Umar Khayam

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[ Dayaram. Bulchand ]

Umar Khayam.

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Ul'lAR KHA.YAM

by

Bulchand Dayaram

[Extract from East & V'est
^larch, 1905]

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UMAR KHAYAM. '^^-"''i!?

UMAR KHAYAM, or to call him by his proper name, Ghiasal-din
Abdul Fattah Omar bin Ibrahim, is one of the most remarkable
and distinguished of the Persian poets. His name has been rendered
immortal by Edward Fitzgerald, the close and life-long friend of
Tennyson. Of all the Persian poets next perhaps to Hafiz and Sadi,
he commands the largest number of admirers in Europe and America.
Besides Fitzgerald, Whinfield, Justin M'Carthy, John Payne, Mrs.
Cadell and others have rendered his poetry into English verse, and
many of his quatrains have been translated into French by Nicolas.
The ''tent-maker" poet, or Khayam, is a name quite familiar to
European ears. Whatever is therefore said or written about him is
likely to prove of some interest to a large circle of cultured and literary
men, not only in Asia, but in the more highly intellectual and scientific
regions of the West.

Undoubtedly Fitzgerald's " Omar,'' *' that large infidel," has been
a name to conjure with and exercises a potent spell on Asiatic and
European imagination. In London, in Paris, in New York, in Chicago,
and other advanced centres of thought and literary pursuit, Umar has
found warm and devoted students of his poetry and enthusiastic and
charmed followers of his creed. The Umar Khayam clubs and coteries
in aristocratic London alone are a singular proof of the influence exer-
cised by this eastern poet and philosopher.

It was Fitzgerald who first revealed the subtle and deHcate charm
of his poetry in the middle of the last century to the European gaze.
His edition of Umar Khayam's quatrains is a real masterpiece which,
to quote Lord Tennyson, " drew full-handed plaudits from our best in
modern letters" and was a ''planet equal to the sun which cast it." Since
then the interest in Umar Khayam's poetry has remained unabated
among western readers, and the influence of his teaching continues
steadily to increase. In Asia, the home of eastern poetry, Umar
Khayam counts his readers and admirers by the thousand. Fitzgerald,

300 EAST &• WEST

however, failed to appreciate the winsome eclectism and splendour
of his philosophy and the breadth and magnificence of his cultivated
intellect, and it was left to Nicolas, Cowell and other later writers to
more properly appreciate and expound Umar's religious and philo-
sophic views.

What is the secret of the influence and what has been the history
and life-work of this oriental writer who has so captivated even occi-
dental imagination, it may be worth while to state briefly here. Umar
bin Ibrahim was an inhabitant of Nishapur in Khorasan, the nursery
of so many Central Asian poets, and was born in the beginning of the
eleventh century according to the Christian era, or the end of the fifth
century according to the Mahomedan or Hejira era. He lived up to a
good old age and died in the beginning of the twelth century A. D. or
about the year 1225. The exact year of his birth and death cannot be
ascertained, as is often the case regarding oriental writers and kings
and heroes, the couplets on their tombstones in which they love to
enshrine these dates mystifying rather than enlightening the anti-
quarian. His early life was a most uneventful one and he did not rise
to any high rank or position in life. His tutor was Iman Muwafik, a
famous teacher of Nishapur, nay, even of the whole of Khorasan. His
fellow students were Hussan-bin-Sabah and Abu-ul-Kasim, both of
whom subsequently attained a very high rank at an oriental court, the
latter becoming the Grand Vizier of Sultan Alp-Arslan, and the former
reaching a somewhat lower but still a high position at the same court,
though subsequently his career became a most unfortunate one and he
acquired an unenviable notoriety as the head or founder of the sect of
Ismailis or Assassins, and was known as the terrible '' Man of the
Mountain." Umar Khayam eschewed worldly pomp and power and pre-
ferred to lead a retired and secluded Hfe — a life of ease with dignity, and
his former friend Abu-ul-Kasim, known as the Nizam-ul-Mulk, helped
him to his heart's wish, by conferring on him a pension or
annuity of twelve hundred gold coins or "mishkals." He lived and died
at Nishapur, studying mathematics and science, and writing those
little Persian gems in hundreds — his " rubayats," which are the wonder
and admiration of the east and the west. Though thus hving a life of
leisured comfort, he was by no means idle or resting his mind in sloth-
ful ease. He worked and warred, in his own line, as much as men who
work and struggle in the more active and combative spheres of life,
warred with his own soul and warred with all the powers of evil in the
world, its forms and shadows, the lying and deceit, the cant and cruelty,

UMAR KHAYAM 301

the fraud and violence of earthly priests and preachers. There was a
strong thread of militancy and combativeness in the warp of his soul in
spite of his retiring disposition, and there was a certain amount of robust-
ness and toughness in his nature. He looked at things straight and full
in the face and called a spade a spade. Much of his writing, therefore,
is, according to a writer, "a breviary of a radical free-thinker who pro-
tests in the most forcible manner both against the narrowness, bigotry
and uncompromising austerity of the ulema, and the eccentricity,
hypocrisy and wild ravings of advanced Sufis whom he successfully
combats with their own weapons." He is not inaptly called the Voltaire
of the East, so trenchant and incisive is his scorn and power of denun-
ciation of the evils inflicted by priestcraft and by the wrong decrees
of fate, and so bold, free and original is he in his views. He is said to
have been by nature exceedingly sensitive, tender and imaginative, and
so all unfairness or injustice, deceit or untruthfulness, provoked un-
compromising hatred and withering satire from him. In this respect he
resembled somewhat the poet Shelley and^that English poetic free-lance,
Lord Byron, the " father" of Childe-Harold. To the orthodox priests of
his day, who were intolerant hypocrites, " veneered over with sanctimo-
nious piety," he says :

You concern yourself with formulae, hypocrisy and dissembling
We remain happy ever with our wine and beloved.

Again in another place he says : —

Oh city priest, you go more astray
Than I do though to wine I give way ;

I drink the blood of grapes, you that of men,
Which of us is the more bloodthirsty, pray ?

Umar did not only war with the world outside him but wrestled
with equal vigour with his own soul. Dissatisfied with the apparent
contradictions and palpable oppositions of the world, and with human
life and the universe, he was at one time ready to rise in revolt against
God and his Universal Scheme. His mind rebelled against what it
regarded as the manifest injustice and iniquitj- of fate in exalting
the ignoble and in degrading the divine-souled, and against the vagaries
of Fortune which frowned where it should smile and smiled where it
should frown, and a vehement cry of protest rose on his lips. He
sighed at this and sang: —

392 EAST a- WEST

Ah ! seasoned wine oft falls to rawest fools,
And clumsiest workmen own the finest tools,

And Turki maids, fit to delight men's hearts,
Lavish their smiles on beardless boys in schools,

and could not reconcile the apparent inconsistencies of God's work.

He would not, like Tennyson's friend Arthur, the beloved son of
Henry Hallam, "make his judgment bHnd," and so ran full tilt at the
existing condition of things and "touched a jarring lyre at first." He
drifted into rank pessimism and scepticism which developed into a kind
of atheism. But as he was a strenuous thinker and ardent seeker of
truth

He fought his doubts and gathered strength. . .

He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them ; Thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own ;

And power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,

And dwells not in the light alone,

But in the darkness and the cloud,

As over Sinai's peak of old

While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.

He discovered that by powers higher than those of reason, the
eternal verities of existence could be realised, and that by restraining
human senses and human desires by avoiding pain and injury, by fol-
lowing the old world-worn triple tenet of good speech, good thought,
good deed, without thought of self in this world or the next, or with
" fruitless " action, as the Gita puts it pithily, Man attains true salva-
tion and understands the " real nature" of his being, and the justice,
ordered purpose and economy of the Universal Scheme. In fact, he
discovered independently and for himself the basic principles of those
transcendental truths which prophetic souls in all ages and climes have
discovered and revealed to others. He discovered that

The soul of Things is sweet,

The Heart of Being is celestial rest ;
Stronger than woe is will ; that which was good

Doth pass to Better — Best

VMAR KHAYAM 303

It was a touch of inspiration that disclosed them to him. What
wonder, therefore, if all kindred ardent spirits both in the east and the
west continue to be drawn to Umar Khayam's teaching and come in
increasing numbers within the radius of his direct influence. This
teaching again is clothed in one of the most charming attires that
human language can assume. Simplicity, grace, melody, strength and
stateliness are its leading characteristics, and it is regarded as one of
the best and fittest instruments for conveying the most vigorous, ener-
getic and concentrated philosophic and religious thought. There are few
writings to compare with Umar Khayam's in purity of diction, fine wit,
crushing satire and general sympathy with human suffering. His ■
rhapsodies of love of wine and earthly joys, his fervent effusions of the
heart full of the most tender feelings and affections, and his passionate
denunciation of a malevolent fate which dooms to decay and oblivion
all that is great and good and beautiful in the world, are unsurpassed in
Persian poetry. To this must he added his deep religious and philoso-
phic insight into the truths of life and nature and the inspiration left
behind by him. This makes his claim to the enduring and reverent
devotion and enthusiastic praise of his admiring readers both in Asia
and Europe as intelHgible as it is strong.

Umar's achievements in the realms of science and mathematics too
were by no means insignificant, and he affords a rare instance of
an oriental poet of a very imaginative order applying himself to the dry
and crabbed problems of scientific investigation, and what is more,
elucidating and expounding them. He brought out a standard work
on Algebra in Arabic, wrote a treatise on the extraction of the cube-
root, and on the explanations of the difficult definitions in Euclid.
He issued a revised edition of"Zij," which contained astronomical
tables, and reformed the Mahomedan calendar, and made a computation
of time which, says Gibbon, " surpasses the Julian and approaches the
accuracy of the Gregorian style."

Thus did this remarkable astronomer, mathematician and poet, at
one time, perhaps, the sewer of tents or born of a family that made and
mended them, irradiate the world with the many-coloured light of his
genius. Humorously alluding to his name and family occupation he
wrote . —

Khayam who stitched the tents of science
Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burnt.
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing !

304 EAST 6* WEST

The shears of Fate cut the tent ropes of his life, according to one
computation, in the Hejira year 517, and removed from this mundane
sphere one who was unrivalled in science in Khorasan and Persia in
his days and was the paragon of his age, at first obscure and unknown
to fame, but now a star of the highest magnitude in the oriental firma-
ment of poesy. I shall conclude this short panegyric of Umar Khayam
by a few quotations from his writings shewing the beauty of his poetic
compositions and the sublimity of his philosophy. Some of these
extracts, which are translations by Whinfield, are taken from a very
able and learned essay written by a friend of mine on Umar Khayam
some years ago, in which he gave a skilful, esoteric, and what I regard
as a true exposition of Umar's doctrines and a synthesis of his
philosophy.

I give first the two oft-quoted and most quotable quatrains of Omar
Khayam, which have become well-worn and hackneyed almost like
some lines of Shakespeare or Tennyson. They are now "current
coin " in the English language.

(i) Before the phantom of False morning died,
Methought a Voice within the tavern cried,
" When all the Temple is prepared within
Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside ?"

(2) The Moving Finger writes ; and having writ,
Moves on : nor all your Piety and Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.

Now as to his philosophy and religious creed. Says Umar : —

Now in thick clouds Thy face Thou dost immerse
And now display it in this universe ;

Thou the Spectator, Thou the Spectacle,
Sole to Thyself Thy glories Thou dost rehearse.

The above touches one of the highest notes of Advait and mystic
philosophy and reminds one of the beautiful lines in the Lord's song,
the Bhagvat Gita.

I the oblation ; I the sacrifice ; I the ancestral offering ;
I the fire giving herb; the mantrain I ; I also the butter ;
I the fire ; the burnt offering I :
And I am indeed the enjoyer of all sacrifices.

UMAR KHAYAM 305

In another place we find the following which is in a similar
strain.

I compassed the world to find Jamshed's world-reflecting
bowl,

I sat not a day, rested not a night ;
"When I heard from a sage a description of it,

I knew I was myself it.
This being is not I, it is of Him ;

Of myself what, where, whence was I ;
The light in the little eye of the ant is from thee ;

The strength in the puny foot of the gnat is from thee ;
Thy self is well worthy of suzerainty ;

All base, unbecoming qualities are far from thee.

Umar's intrinsic piety, genuine devotion and heart-felt humility are
manifest from the following, in spite of his outward scorn of piety and
religiousness and profession of epicureanism and convivial jollity and
" abandon."

(i) Oh Lord ! from self-conceit deliver me,
Sever me from self and occupy with thee !

This self is captive to earth's good and ill,
Make me beside myself and set me free.

Though 1 had sinned the sins of all mankind.
I know thou wouldst to mercy be inclined.

Thou sayest, " I will help in time of need,"
One needier than me where wilt thou find ?

(2) To Thee, whose essence baffles human thought,
Our sins and righteous deeds alike seem naught.

May Thy grace sober me though drunk with sins,
And pardon all the ills that I have wrought.

(3) Sure of thy grace for sins, why need I fear?
How can the pilgrim faint while Thou art near ?

On the last day Thy grace will wash me white
And make my " black record " to disappear.

(4) Oh heart ! When on the Loved One's *' sweets " you feed
You lose yourself, yet find yourself indeed ;

3o6 EAST ^ WEST

To-day to heights of rapture have I soared,
Yea and with drunken maghs pure wine adored :

I am become myself, and rest on
In that pure temple '• Am I not your Lord ? "

(5) My body's life and strength are from Thee !

My soul within and spirit are of Thee !
My being is of Thee and Thou art Mine,

And I am Thine since I am lost in Thine.
Like to the intertwisted melody

Of harp and lute shall our wedding be,
And such a marriage of fair music make

That none shall separate the Thee from Me.

Is not the above reminiscent of the highest adoration and self-
surrender of a Hindu Bhakt likeDhruva, Kabir, Namdev or Chainlanya,
and does not the poet's love for God soar into the empyrean heights
of perfect union with the Divine Self ? Has the highest Hindu " Bhakt
Marag " pointed a higher path ?

The ethics of Umar too are quite rational and intelligible. Listen to
him where he says so pithily : —

Acts of goodness towards friend and foes alike are good,
How can persons of good heart and habit do evil ?

When I survey the world I see no good
But goodness, all beside is nothing worth.

To find a remedy put up with pain.

Chafe not at woe, be ever of a thankful mind,
'Tis the sure method of riches to obtain.

My queen (long may she live to vex her slave)
To-day a token of affection gave

Darting a kind glance from her eyes she passed,
And said " Do good and cast it on the wave."

The above quatrain sums up the highest philosophy of practical
benevolence which was exhibited by that world-renowned philan-
thropist Hatim of Tai, of Persian and Arabic legend and song, whose
motto was, " Do good and cast it on the wave," the refrain of which yet
rings round the world and is echoed by Umar Khayam.

UMAR KHAYAM 307

Fitzgerald took a very poor measure of the extent and depth of
Umar Khayam's philosophy and religious inspiration, mistaking the
outward symbols for the intrinsic thing, the gross material for the
ethereal object for which it stood. He charged Umar Kayam with a love
of epicureanism and self-gratification, or a glorification in verse of the
delights and pleasures of the senses, and persisted in believing in it even
after its hollowness was pointed out by Cowell and others. The
charge was made on such slender grounds that it is rather surprising
hoWj a man of Fitzgerald's breadth and fineness of mind could make
it. Wine and the wine-cup, which are the most palpable symbols
among the poets of the Sufi cult for "bhakti,'' and "gnyan," the intoxica-
tion with the love of the divine or the inner light that is reflected,
were interpreted by him to be the material objects connoted by their
names. On this point Umar himself is the best guide to follow, being
an expounder of his own terminology. This is how he regards the wine
and the wine-cup : —

Man is a cup, his soul the wine therein,
Flesh is a pipe, spirit the voice within.

The truth, they say, tastes bitter in the mouth
This is a token that the " Truth '* is wine.

In drinking thus it is not my design
To riot, to transgress the law divine,

No ! to attain unconsciousness of self
Is the sole cause I drink me drunk with wine.

That the basis of Umar's poetry and beliefs and doctrines are solely
ethical, is proved by quatrain after quatrain of his poetry. Their moral
tendency is manifest to the most unreflecting. He preaches selflessness,
contentment, kindness and love of fellow-creatures, and humility, and
himself exhibits a genuinely meek and prayerful soul. Some of his verses
on these subjects contain thoughts which rival ^the most sublime or the
most beautiful in Tennyson's " In Memoriam." I shall give a few of
these quatrains below.

We rest our hopes on Thy free grace alone
Nor seek by merits for our sins to atone ;

Mercy drops where it lists, and estimates
111 deeds as undone, good undone as done.

Compare with this the following from Tennyson : —
21

30« EAST ^ WEST

Forgive what seemed my sin in me ;

What seemed my worth since I began ;

For merit lives from man to man
And not from man, O Lord ! to Thee.

In another Umar says,

O Lord ! to Thee all creatures worship pay.
To Thee both small and great for ever pray,

Thou takest woe away and givest weal,
Give then, or if it please Thee, take away !

Compare Tennyson's lines : —

Thine are these orbs of light and shade ;

Thou madest life in man and brute ;

Thou madest Death ; and lo ! thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made.

Umar's spirit of kindness and love, or ahinsa, is shown by the following: —

Oh thou who for thy pleasure dost impart
A pang of sorrow to thy fellow's heart,

Go ! mourn thy perished wit, and peace of mind.
Thyself hast slain them ; like the fool thou art.

Better to make one soul rejoice with glee
Than plant a desert with a colony ;

Rather one free man bind with chains of love
Than set a thousand prisoned captives free.

In the following he strikes some of the highest notes of his philosophy,
reminding one of Tennyson's poems on the " Higher Pantheism "' and
" Crossing the Bar" —

The drop wept for his severance from the sea,
But the sea smiled, for " I am all," said he.

The truth is all, nothing exists beside,
That one point circling apes plurality.

You ask what this life is, so frail, so vain,
'Tis long to tell, yet will I make it plain ;

'Tis but a breath blown from the vasty deeps.
And then blown back to those same deeps again.

UMAR KHA YAM 309

This tells us exactly what Tennyson has told us that " from the Great
Deep we come and to the Great Deep we go," and " that which drew
from the boundless Deep turns again home." Umar's theory of the
Deity and his cosmogony are comprised in the following : —

This world a body is, and God its Soul,
And angels are its Senses, who control

Its limbs — the creatures, elements and spheres ;
The Om is the whole basis of the whole.

His theory of cosmogony, which bears a close parallel to Aristotle's as
given in his " De Anima " is as follows : —

Ten Powers, and nine spheres, eight heavens made He,
And planets seven, of six sides, as we see,

Five senses, and four elements, three souls,
Two worlds, but only one, O man ! like thee.

Umar's large faith in the ultimate triumphs of good and the cer-
tainty of conquest over death is heard in resonant tones which cheer
the heart and nerve the soul like the assurance of a trusted and well-
beloved triend. According to him.

Death's terrors spring from baseless phantasy,
Death yields the tree of immortality ;

Since Isa breathed new life into my soul,
Eternal death has washed its hands of me !

And now I shall close with the quatrains that shew how eclectic,
how truly catholic, was Umar's nature, a nature that in gentleness and
in the possession of a true feeling of universal brotherhood had its
counterpart in the God- gifted twin scholar ministers of the great Akbar,
Faizi and Abu Fazul. In a temple of Kashmir Abu Fazul inscribed
these beautiful hues which Tennyson has quoted in his preface to his
Akbar's Dream, and which will bear repetition here.

" Oh God, in every temple I see people that see Thee and in every
language I hear spoken people praise Thee. Polytheism and Islam feel
after thee. If it be a mosque, people murmur the holy prayer, and if
it be a Christian church, people ring the bell from love to Thee. Heresy
to the heretic and religion to the orthodox, but the dust of the rose-petal
belongs to the heart of the perfume-seller." So said Umar Khayam: —

3IO EAST fir WEST

Pagodas, just as mosques, are homes of prayer,
'Tis prayer that church-bells chime unto the air,

Yea, Church and Ka'ba, Rosary and Cross
Are all but divers tongues of world-wide prayer.

So said and sung and lived the astronomer-poet, aloof from the world's
vanities and sorrows, urging all to

Sooner with half a loaf contented be.
And water from a broken crock, like me,
Than lord it over one poor fellow-man,
Or to another bow the vassal knee.

Like Byron he wished that the desert were his dwelling-place with
one lone spirit, and like Keats he sighed for a draught of vintage, for a
beaker full of the Warm South — and for

a mossy couch,
Some wine, a Houri (if Houris there be)
A green bank by a stream with minstrelsy.

Writing thus and living thus, no wonder he was very little appreci-
ated at first in that age of bigotry and rampant orthodoxy which he
attacked so fiercely, and with a sad heart he mourned in the
following strain : -

Soon shall I go, by time and fate deplored.
Of all my precious pearls not one is bored ;

Alas ! there die with me a thousand truths
To which these fools fit audience ne'er accord.

But soon the tide set in his favour. His transcendental thought and
beautiful expression came to be valued more correctly and admired, as
they deserved, till now Umar exercises a fascination on the eastern mind,
and also to some extent on the western, which is almost magical.

BULCHAND DAYARAM.

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