Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is a book of poetry published in 1859. It is an English translation by Edward FitzGerald of a group of four-line verses, or quatrains, that are credited to Omar Khayyam, a Persian astronomer and mathematician who lived from 1048 to 1131 and is often called the "Astronomer-Poet of Persia."

The book did not sell well at first. Its popularity grew after 1861 thanks to Whitley Stokes, and it became highly admired by the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. FitzGerald released a third edition in 1872, which sparked interest in the United States. By the 1880s, the work was extremely popular across the English-speaking world, leading to the formation of "Omar Khayyam clubs" and what was described as a "cult of the Rubaiyat." The translation has since appeared in hundreds of editions and inspired similar translation projects into English, Hindi, and many other languages.

FitzGerald based his translation on two main sources. The first was the Bodleian MS, a copy of 158 quatrains given to him in 1856 by his friend Edward B. Cowell. The second was a transcript of a manuscript Cowell found in 1857 at the library of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta.

FitzGerald finished his first draft in 1857 and sent it to Fraser's Magazine in January 1858. He made a revised draft in January 1859 and privately printed 250 copies. By the 1890s, this first edition had become highly sought after, with more than two million copies sold across two hundred editions.

A. J. Arberry, in his 1959 book Romance of the Rubaiyat, identified the Persian sources for each of the 75 quatrains in FitzGerald's first edition. He found that about 40 were loose translations of a single stanza from either the Bodleian or Calcutta manuscripts, while others were "mashed together" from two quatrains. Juan Cole is expanding on Arberry's work in a series of blog posts that also explain the Persian concepts and figures in the poetry.

The authenticity of the poems attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain. During his lifetime, Khayyam was famous as an astronomer and mathematician, not a poet. The earliest mention of him writing poetry appears in a biography by al-Isfahani, written 43 years after his death.

This view is supported by later medieval historians such as Shahrazuri (1201) and Al-Qifti (1255). Some of the Rubaiyat appear as incidental quotes in early biographies and anthologies, including works by Razi (ca. 1160–1210), Daya (1230), Juvayni (ca. 1226–1283), and Jajarmi (1340). Five quatrains assigned to Khayyam in later sources appear in Zahiri Samarqandi's Sindbad-Nameh (before 1160) without any attribution.

The number of quatrains attributed to him in more recent collections ranges from about 1,200 (according to Saeed Nafisi) to more than 2,000. Skeptical scholars argue that the entire tradition may be pseudepigraphic. The existing manuscripts containing collections attributed to Omar are dated much too late to reconstruct a body of authentic verses.

In the 1930s, Iranian scholars like Mohammad-Ali Foroughi tried to reconstruct a core of authentic verses from scattered quotes by 13th- and 14th-century authors, ignoring the younger manuscript tradition. After World War II, these efforts were significantly delayed by two clever forgeries. De Blois (2004) is pessimistic, stating that contemporary scholarship has not advanced beyond the situation in the 1930s, when Hans Heinrich Schaeder commented that the name of Omar Khayyam "is to be struck out from the history of Persian literature."

A feature of the more recent collections is their lack of linguistic consistency and continuity of ideas. Sadegh Hedayat remarked that "if a man had lived for a hundred years and had changed his religion, philosophy, and beliefs twice a day, he could scarcely have given expression to such a range of ideas." Hedayat concluded that only 14 quatrains could be attributed to Khayyam with certainty.

Various tests have reduced the number of likely authentic quatrains to about 100. Arthur Christensen stated that of more than 1,200 known ruba'is, only 121 could be considered reasonably authentic. Foroughi accepted 178 quatrains as authentic, while Ali Dashti accepted 36.

Scepticism vs. Sufism debate

The enormous popularity of FitzGerald's work sparked a long debate about the correct interpretation of the poems' philosophy. FitzGerald emphasized the religious skepticism he saw in Omar Khayyam. In his preface, he described Omar's philosophy as Epicurean and claimed that Omar was "hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose practice he ridiculed and whose faith amounts to little more than his own when stripped of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide." Richard Nelson Frye also stressed that Khayyam was despised by several prominent contemporary Sufis, including Shams Tabrizi, Najm al-Din Daya, Al-Ghazali, and Attar, who viewed him not as a fellow mystic but as a free-thinking scientist.

This skeptical interpretation is supported by the medieval historian Al-Qifti, who reported in The History of Learned Men that Omar's poems were only outwardly in the Sufi style but were written with an anti-religious agenda. He also noted that Khayyam was indicted for impiety and went on a pilgrimage to avoid punishment. Critics of FitzGerald, on the other hand, have accused the translator of misrepresenting the poems.