Khayyam’s Tent: A Secretive Autobiography: 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from His Tavern of Happiness

His poetic “book of life” was intended to be released posthumously, so its existence was not known to his contemporaries. Following his death, it was released but became scattered and its logical unity was shattered by natural and social disasters and scribal poetry alphabetizing styles, some quatrains wandering into other poets’ works and others becoming misattributed to him. The Robaiyat as shared in this book were logically re-sewn and newly translated in verse by the sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi during his integrative study of all of Khayyam’s works as reported in his unprecedented 12-book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (2021-2025). 

Following a summary of his series’ findings, Tamdgidi presents in this book nothing else but Khayyam’s Robaiyat, including the Persian originals and his verse translations (his study of them having been shared in his series, especially its Books 8-11). The poems, comprising songs of doubt, hope, and joy, are logically organized to address three questions, based on the 3-phased method of inquiry Khayyam himself introduced in his other writings.

Quatrains 1-338 of Part 1, Songs of Doubt, open by explaining his epic’s secretiveness and address the question “Does Happiness Exist?” Their order follows a logically inductive reasoning through which Khayyam delves from surface portraits of unhappiness to their deeper chain of causes. Quatrains 339-685 of Part 2, Songs of Hope, address the second question “What Is Happiness?” Their order follows a logically deductive reasoning through which he moves from methodological to explanatory and practical quatrains. Quatrains 686-1000 of Part 3, Songs of Joy, address the third question “Why Can Happiness Exist?” Still deductively ordered, they show how happiness can be made possible through his poetry’s Wine itself, realizing that one can never become truly happy by bringing sadness to others since human self and society are always twin-born and universal. Hurting another is always a hurting of that self in you that represents that other. For Khayyam, happiness can be possible by way of joyful, creative, and constructive humanizing efforts by own example, like his Robaiyat, which must also start from our inner and interpersonal todays and spread globally.

Khayyam’s Robaiyat represented the tent of which he was a “tentmaker,” his poetic pen name having been inspired by his true birth date horoscope chart as discovered by Tamdgidi and reported in his series for the first time. The metaphor also underlies the numerical geometry of its triangular unity, proportional to the dazzling Grand Tent (Triplicity) features of his birth chart, the same way he embedded his own triangular golden rule in the mysterious design of Isfahan’s North Dome. A metaphor of the Robaiyat as Simorgh (or Phoenix) songs is also hidden in its deep structure. Khayyam’s Robaiyat are his Simorgh’s millennial rebirth songs served in his tented tavern as 1000 sips of his bittersweet poetic Wine of happiness.

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REVIEWS:

“… a masterpiece in Omar Khayyam studies …” -- Jafar Aghayani Chavoshi (Ph.D., University of Paris, 1997), Professor of Philosophy of Science at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, specializing in Philosophy, Epistemology, and History of Mathematics and Science, and in Omar Khayyam Studies. From his Foreword to the last book of Tamdgidi’s 12-Book Omar Khayyam’s Secret series.

“Indeed, for this reader, who was exposed at an early age to Khayyam, through the work of Edward FitzGerald, encountering the Omar Khayyam’s Secret series was like the astronauts who experienced seeing the Earth for the first time from outer space. It was nothing I could have imagined, from prior experience. … In Khayyam’s work, especially his poetry, one finds the pathos of the tragedian, with the author of Gilgamesh, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe calling; one comes face to face with anxiety, doubt, and the absurd, and tastes Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Kobo Abe; one confronts subtleties of the most refined kind and meets Buddha, Pushkin, and the practical genius of Da Vinci and Bacon; and one, confronted with the heart and matters of faith and reason, love and happiness, finds voices from Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Aquinas, to Zara Jacob, Jefferson, and Bonhoeffer. Happiness, for example, is not only a state of well-being, but a process of continuing liberation. … While Khayyam’s life is a major story of fierce intellectual passion and a like devotion to ideals of philosophy, science, and poetry (and modes of living that combined those of the solitary and the celebrated, the private and the public), there is an area that is also part of his identity that cannot be overlooked without an injustice to scholarship, history, and human culture. It is the role of satire -- that which humorously criticizes defects of reason, science, philosophy (including theology), politics, history, custom (however sacred), even in face of deep disappointments or lived catastrophes. Welcoming the comedy, as Aristophanes, Cervantes, Vico, Erasmus, Santayana, and Chekhov knew, is part of coming to know, of wisdom, of ensuring human flourishing. One may say that Khayyam could be regarded as the first true humanist. All that is human find unhidden expressions through him.” -- Winston E. Langley, Professor Emeritus of Political Science & International Relations, Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School for Policy & Global Studies, and a former Provost (2008-2017) of the University of Massachusetts Boston. From his Foreword to the last book of Tamdgidi’s 12-Book Omar Khayyam’s Secret series.

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TABLE of CONTENTS:

About OKCIR—i

The Series “Omar Khayyam’s Secret” on Which the Present Book is Based—ii

About this Book—iv

About the Series Author and Translator—viii

Acknowledgments—xiii

Introduction: A Summary of the Findings of the 12-Book “Omar Khayyam’s Secret” Series Resulting in the Present Book: How a Method Framed in the Quantum Sociological Imagination Helped Solve the Riddles of Omar Khayyam’s Life and His Robaiyat amid All His Works—1

The Robaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Part 1 of 3: Songs of Doubt Addressing the Question “Does Happiness Exist?”

I. Secret Book of Life (راز دفتر عمر)—p. 23

II. Alas! (افسوس)—p. 28

III. Times (زمانه)—p. 35

IV. Spheres (افلاك)—p. 39

V. Chance and Fate (قضا و قدر)—p. 47

VI. Puzzle (معمّا)—p. 50

VII. O God! (خدايا)—p. 55

VIII. Tavern Voice (ندا از ميخانه)—p. 66

IX. O Wine-Tender (اى ساقى)—p. 72

The Robaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Part 2 of 3: Songs of Hope Addressing the Question “What Is Happiness?”

X. Drunken Way (راه مستى)—p. 79

XI. Willfulness (اراده)—p. 89

XII. Foes and Friends (دوست و دشمن)—p. 93

XIII. Wealth (ثروت)—p. 102

XIV. Today (امروز)—p. 110

XV. Pottery (كوزه گرى)—p. 121

XVI. Cemetery (گورستان)—p. 124

XVII. Paradise and Hell (بهشت و جهنم)—p. 127

The Robaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Part 3 of 3: Songs of Joy Addressing the Question “Why Can Happiness Exist?”

XVIII. Garden (باغ)—p. 135

XIX. Wine (شراب)—p. 142

XX. Love (عشق)—p. 157

XXI. Night (شب)—p. 162

XXII. Death and Survival (مرگ و بقا)—p. 165

XXIII. Liberation (رهايى)—p. 170

XXIV. Return (بازگشت)—p. 182

Robaiyat Index—185