The Timeless Classic of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat
Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is one of the very few literary gems that are considered to be two times classic, one in its original language Persian and one in its translated variant English. The Rubaiyat sails through many of the grand themes of poetry such as love, wine, god and the meaning of existence in the giant cosmos.
About a 100 years ago, when Edward FitzGerald translated Omar Khayyam’s bedazzling poem, the Rubaiyat in English, he would not have imagined what a jewel he had made accessible to a vast number of people on earth.
FitzGerald’s translation of Rubaiyat not only gave it new heights which is seldom the case for translated works, but it made it possible for Khayyam’s words to reach the ears of some of the literary giants of the West and therefore become popular in the eyes of the public which is also seldom the case for translated works.
It’s believed that Oscar Wilde once described Rubaiyat as ‘a masterpiece of art’ placing it with Shakespeare’s sonnets as one of his greatest literary loves. Similarly, Mark Twain and T.S Eliot too had applauded the splendour of Khayyam’s ideas as well as the labour of FitzGerald that went into making those ideas read into sweet and beautiful poetry.
It’s believed that when the English painter, John Ruskin first received the copy of Rubaiyat in the 1800s, he described his feelings as, ‘I never did — till this day — read anything so glorious’, a feeling that many many others have come to share since that time.
Omar Khayyam was an 11th-century polymath from Iran who is better known for his contributions in astronomy and mathematics rather than poetry. Because of his contributions, in 1982, NASA decided to name a crater on Moon after him. Khayyam was a student of Ibn Sina, the Islamic predecessor of Socrates, who studied philosophy under him but more than philosophy, he was attracted to poetry.
Unlike other Persian poets, Khayyam combined his obsession of Persian verse with his insights about philosophy, hence creating something wholly unique to him in the giant and rich inventory of classic Persian literature.
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is considered a poem for all seasons.
It is holy and profane at the same time. It deals with the ultimate questions of life and death while imparting an Epicurean style philosophy of not taking things too seriously. It questions our deeply held beliefs about God and heaven while focusing on the kind of spiritual transcendence usually found in Sufi literature.
Khayyam was an agnostic at heart and he often found little confidence in the promises of religion — it’s claims of heaven and hell, and its insistence on God’s existence. He often criticized the superiority complex of Muslims who thought they had all the answers handed to them while the rest of people were simply ignorant manikins. No wonder that Christopher Hitchens used one of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat verses as a prologue to his mind-boggling essay, God is Not Great which read:
And do you think that unto such as you
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
God gave a secret, and denied it me?
Well, well — what matters it? Believe that, too!
(Richard le Gallienne translation)
Or outside Rubaiyat, consider his verse:
Which man has never transgressed your law, say?
A life without sin, what taste does it have, say?
If you punish the evil that I have done by evil,
What is the difference between you and me?
Or this:
Am I a wine-bibber? What if I am?
Zoroastrian or infidel? Suppose I am?
Each sect miscalls me, but I heed them not,
I am my own, and what I am, I am.
Or this:
When Allah mixed my clay, he knew full well
My future acts, and could each one foretell;
Without His will no act of mine was wrought;
Is it then just to punish me in Hell?
Or this:
The Koran! well, come put me to the test
Lovely old book in hideous error drest —
Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,
The unbeliever knows his Koran best
Khayyam’s blunt and open scepticism surely makes him a voice of reason for the Muslim world which often disowns him as if he never went down in history.
And yet, Khayyam’s poetry has a history of inspiring the religious-minded, his verses exploring and making sense of the many faces of God that people experience in their day-to-day lives, the highest form of which had been described using the vocabulary of ‘love and light.’
Consider his verse:
Then of the Thee in Me who works behind
The Veil of Universe I cried to find
A Lamp to guide me through the darkness; and
Something then said — ‘An Understanding blind.’
The metaphors of veil and lamp have often been used in classic Sufi literature to refer to the ‘doctrine of the emanation of the moral Creature from God, the Creator and his re-absorption into God’ meaning the idea that humans depart from God and eventually are reabsorbed into God in a cosmic union of becoming all and one.
Note that themes like this are almost universal in the language of poetry. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism also talked about such themes of union in his poetry, and Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet who wrote the classic epic Gitanjali also explored similar themes of mysticism about ‘unity of it all’ in his poetry.
And so it’s not a surprise that Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is laden with such metaphors but perhaps what is unique to his poetry, or the Sufi poetry, in general, is the use of wine and it’s never-ending relationship with God. Khayyam often refers to ‘the Cup’ or the chalice of wine or the cup-bearer which in Sufi vocab has been used to invoke the concept of God. The very early verses of Rubaiyat beautifully uses that metaphor:
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
“Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.”
While wine has been called ‘an abomination of Satan’s doing’ in the Quran (5:90–91), a tool with which the Satan seeks to stoke ‘enmity and hatred’ between believers and ‘keep you from remembrance of God and prayer,’ the interesting thing isn’t that wine poetry has been the gold standard for all the Islamic literary gems, but that the concept of wine has been used in remembrance and praise of God which makes it more paradoxically enjoyable.
Beginning with the Caliphate period, wine drinking became one of the greatest subjects of poetry. Some of this poetry was written by caliphs themselves, the Caliph al-Walid ibn Yazid (d. 744), for example, composed some of the finest and also some of the most scandalous poetic verses in the canon. He wrote:
I testify before God and the angels
And all His servants and fellows devout
That I crave song and gulps from the glass
And to seize beautiful cheeks by the mouth
Wine poetry had been explored in detail not just by atheist poets like Al-Mari (also called the blind poet), or Sufi poets like Rumi, but it has occupied a special place in the hearts of even many of the religiously orthodox poets. Shams-ud-Din who lived right after Ibn Taymiyya’s time, and went by his pen name Hafez, wrote several volumes of poetry about ‘the joys of love and wine.’ Next in the line is Allama Iqbal — also known as ‘the poet of the East’ and one of the pioneers of pan-Islamism in South-Asia — who went on to write several commentaries of the Quran through his poetry had a lot to say about the texture and taste of wine in relation to his metaphysical views about God’s place in human psyche. One of his beautiful verse in Bang-e-Dra reads:
If the book of literature’s wine in the world’s garden does not exist
The flower, the bud, the verdure, even the garden will not exist
So what does the wine represents in Islamic poetry? When Hafez talked about wine in his poetry, he actually meant wine. According to Hafez, you are never going to unveil the mysteries of the universe by embarking on Socratic wisdom, you need the joys of love and wine to make your existence bearable in this cold hard universe. He once wrote, ‘For no one has, nor will, unveil this mystery through wisdom.’ But wine has been used in both holy and profane way in classic Islamic poetry.
Khayyam, for example, used the metaphor of ‘the cup’ or the ‘cup-bearer’ to refer to the deep Sufi idea that since everything is a manifestation of God, a wine glass too is a reflection of God’s omnipotence. But more so it has a connotation of being intoxicated in the way Sufis get intoxicated for their love of God. Rumi described that feeling as being ‘drunk on God.’ He also described it as the feeling of ‘being vulnerable’ and ‘having your ego dissolved’ in front of God an effect that wine often has on people. It is also called ‘being truthful’ or ‘naked’ with God because wine often makes people utter truths about themselves which they would not otherwise utter in their normal state. When Iqbal talked about wine in his poetry, he also referred to ‘bowing your head’ before God or getting your ego shattered because ego often prevents people from submitting to their vulnerabilities in front of God. More often than not, however, wine represents love, earthly love as well as the higher godly love. Love is intoxicating and so is wine. Love is painful and so is the effect of wine. And the highest form of love which is often God’s love is the most intoxicating and the most painful.
Khayyam often talks about such passionate and intoxicating kind of love in his Rubaiyat and while he believes in getting consumed and even getting destroyed by the power of such love, at the same time he embarks on a ‘lightly child lightly’ message which is more representative of Aldous Huxley and his scepticism. Like all great philosophers, Khayyam also thinks that ‘in the end nothing matters’ and that ‘life is short’ and therefore you should not take things too seriously, that whatever meanings you have constructed, and whatever grand purpose you have taken upon yourself should be moderated with a glass of wine that is, it should be dealt with the kind of lightness and non-seriousness that is often more becoming of the attitudes of drunkards. He writes:
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in — Yes —
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but
what Thou shalt be — Nothing — Thou shalt not be less.
In the end, Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is the kind of poem that you never really read once. Every time you read it, you find something new in it which gives it a timeless character that is often found in books that we come to call ‘classics.’ Italo Calvino in his handsome essay, Why Read the Classics, writes that ‘A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading’ a characteristic that couldn’t be more true for Rubaiyat. It definitely is one of ‘those books’ that you keep on your shelf and it comes to ‘represent you’ in some odd yet fantastic way, in case of Rubaiyat it is the mish-mash of East and West, of passion and scepticism and of God and the profane world.
