Khayyam's Tent: A Secretive Autobiography

This book offers the original Robaiyat of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123) as a tent of 1000 logically sewn quatrains serving the poetic Wine of his secretive autobiography. It is an epic, at once a personal, world-historical, and cosmic search for true human happiness. He composed it to be highly readable so that it can be read by all, continually, and today, before it is too late, like a prayer book or a rosary of pearls or ruby stones, since it was meant to be not only reflective but also generative of search for happiness. If you begin reading it, you must do so at least once to its end, so that in later readings any of its parts can be recalled amid the unitary architecture of its philosophical, spiritual, and scientific wisdom rendered as an astounding and most beautiful work of art. Khayyam was right; there is nothing on Earth like his Wine.

His poetic "book of life" was intended to be released posthumously, so its existence was not known to his contemporaries. Following his death, it was released but became scattered and its logical unity was shattered by natural and social disasters and scribal poetry alphabetizing styles, some quatrains wandering into other poets' works and others becoming misattributed to him. The Robaiyat as shared in this book were logically re-sewn and newly translated in verse by the sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi during his integrative study of all of Khayyam's works as reported in his unprecedented 12-book series Omar Khayyam's Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (2021-2025).

Following a summary of his series' findings, Tamdgidi presents in this book nothing else but Khayyam's Robaiyat, including the Persian originals and his verse translations (his study of them having been shared in his series, especially its Books 8-12). The poems, comprising songs of doubt, hope, and joy, are logically organized to address three questions, based on the 3-phased method of inquiry Khayyam himself introduced in his other writings.

Quatrains 1-338 of Part 1, Songs of Doubt, open by explaining his epic's secretiveness and address the question "Does Happiness Exist?" Their order follows a logically inductive reasoning through which Khayyam delves from surface portraits of unhappiness to their deeper chain of causes. Quatrains 339-685 of Part 2, Songs of Hope, address the second question "What Is Happiness?" Their order follows a logically deductive reasoning through which he moves from methodological to explanatory and practical quatrains. Quatrains 686-1000 of Part 3, Songs of Joy, address the third question "Why Can Happiness Exist?" Still deductively ordered, they show how happiness can be made possible through his poetry's Wine itself, realizing that one can never become truly happy by bringing sadness to others since human self and society are always twin-born and universal. Hurting another is always a hurting of that self in you that represents that other. For Khayyam, happiness can be possible by way of joyful, creative, and constructive humanizing efforts by own example, like his Robaiyat, which must also start from our inner and interpersonal todays and spread globally.

Khayyam's Robaiyat represented the tent of which he was a "tentmaker," his poetic pen name having been inspired by his true birth date horoscope chart as discovered by Tamdgidi and reported in his series for the first time. The metaphor also underlies the numerical geometry of its triangular unity, proportional to the dazzling Grand Tent (Triplicity) features of his birth chart, the same way he embedded his own triangular golden rule in the mysterious design of Isfahan's North Dome. A metaphor of the Robaiyat as Simorgh (or Phoenix) songs is also hidden in its deep structure. Khayyam's Robaiyat are his Simorgh's millennial rebirth songs served in his tented tavern as 1000 sips of his bittersweet poetic Wine of happiness.