In Praise of Persia and Omar Khayyam’s “The Rubaiyat”

Long ago I travelled across Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, who’s borders belie a greater region once known as Persia. In its time, the Persian Empire was populated by a people distinct in language and culture from the nomadic Arabs. The Persians, as most Iranians I know still prefer to be called, were able to create a high culture in which learning and discovery were much revered. V. S. Naipaul, in his book “Among the Believers” suggests that the 1979 Iranian revolution was more of a revolt against the oppressive American-backed regime of the Shah, than a move toward Islamic fundamentalism.

As a traveler, my experience with Iranians, nee Persians, was that their culture is the most urbane in the region called the Middle East. Though they take pride and joy in their history, they are quick to embrace and improve upon modern ideas and methods. I have a strong sense that repressive Islamic theocracy is not viable in their long-term and current events may presage a change toward the re-emergence of the best in Persian character.

Omar Khayyam (Persian, born 1048 AD, Neyshapur, Persia, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and poet.)

Omar Khayyam, the Persian polymath, philosopher and poet born in 1048 AD, is credited with penning “The Rubaiyat” made famous by the English translator, Edward Fitzgerald. The Rubaiyat consists of a collection of short 4-line Haiku-like poems, called quatrains. I find many of Khayyam’s  quatrains evocative of some key systems thinking ideas. Some argue that Fitzgerald’s translation cannot be trusted, but given Khayyam’s remarkable contributions in Algebra and Astronomical theory, I am inclined to think that the ideas conveyed in the English translation are more consistent with the original than some critics suggest.

On the nature of knowledge, Khayyam wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

This quatrain, among my favorites, always comes to my mind when I reflect on a blog entry that I have posted and then later, regretted. I ask myself if I should erase it from my blog with a tap on the DEL key but of course, like it or not, the DEL key cannot erase the ideas I have unleashed into the world. I have no power to erase the past, I only have the power to shape my future in doing what I do here and now.

You cannot undo the past you created. You cannot unlearn, unmake, or erase. What is passed is now committed within you, here and now. Make of it what you can.

In another of my favorite quatrains, Khayyam evokes the the idea of transcending the reductive mind through intentional action.

For I remember stopping by the way 
To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay: 
And with its all-obliterated Tongue 
It murmur’d–”Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

And  then the potter’s hot pipkin product—-a  quatrain about the coincidence of what is created and its creator.

Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot– 
I think a Sufi pipkin-waxing hot– 
“All this of Pot and Potter–Tell me then, 
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”