His own man

What little most of us know about Omar Khayyam can be summarised in two words: the Rubaiyat, a collection of his free-spirited quatrains made famous around the world by the translations of the 19th-century poet Edward Fitzgerald. It has been said that these immensely popular books, first published in 1859 and running into numerous editions, contributed more phrases to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined.

Hazhir Teimourian, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, has offered readers a much broader study of this 11th-century polymath in a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy. We learn a good deal of the challenging political and cultural environment in which the young Khayyam grew up in his native city of Nishapur in north-eastern Iran, captured by the Seljuks in 1040, eight years before his birth. Nishapur, anointed by Zarathustra himself, prided itself on its history but, as Teimourian writes, from the glories of its pre-Islamic history, ‘Iran had sunk to the slavery of savages from the deserts of Arabia and the steppes of central Asia.’

Son of a relatively prosperous doctor, Khayyam was taught by the great Zoroastrian philosopher Abu Hassan Bahmanyar bin Marzban, an expert on logic, music and cosmology, and was also educated in Ptolemaic astronomy by the renowned Abu Hassan al Anbari. He moved on to storied Samarkand to continue his education. Good contacts have never hurt anyone and an introduction to the city’s governor, a friend of his late father, set him on the ladder. Within a couple of years, he had outgrown this provincial backing and his patron was none other than Shams al Mulk, royal leader of the Qarakhanid government in Bukhara. Teimourian’s ‘obnoxiously ambitious young man’ had wasted little time in making the transition from aspiring student to royal hanger-on and mathematical superstar.