Omar Khayyam — the astronomer whose poems doubted paradise | PERSIA'S GREATEST MINDS Part 3

History Onion · Part 3 · 2:58

In 1074, in Isfahan, a young Persian mathematician from Nishapur, Omar Khayyam (عمر خیام), set up and ran one of the first great observatories, with one job from Sultan Malik-Shah: fix the calendar. He was also a poet: four-line poems, rubaiyat, about love and wine, time and death, and some of them questioned the paradise religion promised. The calendar: Earth takes 365 days and nearly six hours to circle the sun, and the old Persian calendar ignored the extra hours, so Nowruz had wandered eighteen days from the first day of spring. Five centuries before the telescope, Khayyam's team timed the spring equinox so precisely that their rule hinged on noon: if spring arrived before midday, that day was New Year's Day; if after, the next. A calendar that follows the sky can't drift — Iran's still works that way, while the Islamic calendar follows the moon and the Gregorian (1582) slips a day every three thousand years or so. The poems: «گویند کسان بهشت با حور خوش است / من می‌گویم که آب انگور خوش است / این نقد بگیر و دست از آن نسیه بدار / که آواز دهل شنیدن از دور خوش است» — take this cash, let that credit go; a drum sounds sweet from far away. In his century these were dangerous questions: the theologian Ghazali ruled that philosophers who denied bodily resurrection were unbelievers who could be killed, and Khayyam was a philosopher of that very school. The historian Ibn al-Qifti says that when men of his time attacked his faith, Khayyam feared for his life, fell silent, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1859 Edward FitzGerald turned the quatrains into English — the same year as Darwin's On the Origin of Species — and Victorian readers unsettled in their own faith made him one of the best-known poets on Earth.