Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence
About this ebook
Having confirmed in the prior three books of the series the true dates of birth and passing of Omar Khayyam, his pen name origins, and his authorship of a robaiyat collection, Tamdgidi explores in this fourth book the origins, nature, and purpose of such a collection by applying the series’ quantum sociological imagination method to hermeneutically explore the ontological structures of the Robaiyat in Khayyam’s last written treatise.
Khayyam’s treatise, found in the early 20th century and still largely ignored or misread, radically challenges the mythical narratives built over the centuries about him as one who thought existence is unknowable, having died not solving its riddles. Strangely, his treatise instead offers a logically coherent and brilliant worldview of someone who has found his answers as far as human existence is concerned. Khayyam even goes so far as confidently saying he hopes his peers would agree that his brief treatise is more useful than volumes.
Offering the Persian text and his new English translation of the treatise, Tamdgidi undertakes in this book a detailed clause-based hermeneutic study of the treatise. He also explores its broader intellectual and historical contexts by examining its relation to the book “Savior from Error” by Khayyam’s junior (by more than three decades) contemporary foe, Muhammad Ghazali, while questioning the long-held belief that the treatise was requested by and addressed to Fakhr ol-Molk, a son of the famous vizier Nezam ol-Molk.
Tamdgidi finds instead that the treatise was written in AD 1095-96, a few years earlier than thought, for another son of Nezam ol-Molk, Moayyed ol-Molk, who served at the time Soltan Muhammad, Malekshah’s son. The treatise was intended as a philosophical foundation to move the post-Malekshah Iran in a more independent direction by way of influencing his son, Muhammad. Ghazali in his book, likely written to please Ahmad Sanjar (Malekshah’s younger son who disliked Khayyam) and his vizier at the time, Fakhr ol-Molk, anonymously chastised Khayyam as a philosopher, duplicitously feeding the cynical metaphors that some theologians and Sufis hurled at Khayyam down the centuries.
Khayyam’s treatise unveils his vision of existence as a participatory universe where the subject has objective status, shedding a new light on the ontological structures of the Robaiyat. His “succession order” thesis of existence is an alternative Islamic creationist-evolutionary worldview that offers a prescient quantum conceptualist vision of the universe as a unitary, relatively self-reliant, self-knowing, and self-creative, substance lovingly created by an absolutely good God in His own image. Existence is essentially good but, due to its good volitionally self-creative nature, can be potentially subject to incidental defects that are nevertheless knowable and curable to build both a spiritually fulfilling and a joyful life in this world. Other than God’s Necessary Existence there is no “another world”; judgment days, heavens, and hells are definitely real this-worldly, not after-worldly, existents. In Khayyam’s view, human existence can be what good we artfully make of it, starting here-and-now from our own personal selves in our this-worldly lifetimes. It is to creatively realize such an existence that the Robaiyat must have been intended.
CONTENTS
About OKCIR—i
Published to Date in the Series—ii
About this Book—iv
About the Author—viii
Notes on Transliteration—xvii
Acknowledgments—xix
Preface to Book 4: Recap from Prior Books of the Series—1
Introduction to Book 4: The Unique Significance of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence, His Last Written in Persian for Keepsake—7
CHAPTER I—The Persian Text and A New English Translation of Omar Khayyam’s “Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence” (Resaleh dar Elm-e Kolliyat-e Vojood)—17
CHAPTER II—Hermeneutic Analysis of Clauses 1-19 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence: Descending the Succession Order—45
CHAPTER III—Hermeneutic Analysis of Clauses 20-50 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence: Ascending the Succession Order—121
CHAPTER IV—Understanding the Succession Order and Its Active Intellect: Comparative Notes on Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence—179
CHAPTER V—The Foe Who Wrongly Spoke: How Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence Compares to Muhammad Ghazali’s Book “Savior from Error”—207
CHAPTER VI—Moayyed ol-Molk or Fakhr ol-Molk?: Who Requested Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence and When Was It Written?—249
CHAPTER VII—Interpreting Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence in Light of Its Intellectual and Historical Contexts As a Whole—279
CHAPTER VIII—The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence—321
Conclusion to Book 4: Summary of Findings—347
Appendix: Transliteration System and Book 4 Glossary—375
Book 4 Cumulative Glossary of Transliterations—388
Book 4 References—397
Book 4 Index—401
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 12-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.
