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By Root 445 0

theory of Euclid’s Elements advanced the theory of numbers, but of even more fundamental importance, in his mid-twenties he wrote a famous treatise on algebra, demonstrating, for the first time, how to solve cubic equations. Remember quadratic equations from school (e.g., x2−5x=6=0, which is solved by x=2 or x=3)? Khayyám was the first to show how one would solve cubic equations such as x3=5x2=3x−81=0 (of which one solution is x =3). But this was not enough: hidden for years from all but his circle of friends, he was a poet—and not only a poet, but a Persian poet who did not conform to Islam.

Islam had been brought to Persia by the Arabs in 642, barely ten years after the death of the Prophet. In northeast Persia, where Khayyám was born, the orthodox principles of Islamic law were determinedly enforced. Islam forbade its followers from drinking wine, a prohibition strengthened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the growth of religious factions, many of which were fanatical in support of their beliefs. Omar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyám—Omar the son of Ibrahim the tentmaker—was nominally a Muslim, but he was secular in his bones and had little time for turbulent religious controversies. Nevertheless, it was safer to wear an outward conformity, and the ruba’i provided a vehicle with which to express his disdain.

The ruba’i was a two-line stanza of Persian poetry set out as a quatrain, of which the first, second, and fourth lines must rhyme. It was epigrammatic: beginning with a reflection or description, it drew a moral in the final line. Witty and intelligent people could express their feelings and opinions. Circulating anonymously and often voicing criticism of imposed doctrines or prohibitions, they were a favorite verse form among intellectuals, who might meet in each other’s home and recite a ruba’i or two. Persia had for centuries been a wine-drinking culture, but Islam prohibited wine; what could be more natural than to use verses about taverns, the grape, and wine both as descriptors and as metaphors for private opposition to the attempts to stamp out suspicious opinions?

This is what Omar Khayyám did. Everyone knows his most famous one, as translated and remodeled by the Englishman Edward FitzGerald in The Rubá’iyát of Omar Khayyám in 1859 and subsequent editions (the standard version of this particular verse is from the fifth edition of 1889):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

This one is harmless enough. But what about this one, which has a touch of anti-Islam about it:

And much as Wine has play’d the Infidel,

And robb’d me of my Robe of Honour—well,

I often wonder what the Vintners buy

One half so precious as the Goods they sell.

This is even clearer in a near-literal translation (not by FitzGerald) of another verse:

Drinking wine and consorting with good fellows

Is better than practising the ascetic’s hypocrisy;

If the lover and drunkard are to be among the damned

Then no one will see the face of heaven.

But according to Khayyám, heaven probably does not exist—and this in itself might have been enough to condemn him, had the authorities known:

When the world is filled with the rumour of the fresh rose

Command, love, the wine to be copiously poured;

Don’t bother about houris, heavenly mansions,

Paradise, Hell—they’re all rumour, too.

For Khayyám, wine was a metaphor for life: drink it while you can, because you will eventually die and there is nothing more:

YESTERDAY This Day’s Madness did prepare;

TOMORROW’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:

Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Yet he was not always so ridden with anguish or such a sense of finality. His rubá’iyát must also have struck sparks because of their occasional devil-may-care cynicism:

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse

I made a Second Marriage in my house;

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine