Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 2: Khayyami Millennium: Reporting the Discovery and the Reconfirmation of the True Dates of Birth and Passing of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123)
About this ebook
In the overall series, the transdisciplinary sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi shares the results of his decades-long research on Omar Khayyam, the enigmatic 11th/12th centuries Persian Muslim sage, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, physician, writer, and poet from Neyshabour, Iran, whose life and works still remain behind a veil of deep mystery. Tamdgidi’s purpose has been to find definitive answers to the many puzzles still surrounding Khayyam, especially regarding the existence, nature, and purpose of the Robaiyat in his life and works. To explore the questions posed, he advances a new hermeneutic method of textual analysis, informed by what he calls the quantum sociological imagination, to gather and study all the attributed philosophical, religious, scientific, and literary writings of Khayyam.
In this second book of the series, Tamdgidi lays down an essential foundation for the series by revisiting the unresolved questions surrounding the dates of birth and passing of Omar Khayyam. Critically reexamining the manner in which Omar Khayyam’s birth horoscope as reported in Zahireddin Abolhassan Beyhaqi’s Tatemmat Sewan al-Hekmat (Supplement to the Chest of Wisdom) was used by Swāmi Govinda Tīrtha in his The Nectar of Grace: Omar Khayyam’s Life and Works (1941) to determine Khayyam’s birth date, Tamdgidi uncovers a number of serious internal inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies that prevented Tīrtha (and, since then, other scholars more or less taking for granted his results) from arriving at a reliable date for Khayyam’s birth, hurling Khayyami studies into decades of confusion regarding Khayyam’s life and works. Tamdgidi then shares in the book the detailed account of his own discovery of Khayyam’s true date of birth for the first time, a finding that eluded Khayyami studies for centuries and is bound to revolutionize the studies for decades to come.
Tamdgidi then turns his attention to the task of definitively establishing the true date of passing of Omar Khayyam. Conducting an in-depth, superposed analysis of Beyhaqi’s Tatemmat Sewan el-Hekmat (Supplement to the Chest of Wisdom), Abdorrahman Khazeni’s Mizan ol-Hekmat (Balance of Wisdom), Nezami Arouzi’s Chahar Maqaleh (Four Discourses), and Yar Ahmad Rashidi Tabrizi’s Tarabkhaneh (House of Joy), amid other relevant texts, he succeeds in firmly reconfirming and further discovering, in a textually reliable way, not only the year, the season, the month, and the day, but even the most likely time of day at which the poet mathematician, astronomer, and calender reformer died as a solar centenarian, completing his 102nd solar year age.
Strange is that these discoveries are made just in time as we approach the first solar millennium of Omar Khayyam’s birth date on June 10, 1021, at sunrise of Neyshabour, Iran, and the ninth solar centennial of his passing on June 10, 1123, on the eve also of his birthday, closing the circle of his life’s “coming and going.”
CONTENTS
About OKCIR—i
Published to Date in the Series—ii
About this Book—iv
About the Author—viii
Notes on Transliteration—xix
Acknowledgments—xxi
Preface to Book 2: Recap From Prior Book of the Series—1
Introduction to Book 2: The Dilemma and Significance of Omar Khayyam’s Dates of Birth and Passing—11
CHAPTER I—Contributions, Inconsistencies, and Inaccuracies of Swāmī Govinda Tīrtha’s Findings Regarding Omar Khayyam’s Dates of Birth and Passing —27
CHAPTER II—In Search of the Correct Gemini Degree: The Story of How Omar Khayyam’s True Date of Birth Was Discovered Shortly Before Its Imminent Millennium—63
CHAPTER III—In Search of Omar Khayyam’s True Date of Passing: Superposing the Birth Date Findings With Beyhaqi’s “Tatemmat Sewan el-Hekmat” And Khazeni’s “Mizan ol-Hekmat”—133
CHAPTER IV—Searching More for Omar Khayyam’s True Date of Passing: Superposing the Birth Date Findings With Present and Older Manuscript Copies of Nezami Arouzi’s “Chahar Maqaleh”—171
CHAPTER V—Omar Khayyam’s True Date of Passing Discovered and Reconfirmed: Superposing the Birth Date Findings With All “Tarabkhaneh,” “Chahar Maqaleh,” And “Tatemmat Sewan el-Hekmat” Accounts—201
Conclusion to Book 2: Summary of Findings—255
Appendix: Transliteration System and Book 2 Glossary—267
Book 2 Cumulative Glossary of Transliterations—280
Book 2 References—287
Book 2 Index—291
About the author
Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Ph.D., is the founding director and editor of OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics) and its journal, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699), which have served since 2002 to frame his independent research, pedagogical, and publishing initiatives. Besides his currently in progress work published in the book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (Okcir Press), he has previously authored Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma (Okcir Press), Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism (Routledge/Paradigm) and Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (Palgrave Macmillan). Tamdgidi has published numerous peer reviewed articles and chapters and edited more than thirty journal issues. He is a former associate professor of sociology specializing in social theory at UMass Boston and has taught sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Oneonta.
Tamdgidi holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology in conjunction with a graduate certificate in Middle Eastern studies from Binghamton University (SUNY). He received his B.A. in architecture from U.C. Berkeley, following enrollment as an undergraduate student of civil engineering in the Technical College of the University of Tehran, Iran.
His areas of scholarly and practical interest are the sociology of self-knowledge, human architecture, and utopystics—three fields of inquiry he invented in his doctoral studies and has since pursued as respectively intertwined theoretical, methodological and applied fields of inquiry altogether contributing to what he calls the quantum sociological imagination. His research, teaching, and publications have been framed by an interest in understanding how world-historical social structures and personal selves constitute one another. This line of inquiry has itself been a result of his longstanding interest in understanding the underlying causes of failures of the world’s utopian, mystical, and scientific movements in bringing about a just global society.
It was during his undergraduate studies at U.C. Berkeley and in the course of his mentorship by the painter and design architect Jesse Reichek (1916-2005) that Tamdgidi’s notion and project “human architecture” was born. During his graduate studies at SUNY-Binghamton, he was mentored in methods, theory, and world-systems studies by Terence K. Hopkins (1928-1997) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), and further in dialectics by Dale Tomich and on space and society by Anthony D. King, amid a uniquely autonomous and flexible transdisciplinary Graduate Program in Sociology founded by T. K. Hopkins.
