Omar Khayyam’s Secret

Omar Khayyam's Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination, by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, is a 12-book series of which this book is the 12th, subtitled Khayyami Legacy: The Collected Works of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123) Culminating in His Secretive 1000 Robaiyat Autobiography. Book 12 condenses the series and its findings in a single volume. This is the first time since Omar Khayyam's passing that all his extant works have been compiled in a single publication series and volume and studied integratively, accomplished for the millennium of his true birth date and the ninth centennial of his true date of passing. It includes two forewords, one by Winston E. Langley, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and former Provost of UMass Boston, and another by Jafar Aghayani Chavoshi, Professor of History of Science and Mathematics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

The original texts are included with their new English (and where needed, updated or new Persian) translations. The preface recaps how a method in quantum sociological imagination helped solve the riddles of Khayyam's life and works in the series. The introduction delineates this series' findings toward a scientifically reliable biography of Khayyam, including a critical commentary on how Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat colonially distorted Khayyam's Robaiyat and Islamic legacy. Three other chapters are also shared: one on how Khayyam's true dates of birth and passing were discovered and reconfirmed in this series, including further notes on Swami Govinda Tirtha's errors in studying Khayyam's birth horoscope for the purpose; another on integratively viewing astronomy and its relation to astrology amid all of Khayyam's works; and a third on the role he played in the design of Isfahan's North Dome.

Khayyam's studied writings are: his treatise on the science of the universals of existence; his annotated Persian translation of Avicenna's "Splendid Sermon" on God's unity and creation; his treatise on the created world and worship duty; his three-part treatises on existence (1-on the necessity of contradiction, determinism, and survival; 2-on attributes; and 3-on the light of intellect on 'existent' as the subject matter of universal science); his treatise on soul's survival, necessity of accidents, and nature of time; his treatise in music on tetrachords; his two treatises on balance; his treatise on circle quadrant for achieving a certain proportionality; his treatise in algebra and equations; his treatise on Euclid's postulation problems; his literary treatise "Nowrooznameh"; and his secretive autobiography, the Robaiyat, comprised of 1000 quatrains logically organized based on his own three-phased method of inquiry.

This series has found the answer to its question about the origins, nature, and purpose of the Robaiyat in Khayyam's life and works. Lifelong, he was secretively writing his Robaiyat as his "book of life," his autobiography, for posthumous release. His pen name "Khayyam" ("tentmaker") had been inspired by his dazzling birth chart. By re-sewing in this series his autobiographical tent of wisdom as a Tavern serving the spiritual Wine of his poetry, we have advanced from knowing little about his life to reading his most intimate autobiography. But the Robaiyat is not just a private autobiography; it is also a sociologically imaginative and poetic public telling of humanity's search for a universal healing.

Iran's appreciation of Omar Khayyam's legacy can be best judged not by the physics of his burial sites, traditionally humble or artistically modern, but by the role Iranians themselves have played since his time in safeguarding his works especially in the poetic bricks and mortars of the human architecture of his own secretly designed and designated everlasting tomb.