Omar Khayyam of Persia, Shunya.net
In his his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. The Great Seljuq Empire owed the reform of its calendar to him. The result was the Jalali era (named after Jalal-ud-din, one of the kings)-‘a computation of time,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian [calendar].’ He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a number improved to 365.242196 days only in the 19th century and the current measure is 365.242190 days.
He not only discovered a general method of extracting roots of an arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations which he did by means of conic sections. He was also part of the Islamic tradition of investigating Euclid and his parallel postulate. Arguing that ratios should be regarded as ‘ideal numbers,’ he conceived a much broader system of numbers than used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers. In many such areas, he furthered the remarkable work of al-Beruni. Commissioned to build an observatory in the city of Esfahan, he led a team of astronomers to do so.
Omar Khayyam (‘Tentmaker’, possibly his father’s profession) was not only a top-notch mathematician but also a major poet. The world today knows him for his quatrains, the Rubaiyat. Besides the social attitudes of the times, they reveal a sensitive, intelligent, humble, gently-mocking yet good-humored man, skeptical of divine providence and certainty of truth, wistful of an ever-present evanescence, mystical in one, lamenting human ignorance in another. Many of his 500 or so quatrains celebrate wine, exhorting all those who take themselves too seriously to partake of it while time permits. He “chooses to put his faith in a joyful appreciation of the fleeting and sensuous beauties of the material world. The idyllic nature of the modest pleasures he celebrates, however, cannot dispel his honest and straightforward brooding over fundamental metaphysical questions.”♣
Khayyam was attached to the court of the Seljuks-of Khorasan, later of Baghdad, Samarkand and Esfahan as well-and lived amidst political turbulence interspersed with quiet periods. His ideas frequently attracted flak from the growing religious conservatism of Sunni Turks. According to Professor Iraj Bashiri, Khayyam—synthesizing the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonian al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna)—believed that
“God had created the world but . [it] had been a necessity for God and, therefore, inevitable. The stages leading to the creation of matter followed each other as night follows day . This ascription of limits to the power of the Almighty is the most startling notion in Khayyam’s Quatrains. It jolts the unwary reader out of the routine of orthodox thinking and places him or her in the uncomfortable position of the unwilling blasphemer. Yet, Khayyam’s God is more real and approachable than the fearful Creator of orthodoxy . [he] formally rejects the Creator/creature relationship for a cause and effect relationship . God becomes the cause of a necessary creation . that develops of its own accord, and at its own pace. A number of Khayyam’s quatrains concentrate on what religion teaches about the powers of the Almighty and the limitations of that power.” ♣
Here are ten sample quatrains (translated by EH Whinfield).
O unenlightened race of humankind,
Ye are a nothing, built on empty wind!
Yea, a mere nothing, hovering in the abyss,
A void before you, and a void behind!
All my companions, one by one died
With Angel of Death they now reside
In the banquette of life same wine we tried
A few cups back, they fell to the side.
Some are thoughtful on their way
Some are doubtful, so they pray.
I hear the hidden voice that may
Shout, “Both paths lead astray.”
The secrets eternal neither you know nor !
And answers to the riddle neither you know nor !
Behind the veil there is much talk about us, why
When the veil falls, neither you remain nor !
Drinking wine is my travail
Till my body is dead and stale
At my grave site all shall hail
Odor of wine shall prevail.
Heed not the Sunna, nor the law divine;
If to the poor his portion you assign,
And never injure one, nor yet abuse,
I guarantee you heaven, and now some wine!
Slaves of vain wisdom and philosophy,
Who toil at Being and Nonentity,
Parching your brains till they are like dry grapes,
Be wise in time, and drink grapejuice like me!
You, who in carnal lusts your time employ,
Wearing your precious spirit with annoy,
Know that these things you set your heart upon
Sooner or later must the soul destroy!
Never in this false world on friends rely,
(I give this counsel confidentially);
Put up with pain, and seek no antidote;
Endure your grief, and ask no sympathy!
You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,
Why then remain a prey to empty fear?
You can not bend things to your will, but yet
Cheer up for the few moments you are here!
See also:
Peace and Justice Post 
Obama’s Peace
October 23, 2009For his continued wars against Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Iraqis, his support for the overthrow of democracy in Honduras, his abetting dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim worlds (which his government finances, arms, and trains in torture methods), his planning for a possible invasion of Iran, and his enthusiastic support for the racist Israeli settler colony (and its colonial wars and occupations against Palestinians), President Barack Obama received the Nobel “Peace” Prize. This comes as no surprise, as Obama joins a long list of recipients of this sham of a prize, who are distinguished for similar “peaceful” pursuits. These include terrorists like Menachem Begin, war criminals like Henry Kissinger, ethnic-cleansing colonial generals like Yitzhak Rabin, dictators like Anwar Sadat, corrupt politicians like Yasser Arafat, and imperial presidents like Jimmy Carter. Granting this overambitious power-hungry man the recognition of the Nobel committee is therefore most apt.
Obama’s most recent pursuit of peace has been to force the corrupt Palestinian Authority to discard the United Nations-issued Goldstone Report which detailed the war crimes committed by Israel in its murderous war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza ten months ago. Indeed, the first Black American President has just enjoined the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim countries from the pulpit of the United Nations to recognize Israel’s right to be a racist “Jewish State.” One wonders what the American reaction would be if Palestinian and Arab leaders would call on Obama and on African Americans to recognize the right of the United States to be a white state.
This is the same Obama whose hubris was of such caliber that when he gave his infamous speech in Cairo several months ago he did not grieve the tens of thousands of Arab, including Egyptian, civilians killed by Israel’s six decade-long wars and massacres against them; nor did he show solidarity with the millions of Arabs who were rendered refugees (including one million Egyptians during the War of Attrition) by Israel’s barbaric bombings. Instead, Obama chose to give Arabs a lesson in European Jewish history and enjoined them to appreciate the holocaust committed by European Christians against European Jews and not the ongoing Nakba committed by European Jewish colonial settlers against Arabs. He has even forbidden Palestinians or other Arabs from ever attempting to destroy Israel’s racist structures to end its racist rule. Indeed, Obama threatened Arabs that any attempt by them to destroy the racist basis of the Jewish state would be seen as tantamount to a holocaust. One wonders if he thinks ending segregation in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were tantamount to the extermination of white people! This is also the same Obama who, in order to fend off the accusation of being Muslim, told us during his electoral campaign that not only was he a Christian, but that he prays to Jesus every night and that the blood of Jesus Christ will redeem him.
But general wisdom in the US has it that the election of Obama, even if it did not instantiate any change in US imperial policy abroad, has been the best thing that happened to most Americans, or at least to white liberal Americans and all African Americans, at the domestic level. This is a largely mistaken conclusion. Obama in my estimation is the worst thing that happened in recent years to African Americans, who continue to face institutional, structural, economic, cultural, social, and personal discrimination on a daily basis. The racism that informs US domestic policy and causes the poverty of African Americans is not unrelated to the racism that informs US imperial policies that impoverish Egyptians, Palestinians, Hondurans, Iraqis, and Afghanis.
Obama’s election has been best for white liberal Americans whose conscience can be assuaged by pretending that they are not racist at all and that indeed America is no longer a racist place evidenced by the election of a black man to the presidency. The fact that today African Americans are less educated and poorer than they were in the 1960s is immaterial to this self-congratulatory logic. Neither is the fact that there are more African American men today (in relative and absolute numbers) in America’s racist jails than there had been at the height of Apartheid in South Africa. As for Obama’s ongoing policies on education and racialized crime, they of course continue the policies of his white predecessors in pushing for more corporatization of schools and jails and busting teachers unions in the interest of the white business class.
But Obama is the culmination of white liberal hopes entertained since the early seventies when the language of racism was transformed, as an effect of the cooptation of the Civil Rights movement, into a culturalist language. Black people were not inferior racially, white liberals averred, “their problem” was diagnosed as “cultural.” The feeling was that if black Americans would simply speak and act like a fantasized white middle class and adopt its social and cultural values, they would cease to face discrimination and they would break the “cycle of poverty.” Reform, it was decided, should aim to effect such transformation. The black middle class, formed in the late nineteenth century in the wake of the abolition of slavery, though a small minority among African Americans, was seen as a model to be emulated. Indeed white liberal remedies like Affirmative Action (the largest beneficiaries of which were and still are white women and not African Americans) when it benefited any blacks at all, it did so by benefiting the established small black middle class. It was conservative members of this class who, after reaping its benefits, would advocate against Affirmative Action. Thus, white women and middle class African Americans benefited from a program that improved little in the lives of most African Americans, while the latter would increasingly be blamed for benefiting from it at the expense of white men –a refrain used by most white conservatives and not a few white liberals!
As Derrick Bell has eloquently demonstrated, Affirmative Action is a cover for a system by which racism continues to be institutionalized and African Americans continue to be blamed for refusing to improve their lives despite alleged Herculean efforts on their behalf. Some of the culturalist arguments of white liberals centered on Affirmative Action’s production of white-acting black folks who would join the ranks of “hard-working Americans,” a racist code that refers to white people which Obama often invokes in his speeches. The fantasy of low-grade American television programs in the late 1970s and 1980s like “Different Strokes” and “Webster” was to demonstrate that if white families were afforded the opportunity to raise black kids, these kids would end up as model citizens; indeed, they could grow up to become presidents one day. It was culture, you see, not race!
Obama was of course not only raised by his white Christian mother and her family (something he –and Joe Biden –never tired of reminding us during his electoral campaign to fend off his paternal Muslim contamination), but even his black father was African and not African American. Passing him off as an example of what happens when African Americans are raised the “right way” is the pride and joy of white liberals enamored of their own culturalist-cum-racist ideology and inebriated by virulent American nationalism. Obama’s continuation of America’s imperial wars and aggressions is proof that if you put an African American in office who is raised “the right way,” he will perform his imperial duties as well as any white president. Obama’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize was therefore a major gain for white liberal Americans who can bask in the sun of their achievement. For after all, producing a few African Americans in the form of Barack Obama can and will silence whoever can still muster the courage to criticize this thoroughly racist system dubbed “American democracy” which continues to victimize most African Americans and much of the Third World.
The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.
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