sinner but denies being a dualist (i.e. Zoroastrian) heretic. Zoroastrians were not actually dualists, since they thought the good God won out at the end of time, but were accused of being so by Muslim writers. If the author is unknown (or, worse, has deliberately remained anonymous), a question may be raised for readers of how “factual” his or her account of reality can be.76 But asking about factuality with regard to lyrical poetry is already strange. Perhaps we are thinking about this issue all wrongly, imposing an anachronistic

134

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

approach on medieval literature. Is the search for an “author” a modern artifact? A specialist in British literature has pointed out that much Restoration verse in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain was initially published anonymously, whether in manuscript or in printed pamphlets (including works by Andrew Marvell and John Oldham).77 Only later did scholars attempt to establish an author’s oeuvre and create critical editions. Eighteenth-century writers and readers may have valued anonymity. Readers were more free to excerpt poetry, make their own collections, and to guess about authorship, building reputations by their attribution. They received the poetry not as the work of the individual genius but as a contribution to an established genre, such as politics or eroticism. Many readers were interested not so much in the real-world author but in what some have called the “persona” or “pose” of the poetry. With erotic verse, “Anonymity frees the persona from the author, and in so doing invites the reader to write himself into this play of social and erotic fantasy.”78 Readers throughout the centuries built this sort of private fantasy world via the Rubáiyát. Despite the tradition of attributing the Rubáiyát to Khayyam, they were also often transmitted as anonymous and readers were freed by this ambiguity to make the verses their own. Anonymous verse alters the relationship between author and reader, so that it becomes more interactive and gives the reader a larger role. Readers could also repurpose anonymous poetry more easily, since it lacked

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

135

close context, applying verses written for one occasion to a later, different one without fear of contradiction. Writers may also have valued anonymity because they filled other roles in society and wanted to intervene with their verse in a way that did not have negative consequences for their professional lives or for their relationship with other public figures mentioned or criticized in the poetry. We now look back on the history of English poetry as the history of known authors putting out publications to a passive public, but many works initially circulated without a name attached to them, exciting speculation and involving readers in the construction of their meaning. Even in the later Victorian period, Charles Dickens published a magazine of short fiction in which all of the authors remained anonymous. A text purporting to be Dickens’s annotated copy of the set, noting their identities, was only discovered in 2015 (it may or may not be authentic).79 Likewise, in early modern Persian letters, one of the more popular genres was the “collection” (majmu‘), which brought together several distinct manuscripts of prose and poetry, the individual authors of which often remained anonymous.80 There were also the equivalent of commonplace books in which people copied out poetry that they liked, including authorless verse. That so much publication was anonymous made the anonymity of the poems that were later collected into Omarian Rubáiyát volumes unexceptional. Misattribution, and multiple attribution, was also common in that period.

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

136

Of course, the problems with the Omarian corpus go far beyond mere anonymity. How to problematize poetry that pops up here and there over centuries and gets collected together at a particular point in time (centuries after the frame author’s death) as the work of a single author—and then goes on being added to by subsequent authors and anthologists into the nineteenth century? As I suggested above, we do have models for approaching this kind of literature. Academics have not abandoned studying The Thousand and One Nights tales, even though they present the same difficulties as the Rubáiyát. Scholars approaching the Arabian Nights have tended to focus on the history of the text, or on those moments when they were crafted by an author or compiler into a unified manuscript, or when a translator cast them into a new, hybrid, and original form.81 Thus, specialists studied the tales as they occur in scattered manuscripts going back to the Abbasid period. The great scholar Muhsin Mahdi attempted to reconstruct what a thirteenth- or fourteenthcentury edition of the tales would have looked like, excluding all but forty or so of the ones contained in much later compendia. Or we can consider the eighteenth-century French traveler Antoine Galland’s translation itself, which is arguably a French work of literature. Similar approaches can be pursued in studying the Rubáiyát. A frame author had the advantage of allowing the audience to feel they were being addressed by a known individual rather

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

137

than a fantasy figure, and thus bestowed more authority on the verse. In part, the use of a frame story is typical of folk literature, but in part, the dangerous character of the sentiments in this tradition may have formed an additional incentive to anonymity. Since some of these verses could have resulted in a stint in jail, there was a strong reason at some times and places to write within the Khayyam “persona” but to stay anonymous, allowing editors to misattribute the verse to the antique astronomer if they liked.

The Yerbudaki manuscript In the mid-1400s, compilers creating poetic anthologies began a new practice of collecting dozens or even hundreds of quatrains into one volume and attributing them all to Omar Khayyam. In fact, many had circulated for a century or two as anonymous, or had been ascribed to other authors. Ordinarily, single-author works of poetry collected all the genres of poetry (odes, couplets, quatrains, etc.) produced by that figure as a “divan.” Alternatively, earlier anthologists of quatrains preferred multi-author collections and organized them by author, or topic, or both. Only quatrains were attached to Khayyam, however, and so his “collected works” consisted of a volume entitled “Rubáiyát,” or quatrains in the plural.

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

138

So far as we now know, the first known such one-volume book of poetry ascribed to Khayyam was assembled by one Mahmud Yerbudaki late in 1460, in the southwestern Iranian city of Shiraz.82 Yerbudaki, about whom nothing is otherwise known, published 158 quatrains as the work of Khayyam (my translation presents 157 of them, discarding the first as likely a piece of camouflage to misdirect the pious or conventionally minded as to the character of the book). Yerbudaki worked under the Qara Qoyunlu dynasty, Turkic Shi‘i rulers of Iran and eastern Asia Minor. In the middle of the fifteenth century, its leader, Jahanshah (1397–1467) became an independent monarch.83 From his capital of Tabriz, he extended his dominion over what is now eastern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and western Afghanistan. These frontier nomads wore their Islam lightly. Contemporary Muslim chroniclers often accused the various princes and notables of this court of being atheists or heretics and said of one that he “spent his days and nights in impiety and licentiousness.”84 In the late 1450s, Jahanshah’s eldest son, Pir Budak, rebelled against his father and set up his own state with its capital in the southwestern city of Shiraz. A contemporary historian alleged that Pir Budak raised the banner of rebellion there and used expletives against his father. He associated with atheists, abandoning

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

139

fasting and prayer and abolishing the regulations of Islam. No distinction was any longer made between women who were permitted to mix with a man because of their close kinship with him, and those who were not.85 It is true that Sunni traditionalists sometimes alleged that historical figures were atheists when in actuality they simply followed minority beliefs such as Shi’i Islam. This passage about Pir Budak, however, is corroborated by other sources. Gender segregation, an upper-class urban Muslim custom likely adopted, like veiling, from the pre-Islamic Persian and Byzantine empires, could not be practiced by pastoral nomads. Mongol and Turkmen women migrated with their men and specialized in packing up tents and goods for their treks in search of pasture. At the Mongol and Turkmen courts, women danced publicly at gatherings, served wine, and slipped out for picnics with their lovers. Even settled Turkic noblewomen in this period did not veil or seclude themselves. A miniature painting survives depicting Pir Budak holding an outdoor tent party. He is seated beneath a pavilion being served while a dancing girl entertains him and his guests, and a threeman band plays music. All the men are wearing turbans or caps. The girl dances, bareheaded and clad in a tunic with loose pantaloons, while waving a white handkerchief.86 This confirmation of mixed-sex festivities at Pir Budak’s court, alleged by the

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

140

chronicler Qazvini, bolsters the chronicler’s credibility when he launches other accusations at that court: that it was irreverent and godless. It has been suggested that painters intended scenes such as Pir Budak’s tent party to be contemplated by viewers who were intoxicated, on wine, wine spiked with opium, or opium itself, and that the painters would hide faces in the background, in ways that would jump out at the inebriated.87 That is, paintings were sometimes themselves aids to a party atmosphere, just as irreverent poetry was. We now know why Yerbudaki says at the end of his manuscript that it was calligraphed in the “capital” of Shiraz: He clearly put together this poetry anthology under Pir Budak during the era of his rebellion. Yerbudaki is a Turkic name and presumably he was himself from a Qara Qoyunlu or allied clan, and it is a fair guess that he had joined Pir Budak’s rebellion. The collection includes praise poetry (69): My king! The stars appointed you to rule and dressed for you the caparisoned steed of empire. Your golden-hoofed stallion charged ahead, and gilded with its sparks the battle plain. While these verses were probably composed earlier and in other circumstances, Yerbudaki likely included it here in order to flatter the rebel prince.

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

141

An irreligious prince of Pir Budak’s description might well have permitted the flowering of secular literature and thought, and might have encouraged scholar or scribe to collect together skeptical and epicurean poetry to be memorized and recited in gatherings while wine was served and dancing girls performed to band music. Indeed, the miniature painting mentioned above shows just such a scene, with music and a dancing girl. Yerbudaki appears to have thought it desirable that these recited verses should be given the authority of a great Muslim scientist and mathematician. My educated guess, then, is that the Yerbudaki manuscript is a script compiled for revelries for the close companions of Pir Budak at his palace in Shiraz or in his camp tents. It is Yerbudaki’s anthology of quatrains that you hold in your hands. Let me underline that Yerbudaki did not invent the poetry, which existed before his selection; he only invented a way of packaging it, as the single-volume work in a single genre, of a supposed single author. Around the same time in England, Thomas Malory, imprisoned in 1460 after a life of crime, began cobbling together French romances about King Arthur, producing Le Morte d’Arthur (“The Death of King Arthur”), which is as much a composite work dependent on previous authors as is Yerbudaki’s collection of Khayyami poetry. In the Muslim east during the Mongol period and after, there often was more pluralism and more space for dissent in the

142

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

centuries after Khayyam than was typical in the central realms of the Arab world. In Iran, Afghanistan, and Muslim-ruled South Asia there were Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Hindus, not to mention folk messianic and gnostic movements. East of the Tigris, royal courts were often established by rural, tribal peoples who were animists or Buddhists (as with the Mongols) or lightly Islamized or frankly heterodox. Chinese and Inner Asian cultural influences circulated with the nomadic warriors and with the merchants of the Silk Road. Still, in the lands of Islam one could never know when a ruler might turn pious or when a puritan cleric might get the ear of the court or the people, and arrange for heretical or immoral views to be punished. Originators of the irreverent memes which ended up in the Rubáiyát might have felt they needed a cover story. As noted above briefly, it has been argued that one response of Persian culture to the advent of Islam was the development of an indigenous tradition of humanism, which was not grounded in the Qur’an and the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and other holy figures.88 This argument is in my view entirely correct, but I want to make two important modifications of it. First, many of the Persian humanists, such as Saadi or Hafez, were relatively orthodox Muslims, even if tolerant of human foibles. There is no evidence that either one questioned the ideas of a personal, compassionate God or of the reality of the afterlife, and their use of wine probably really was, to some extent at least,

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

143

allegorical. Within the tradition of Persian humanism itself, then, I see a spectrum from the relatively orthodox to the outright atheistic or agnostic. While both the humanism and the agnosticism could be termed “secular,” the latter is truly distinctive as a medieval form of culture in the cultural sphere of the Abrahamic religions. Rather than a binary of humanism and religious scholasticism, I am proposing that the interior life of medieval Muslims ran a spectrum from cynical unbelief through humanism to tolerant orthodoxy to legalism and movements of militancy visible throughout history. That medieval Iran produced its own secular-leaning poetic culture, analogous to that of William Shakespeare in Elizabethan England, will come as a shock to some Western readers who only know the country from the contemporary Islamic State of Iran. The 1979 revolution drew on nativist and populist Muslim identity politics to establish a clerically ruled, puritanical government. Strict Muslim legal codes developed in the medieval period were applied in a literalist fashion. Women were made to cover up in public, Western culture was branded decadent, and religious police occasionally conducted sweeps. Remarkably, however, the Islamic Republic never seriously attempted to ban the libertine and Epicurean poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam, and it retains its popularity in some quarters of Iran even today. Nor is the broad mainstream of Iranian youth culture even today particularly religious, and the attractions to the new generation

144

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

of secular music, dress, and other culture, including on the internet, in a way continues the long tradition of Omarian skepticism, although not necessarily in a self-conscious manner. The Persian originals of these Rubáiyát derive from what might be called a secular, Muslim counterculture in the medieval Middle East. This counterculture was a significant part of the life of people in the eastern reaches of that region, on the frontiers with nomadic Inner Asia. Europe in the period 1100 to 1550 did not even have a word for atheism, but unbelief, skepticism, hedonism, and existential doubt were common in the Persianspeaking world in the late medieval and early modern era. In other words, Western thinkers believe that they invented modern secularism from the eighteenth century forward, and that the Muslim world lacked the concept and was mired in piety then and even until today. In actuality, Europe in the age of Inquisition would never have allowed the freewheeling Khayyami sort of poetry, whereas it flourished in West, Central, and South Asia. Since the nineteenth century, academic scholars have typically imagined what they called “Islamic civilization” to have been driven by Islamic texts such as the Qur’an and the hadith (sayings and doings of the Prophet), and the Islamic disciplines that grew out of these texts. The intellectual history of the Muslim Middle East has been written for the most part as a “Great Books” project, examining prose texts with known authors. But what if we turned to a social history of ideas? What if a full history of the

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

145

thought of people of Muslim heritage can only be achieved by also considering anonymous works, including the masses of unconventional poetry that still survives in manuscript? That is, if we step back from the ideal image of a civilization constructed by known, conventional authors in prose, we will see that it is only part of the story. What if we spoke of “Muslim civilization” instead of “Islamic,” using “Muslim” as a broad cultural term and attending to what non-religious or irreligious people thought as well as to clerics? What if we saw Muslim belief and practice as on a spectrum from the skeptical and non-observant through the occasionally observant to the pious? Such a spectrum would help abolish the unhelpful division between the small stratum of urban, literate believers (“Islamic civilization”) and “popular religion” (the vast majority!), with all unorthodox beliefs and behaviors dumped in a jumbled way into the latter. It would then become clear that there have been all through history Muslim countercultures, some of them secular-minded.89 No definition of “Muslim civilization” can do justice to it that does not take account of both the religious culture and the profane practices of actual Muslims. Muslims carried with them cultural knowledge beyond the religious. They were often water specialists and had a great deal more success in farming southern Spain under the Umayyad caliphate than did the Catholic Castilians who conquered that area from them. They also carried

146

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

the traditions of pre-Islamic Arabic and Persian poetry, much of it non-religious or irreligious. The complex of pre-Islamic Jahili and of early Abbasid wine, love and death poetry constituted the counterpoint to the sermons of the clerics and the religious decrees of the Muslim court judges. In any case, “Muslim civilization” had a religious dimension and a secular one. It had mosques but also taverns or hashish dens. It had madrasas but also poetry circles. The religious and the secular coexisted uneasily, with some sultans favoring the one or the other. Many Muslims tasted both as they went through life: the ecstasy of night prayer and the joy of obsessive illicit love. Together, the two poles of religion and secular activities formed the yin and yang of life. Puritanical religion often drives believers to produces liminal spaces of exception where they can blow off steam, and the anonymity of the Bohemia allows for such escapes from the cage of religious consistency. The promise of anonymous transgression is necessary if the facade of puritanism is to be taken back up on return to quotidian life. Wine poetry and love poetry, sung at evening gatherings in the tavern or in the tents of nomad chieftains, were the equivalent of Las Vegas shows for Muslim civilization. Arab and Persian secular culture was invented by nonconformists. Some were congenitally skeptical and independentminded. Others were sexually adventurous, whether straight or what we would now call lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered

EPILOGUE: PERSIAN LITERATURE AND THE RUBÁIYÁT

147

people. Alcoholics and hashish devotees also played their part. Because homosexual love was stigmatized by the patriarchal and determinedly heterosexual discourse of the Muslim religious authorities, bisexual and gay people were impelled most powerfully to challenge the cultural hegemony of that discourse. Abu Nuwas delighted in tweaking religious sensibilities, which he got away with for the most part because the court judges and clerics feared he would make them a laughingstock with his catchy and acerbic verses if they bothered him, and because the powerful protected him in hopes he would compose praise poems or panegyrics for them. The LGBT poet was a central countercultural figure in Muslim civilization, and often as powerful in his or her own domain as clerics were in theirs. Such poets and literary figures with taboo sexual identities creatively imagined meaningful lives for Muslim-heritage skeptics other than the ones offered by the seminary. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam reminds us of this other, crucial dimension of Muslim civilization, and offers important insights to secular moderns attempting to navigate a post-religious world.

148

NOTES

Acknowledgments 1

E. H. Whinfield, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam: The Persian Text with an English Verse Translation (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 2nd edn, 1901).

2

Edward Heron-Allen, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam: A Facsimile of the MS in the Bodleian Library (Boston: L. F. Page & Company, 1898).

3

A. J. Arberry, The Romance of the Rubáiyát (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959).

4

J. C. E. Bowen, “The Rubā‘iyyāt of Omar Khayyam: A Critical Assessment of Robert Graves’ and Omar Ali Shah’s Translation,” Iran, Vol. 11 (1973), pp. 63–73.

Introduction 1

Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A Critical Edition, ed. Christopher Decker (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997); A. J. Arberry, The Romance of the Rubáiyát: Edward FitzGerald’s First Edition, Reprinted with Introduction and Notes (London: Ruskin House, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959).

2

Dick Davis, “Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyam, and the Tradition of Verse Translation into English,” in Poole et al., FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, p. 8; see also A. H. Morton, “Some ‘Umarian Quatrains from the Lifetime of ‘Umar Khayyām,” in Seyed A. A.

149

150

NOTES

Gohrab, ed., The Great Omar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Ruba’iyat (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), pp. 55–66. 3

J. T. P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Persian (London: Routledge 2014), pp. 16–17.

4

Juan Cole, “Rescuing Omar Khayyam from the Victorians,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 169–80, this poem on pp. 176–7.

5

Most recently, see Peter Avery and John Heath Stubbs, The Ruba‘iyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Allen Lane, 1979).

6

Jim Kacian, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).

7

But see John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977); Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

8

Clement K. Shorter, “The Story of the Omar Khayyam Cult,” T. P.’s Weekly, Vol. 3, No. 68 (February 26, 1904): 275.

9

“Retirement from Active Literary Work,” Birmingham Mail, July 1, 1915; E. S. P. Haynes, “Clodd, Edward (1840–1930),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2013, http://www. oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/view/article/32453 (accessed January 10, 2016).

10 “The Pilgrimage to FitzGerald’s Grave,” Bury and Norwich Post, October 10, 1893; Edward Clodd, Concerning a Pilgrimage to the Grave of Edward FitzGerald (London: The Omar Khayyam Club, 1894). 11 Asad Al-Ghalith, “FitzGerald’s Omar and Hardy’s Jude: A humanistic kinship,” Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2010): 57–69; Andrew Norman, Thomas Hardy: Behind the Mask (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), p. 197; George P. Landow, “Thomas Hardy’s Religious Beliefs,”

NOTES

151

The Victorian Web, June 9, 2014, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ hardy/religion1.html; the Persian is drawn at least in part from an original that goes “Ay vaqif-i asrar-i zamir-i hamih kas/ Dar halat-i ‘ajz dastgir-i hamih kas/ Ya rabb tu ma ra tawbih dih u ‘uzr pazir/ Ay tawbih dih u ‘uzr pazir-i hamih kas,” as suggested on a page in “Eben Francis Thompson Letters,” Omar Khayyam Collection, Box 4, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; it is usually attributed (also incorrectly) to the early Sufi mystic Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr. 12 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” quoted in Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Chapter 1. 13 Saler, As If. 14 Mark Twain, quoted in Mehdi Aminrazavi, Sufism and American Literary Masters (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 223. 15 Vinnie-Marie D’Ambrosio, Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (New York: New York University Press, 1989). 16 Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 92. 17 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 33. 18 Edward A. Waterman, “The Shadow from a Soul on Fire: Robert E. Howard, Irrationalist,” in Don Herron, ed., The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E. Howard, a Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Wildside Press, 2002), pp. 44–5. 19 Michael Skau, “Jack Kerouac’s Rubáiyát: The Influence of Omar Khayyám,” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2015): 487–506, this point on pp. 490–1; Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, with “Visions of the Great Rememberer” by Allen Ginsberg (New York: Penguin Group, 1993).

152

NOTES

20 Bill DeMain, “The stories behind 22 classic album covers,” The Week, October 20, 2014, http://theweek.com/articles/443388/stories-behind22-classic-album-covers 21 Edward Heron-Allen, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam: A Facsimile of the MS in the Bodleian Library (Boston, MA: L. F. Page & Company, 1898).

Rubáiyát 1

Arberry, Romance, p. 104, reads nigarid (behold) for biguzid (choose) and this seems right.

Epilogue: Persian Literature and the Rubáiyát 1

Vladimir Livshits, “A Sogdian Precursor of Omar Khayyam,” Transoxania, Iran and the Caucasus, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2004), pp. 15–18, my interpretation of the inscription from p. 18.

2

Aida Gasimova, “Models, Portraits, and Signs of Fate in Ancient Arabian Tradition,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 73, No. 2 (October 2014): 319–40; T. Emil Homerin, “Echoes of a Thirsty Owl: Death and Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 1985): 165–84, this quote on p. 167.

3

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 35.

4

Garth Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 57–79. I visited the Umayyad pleasure palaces in 1976 as a student

NOTES

153

and was taken aback by their salacious art; I concluded then that Muslim history as a history of puritan movements was, let us say, incomplete. 5

Ibid., pp. 79–84.

6

Anwar G. Chejne, “The Boon-Companion in Early ʿAbbasid Times,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 65, No. 3 (1965): 327–35, this quote on p. 330.

7

Lutz Richter-Bernburg, “Linguistic Shuʿūbīya and Early Neo-Persian Prose,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 94, No. 1 (January–March 1974): 55–64.

8

Ehsan Yarshater, “The Theme of Wine-Drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early Persian Poetry,” Studia Islamica, Vol. 13, No. 13 (1960): 43–53, this point on p. 44.

9

J. T. P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Persian (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 16–17.

10 Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 210–11. 11 Antonino Pagliaro and Alessandro Bausani, Storia della Letteratura Persiana (Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1960), pp. 533–8. 12 Arthur Waley, trans., A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1918), p. 40. 13 Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni, The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia 1256-1353 (New York and New Haven, CT: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002). 14 Ismail Bey Zardabli, The History of Azerbaijan: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (London: Rosendale, 2014), Chapter 9. 15 Peter Avery, “Review of Ali Dashti, In Search of Omar Khayyam,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring 1974), pp. 199–201; Antonino Pagliaro and Alessandro Bausani, Storia della letteratura

154

NOTES

persiana (Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1960), pp. 533–5 (the latter owes some of this analysis to the Polish scholar of Middle Eastern literature, Tadeusz Kowalski [1889–1948]). 16 C. Raymond Beazley, ed., The texts and versions of John de Plano Carpini and William de Rubruquis, as printed for the first time by Hakluyt in 1598, together with some shorter pieces (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1903), p. 191. 17 Rudolph P. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 42. 18 George Lane, Daily Life in the Mongol Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 162. 19 Johann Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 139–40. 20 Devin DeWeese, “ʿAlāʾ al -Dawla Simnānī’s Religious Encounters at the Mongol Court near Tabriz,” in Judith Pfeiffer, ed., Politics, Patronage, and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th century Tabriz (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 35–76. 21 Reuven Amitai, “Hülegü and His Wise Men: Topos or Reality?” in Judith Pfeiffer, ed., Politics, Patronage, and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th century Tabriz (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 15–34. 22 George Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 52, 236–40. 23 Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 130–56. 24 Cornell Fleischer, “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism, and ‘Ibn Khaldunism’ in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Letters,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 18, Nos 3–4 (1983): 198–220. 25 Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality, pp. 1–2. 26 Waley, trans., A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, p. 76.

NOTES

155

27 V. Minorsky, “Pūr-i Bahā’s ‘Mongol’ ode,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1956), pp. 261–78; Lane, Early Mongol Rule, pp. 236–8. 28 Sayyid ‘Ali Mir-Afzali, Ruba‘iyyat-i Khayyam dar manabi‘-i kuhan (Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Danishgahi-yi Tehran, 2003), pp. 25–7; for the Juvayni family of Persian bureaucrats under the Mongols, see Lane, Early Mongol Rule, Chapter 6. 29 F. de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (London: 1994), Vol. V, Part 2, p. 363, quoted by Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, “Khayyam’s Universal Appeal: Man, Wine, and the Hereafter in the Quatrains,” in Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, ed., The Great Omar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Ruba’iyat (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012). 30 Mir-Afzali, Ruba‘iyyat, p. 64. 31 Ibid. 32 Umberto Eco, “Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World, History, Texts,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, 7/8 March 1990, http://tannerlectures.utah. edu/_documents/a-to-z/e/Eco_91.pdf, cited by Muhawi, “The ‘Arabian Nights’.” 33 Mir-Afzali, Ruba‘iyyat, pp. 34–81. 34 Jamal Khalil Shirvani, Nuzhat al-Majalis, ed. Muhammad Amin Riyahi (Tehran: Intisharat-i Zuvvar, 1366s/1987), p. 141, No. 237; Mir-Afzali, Ruba‘iyyat, p. 43; see Ali Dashti, In Search of Omar Khayyam, trans. L. P. Elwell-Sutton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 117. 35 Shirvani, Nuzhat al-Majalis, p. 148, No. 289. 36 Shirvani, Nuzhat al-Majalis, p. 608, No. 4081. 37 Mir-Afzali, Ruba‘iyyat, p. 60. 38 Johann Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 149.

156

NOTES

39 Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘u’t-Tawarikh, Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1999, 3 vols), Vol. 3: 660–1. 40 “Khulasat al-ash‘ar fi al-Ruba‘iyyat,” in Abu al-Majd Muhammad ibn Mas‘ud Tabrizi, ed., Safinih-yi Tabriz (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 2001), pp. 593–612; Seyyed-Gohrab, “Literary Works in Tabriz’s Treasury,” in A. A. Seyed-Gohrab and S. McGlinn, eds., The Treasury of Tabriz: The Great Il-Khanid Compendium (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers and West LaFayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), pp. 126–30. 41 Said Amir Arjomand, “Transformation of the Islamicate Civilization: A Turning-point in the Thirteenth Century?” Medieval Encounters, Vol. 10, Nos 1–3 (2004): 213–45, this point on p. 228. 42 Clifford Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banu Sasan in Arabic Society and Literature, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 43 Lane, Early Mongol Rule, Chapter 8. 44 Timothy May, “The Relationship between Sufis and Inner Asian Ruling Elites,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Vol. 30 (2008): 84–101. 45 N. Pourjavady, “The Concept of Love in ‘Erāqi and Ahmad Ghazzāli,” Persica, Vol. 21 (2007): 51–62. 46 Shirvani, Nuzhat al-Majalis, p. 139, No. 228. 47 Lane, Early Mongol Rule, pp. 247–8. 48 Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1994), pp. 9–10. 49 Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek, A la croisée des voies célestes: Faxr al-Din ʻErâqi: Poésie mystique et expression poétique en Perse médiévale (Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 2002), pp. 235–43. 50 Reuven Amitai-Preiss, “Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Ilkhanate,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1999): 27–46.

NOTES

157

51 Rashiduddin Fazlullah, Jami‘u’t-Tawarikh, 3: 659. 52 Lane, Early Mongol Rule, pp. 246–7. 53 Feuillebois-Pierunek, A la croisée des voies célestes; Cyrus Ali Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn ‘Arabi and ‘Iraqi (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). 54 Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi, Majmu‘ih-’i athar, ed. Nasrin Muhtashim Khaza‘i (Tehran: Intisharat-i Zuvvar, 1993), p. 352. 55 ‘Iraqi, Majmu‘ih-’i athar, p. 345; see for ‘Iraqi’s wine poetry FeuilleboisPierunek, A la croisée des voies célestes, pp. 262–76. 56 ‘Iraqi, Majmu‘ih-’i athar, p. 339. 57 Juan Cole, “Rescuing Omar Khayyam from the Victorians,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring 2013): 169–80, this poem on pp. 176–7. 58 ‘Iraqi, Majmu‘ih-’i athar, p. 348. 59 ‘Iraqi, Majmu‘ih-’i athar, notes on pp. 349, 352 and 364. 60 Lane, Early Mongol Rule, p. 245. 61 Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 62 M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, The Ruba’iyat of ‘Umar-i-Khayyam, Persian text edited from a manuscript dated 911 A.H. (1605 [sic: 1506] A.D.) in the collection of Professor S. Najib Ashraf Nadvi with a facsimile of the manuscript (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1939), plate LVII. 63 “Association Item,” Muraqqa’‘-i Chughtai, illustrated page entitled “Saqi,” Omar Khayyam Collection, Box 1, Special Collections, UCLA. 64 Claudia Yaghoobi, “Subjectivity in ‘Attar’s Shaykh of San‘an Story in Parliament of the Birds,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2004), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/ iss1/8/

158

NOTES

65 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), Part 4. 66 Frederic Lagrange, “The Obscenity of the Vizier,” in Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, eds., Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Center of Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University/Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 161–203, this quote on p. 162. 67 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” in Babayan and Najmabadi, eds., Islamicate Sexualities, pp. 275–96. 68 Irem Özgören Kinli, “Reconfiguring Ottoman Gender Boundaries and Sexual Categories by the mid-19th century,” Política y Sociedad, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2013): 381–95, 746. 69 A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Literary Works in Tabriz’s Treasury,” in SeyedGohrab and McGlinn, The Treasury of Tabriz, p. 125. 70 Harriet Goldberg, “Moslem and Spanish Christian Literary Portraiture,” Hispanic Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 311–26. 71 Karla Malette, “The Hazards of Narration: Frame-Tale Technologies and the ‘Oriental Tale’,” in Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ed., The Oxford Handbook to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Chapter 28; idem, “Reading Backward: The 1001 Nights and Philological Practice,” in Suzanne Akbari and Karla Mallette, eds., A Sea of Languages: Literature and Culture in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 100–16. 72 Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005). 73 Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 210–11. 74 Friedrich Max Meier, Die schöne Mahsatī: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des persischen Vierzeilers (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1963); Rebecca Gould, “Mahsati of Ganja’s Wandering Quatrains: Translator’s Introduction,”

NOTES

159

Literary Imagination, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2011): 225–7; Sunil Sharma, “Wandering Quatrains and Women Poets in the “Khulasat al-ash‘ar fi al-Ruba‘iyat,” in Seyed-Gohrab and S. McGlinn, The Treasury of Tabriz, pp. 151–69; Sunil Sharma, “From ‘Ā’esha to Nur Jahān: The Shaping of a Classical Persian Poetic Canon of Women,” Journal of Persianate Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2009): 148–64. 75 Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 76 Peter Hühn, “The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry,” Narrative, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2014): 155–68. 77 Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006), Chapter 3: “Anonymity in Restoration Poetry.” 78 Ibid., p. 64. 79 Alison Flood, “Dickens’s marginalia reveal famous contributors to his journal, Guardian, 12 July 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/jul/13/dickens-marginalia-famous-contributors-journalwilkie-collins-elizabeth-gaskell 80 F. I. Abdullaeva, “What is a Safina?” in Seyed-Gohrab and McGlinn, The Treasury of Tabriz, pp. 59–76. I am grateful to my colleague Kathryn Babayan for her oral presentations on her research on the majmu‘ for deepening my understanding of this genre and we look forward to her forthcoming book on the subject. 81 Ibrahim Muhawi, “The ‘Arabian Nights’ and the Question of Authorship, Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2005), pp. 323–37. 82 The Yerbudaki edition of 1460 was collected by Sir Gore Ousely or his brother William from Iran in the early nineteenth century and deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It was published, translated, and annotated by Edward Heron-Allen, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam: A Facsimile of the MS in the Bodleian Library (Boston, MA: L. F. Page & Company, 1898). Some of the points made in this section appeared in a different form in Juan Cole, “The Rubaiyat of

160

NOTES

Omar Khayyam and Muslim Secularism,” Studies in People’s History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (December 2016): 138–50. 83 There is at the moment no monograph in any European language on the Kara Koyunlu (Qara Quyunlu in Persian transliteration) confederation. There is a major work on their rivals and successors, the Aq Quyunlu: John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, rev. edn 1999). Some attention is given to Jahanshah Kara-Koyunlu in Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), e.g. p. 45. 84 V. Minorsky, “Jihān-Shāh Qara-Qoyunlu and His Poetry,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1954), pp. 271–97, this quote on p. 277. 85 Budaq Munshi Qazvini, Javahir al-Akhbar: Bakhsh-i Tarikh-i Iran az Qara Quyunlu ta Sal-i 984 H.Q., ed. Muhsin Bahramnizhad (Tehran: Ayinih-’i Miras, 2000), pp. 67–8. 86 “The court of a Timurid prince, Pir Budaq,” Iran (Shiraz), c. 1455–60, Ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, MIA.2013.150, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar. 87 Nina Ergin, “Rock Faces, Opium and Wine: Speculations on the Original Viewing Context of Persianate Manuscripts,” Der Islam, Vol. 90, No. 1 (2013): 65–105. 88 Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism, Chapters 1–3. 89 Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), makes some similar points.

INDEX

Abbasid Caliphate 77–8, 84, 92 Abhari, Isma‘il 99–100 Abu al-Majd 127–8 Abu Nuwas 77–8, 109, 127, 147 Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr 4, 80 Ahmad Sanjar, Sultan 3, 131 Al-Walid ibn ‘Abd al-Malik 77 anonymity 4, 80, 98, 104, 123, 134 Arabs adoption of Islam 75–6 conquest of Iran 2, 76, 122–3 pagan Arab era 74–5 Arghun Agha 84, 98 ‘Attar, Farid al-Din 126 authorship frame authorship 4–5, 128–30, 132, 135–7 nature of 130–1, 133–5 of Rubáiyát 2, 4–5, 71–2, 80, 95–6, 129, 131–3, 136 Avicenna 5, 96 Bausani, Alessandro 80, 85 Bodleian library 14–15 Book of Kings (Shahnameh) (Firdawsi) 131–2 Buddhism 142 beliefs 91, 102, 103 in Iran 85, 87–8, 99

Chinese influence 80–2, 89, 90, 91, 106–7, 142 Chughtai, Abdur Rahman 126 Clodd, Edward 8 Conan Doyle, Arthur 8, 9–10 court life 77–9, 88–92, 101, 138–41 Cowell, Edward Byles 110, 118 criminal underworld 104–7 death 1–2, 75, 96 dervishes 107, 111, 112–13, 120, 122 Dickens, Charles 135 Eco, Umberto 95 Eliot, T. S. 10, 11–12 fate 78, 91, 93, 96 Firdawsi, Abu al-Qasim 131 FitzGerald, Edward 1, 6, 106, 118. See also Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam Foucault, Michel 126, 130 frame authorship 5, 128–30, 132, 135–7 Galland, Antoine 136 Gaykhatu 87, 101, 102 Genghis Khan 82 161

162

INDEX

Ghazan Khan 102, 113, 114 al-Ghazzali, Abu Hamid 109, 110 al-Ghazzali, Ahmad 109, 110 Gleams of the Lamp (Lam‘at al-Siraj) 101 guilds 104–5 haiku 6, 81 Hardy, Thomas 8–9, 10 Haydaris 113, 120 heavens 91, 92, 100 homosexuality 87, 123–4, 126–7, 147 Howard, Robert E. 12–13 Hülegü 84, 87, 88, 95, 99 humanism 85, 91, 122–4, 142–3 Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din 115 Ibn Battuta, Muhammad 104 Il-Khanid Empire 87, 95, 96, 104–7. See also Mongols Iran Arab conquest 2, 76, 122–3 modern Iran 143–4 Mongol rule 82–7, 92, 94–5 Persian Empire 72–3 ‘Iraqi, Fakr al-Din 115–16, 117, 119 Islam 75–6, 108–9, 142–3. See also ‘Muslim civilization’ clerical power 92, 99, 133 ‘Islamic civilization’ 144–5 Jahanshah 138 Jamshid 132 Japanese haiku 6, 81 Juvayni, Ata-Malik 93, 94, 96, 115

Kai-Khosrow 132 Kerouac, Jack 11, 13 Khayyam, Omar as frame author 5, 129, 135–7 mathematician/astronomer 1, 3–4, 71, 89, 129 Kirmani, Sufi Awhad al-Din 98, 100 legislation 90, 92 linguistic style 4, 6, 78, 110 love poetry 97, 104, 110–11, 117, 127, 146 al-Ma‘arri, Abu al-A‘la 94, 96, 123 Mahdi, Muhsin 136 Mahsati Ganjavi 131 Malik-Shah 3 Malory, Thomas 141 Manuchehri 78 manuscripts (sources of Rubáiyát) 95–6 Cowell manuscript 14, 118 Yerbudaki (Shiraz) manuscript 14–15, 121, 137–8, 140–1 meaninglessness of life 1, 92, 97, 119 meter 14 Mir-Afzali, Sayyid ‘Ali 95, 96 Mongols. See also Il-Khanid Empire Buddhism 82, 84, 87–8 conversion to Islam 102–3 Mongol culture 85–93, 122 rule of Iran 82–7, 92, 94–5

INDEX

monotheism 16, 93–4 morality 112, 118–19, 124–7 al-Mubashshir, Abu al-Wafa’ 129 Mughals 90, 93, 126 ‘Muslim civilization’ 145–7. See also Islam mysticism 108–9, 122 Qalandars 97, 112–13, 119–20 Sufis 4, 72, 110, 111–15, 123, 124 nomadic cultures 138–9 migration 82–3, 106, 113 way of life 85, 142 Ögedei Khan 84 Omar Khayyam clubs 7–8, 126 Ouseley, Sir Gore 15 pastoralists 82–3, 85, 106, 113 Pavana, Mu‘in al-Din 115 Persia 72–3 humanism 122–4, 142–3 literature 2, 73, 78–82, 132–3, 135 New Persian language 78 religion 73–4, 142 Pir Budak 138–40, 141 pre-Raphaelite movement 1 Pur-Baha’ 92 Qalandars 97, 112–20 quatrain form in Muslim world 95–6 Persian poetry 2–3, 79–82 structure 2, 13–14

163

readership 95, 134 religious pluralism 88, 99, 141–2. See also Buddhism; Islam; Zoroastrianism rhyme 14 Rinchen Dorje. See Gaykhatu Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. See also manuscripts (sources of Rubáiyát) authorship 4–5, 71–2, 80, 95–6, 129, 131–3, 136 FitzGerald’s translation 1–2, 6–13, 97, 116–17, 118 in Mongol era 95–102, 103–4 popularity 1–2, 6–13, 95–6, 127–8 Rudaki 78 Rumi, Jalal al-Din 115 Safavid dynasty 106 Safi al-Din Ishaq 121 Sanskrit literature 129, 131, 132 Scheherazade 5, 129 secularism Muslim world 90, 91, 93, 100, 107, 143–4, 146 of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam 101–2, 110, 123, 124 Shirvani compendium 98 Seljuk Empire 3, 71, 82, 90–1, 101. See also Turkic tribes literature 99, 109, 131 sexual morality 124–7 Shi‘i Islam 106, 139 Shiraz manuscript. See Yerbudaki manuscript Shirvani compendium 98–101

164

INDEX

Shirvani, Jamal Khalil 98 skepticism 5, 11, 92–3, 116, 144 Sufis 97–8, 107–13, 120–2 mysticism 4, 72, 110, 111–15, 123, 124 school of love 109, 110 Sunni Islam 139 Tabriz Mongol capital 84, 85, 88, 98, 103 Turkic capital 138 Tabrizi, Abu al-Majd 103–4 Tao Yuanming 91 Teguder 113 Thousand and One Nights 5, 128–9, 136 Timurid Empire 93, 95 translation 6, 14, 16–17, 106, 118–19 Turkic tribes 82–3, 93, 138–9. See also Seljuk Empire poetry 80–1

warrior culture 75, 79, 132, 142 Willem van Ruysbroeck 86 wine drinking criminal underworld 104–6 Iranian court culture 74 Mongol culture 86–7, 90–2, 96 Muslim culture 76–7, 118 pagan Arab era 74–5 poetry 78–9, 91, 97–8, 100–1, 146 Sufi mysticism 124 women 127, 131, 143 gender segregation 125–6, 139 houris 92–3 Mongol 86

Umayyad Caliphate 76–7 underworld, criminal 104–7 urban society 106, 120

Yerbudaki, Mahmud 15, 138, 140 Yerbudaki manuscript creation of 15, 137–8, 140–1 individual ruba‘i 101, 103, 104, 110–11, 114, 120–2, 131–3 youth Il-Khanid underworld 104–5, 106 modern culture 13

Vassaf (Abd Allah Shirazi) 94 voice 3–4, 6, 16

Zoroastrianism 16, 73–4, 93–4, 132–3

165

166

167

168