in this video I am going to talk about a book from Lebanon.
When searching for a book from Lebanon I came across this novel written by a Lebanese French
author about a Persian poet whom I love I couldn’t pass the chance to read it. Khayyam
is a very famous poet in Persian language but also around the world. His poems centres
on the idea is that short is short, so try to enjoy it while it last. This went against the
religious piety was the norm in 11th Century Persia.
A very diverse country with 18 religions,
it was colonised by the French. Lebanese people apparently smoke a lot, a habit
they learnt from the French most likely . the only middle eastern country with no
desert. It dates back to Phoenicians, the people who made the first alphabet. The famous John F
Kennedy quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”
was a quote from a Lebanese poet who is also the third best-selling poet in the entire world
after Shakespeare and Laozi. The irony is Khalil Gibran or Jibran lived in America not in Lebanon.
Cedar is the tree in their flag as a symbol of longevity. Talking of longevity,
the name Lebanon is 4,000 years old. It has the oldest name, but also smallest
country in Asia. In order to keep this title, Lebanon should do everything to stop Palestine
from being recognised as a sovereign nation. They’ll be second. A country of 7m people.
A lot of Lebanese people live in Brazil, apparently.
Amin Maalouf was born in 1949 in Lebanon and moved to France in 1976 and has lived there ever since.
He mostly fictionalise the lives of famous people. His other novels include, Leo Africanus about
that very person. He has written about Mani the founder of Manichaism an old religion from Persia.
And this novel is about Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, astronomer, philosopher and mathematician.
This novel is about a book of poetry and a poet who wrote it one thousand years ago
and in-between is a lot of history and politics. The narrator is an American man, Benjamin Lesage,
tells the story one particular manuscript of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat which he lost in the
Titanic incident in 1912. The novel is divided into four books, like Khayyam poems in the
form of Quatrain or Rubai, which in Arabic means four-some or four lines. Despite its Arabic name,
it is purely a Persian poetry form. It’s a form that was more popular
among the ordinary people. It’s like a haiku, very easy to memorise and recite.
Book one takes us to 11th Century Persia, to the city of Samarkand,
where we meet a young poet by the name of Omar Khayyam. He’s from the Persian town of Nishapur
who has recently moved to the Samarkand, the city of dreams in those days.
He’s famed for writing poems about wine and pleasures of this life, so we see him being
attacked by a mob but rescued by a judge who appreciates his talent. Instead of punishing,
the judge gives him a blank book on which Khayyam would write his four-line poems or
Rubai. Here we also have our first love interest between Khayyam and a court lady called Jahan.
In Book two Omar then moves to Isfahan the capital of Saljuk Malik Shah and builds an
observatory to study astronomy. Here he meets two other important characters in Iranian history,
Nizam Almulk the brilliant vizir and statesman, and Hassan Sabah,
the brilliant leader of the Assassins. Omar witnesses Nizam almulk and Hazan Sabah go head
to head and nizam sabotages him and he’s banished from Isfahan. Sabah belonged to
the Shia Ismaili branch of Islam and nizam was a Sunni Muslim who worked for the Turkish Seljuks.
Hasan Sabah after establishing the order of assassins, manages to assassinate Nizam and
set ups his base on Mount Alamut, in the north of Iran. Things go pear-shaped in Isfahan,
so Omar flees back to Samarkand. But by then he is old. So he returns to
his hometown of Nishapur. But his book of poems or Rubaiyat arrives
at Mount Alamut where the assassins keep it for the next 150 years of so. When the
Mongols sack Alamut a century or so later, the book ends up in the Iranian city of Kerman.
Book three takes us to 1890s and our narrator Benjamin tells his own story
of learning about Khayyam and then he meets another character Jamaluddin
an intellectual who is exiled in Europe who once had possession of the book.
When he returns to Iran he ends up losing the book. This part is a lot about politics of Iran,
sandwiched between the Russians and the British during the great game of 19th century.
Benjamin hearing that the book might be in Iran, decides to visit the country.
Jamaluddin writes a few recommendation letters and Benjamin travels to Iran
but caught up when Jamaluddin’s friend, Mr Kermani assassinates the Qajar King of Iran
and he’s implicated in the plot. But with the help of some women he escapes to safety and
then out of the country. He’s rescued by three women and he suckles on her breast to make him
part of the family so he won’t have sex with them. I found this part a bit too unbelievable.
The final part or book four tells the story of how Benjamin returns to Iran
in the turn of century and with the help of an Iranian princess,
Shirin finds the book. They fall in love and make their way to America via Turkey and finally
on the Titanic. We know what happens next. The book ends up at the bottom of the ocean.
It is a story of how he loses the book, rather how he finds the book.
Reading this makes me visit Samarkand the alleyways and palaces and streets
at dark. Also there is a sense of freedom being in that period.
Of course it’s we see things from the lens of a novel or history where everything is
simplified. That’s what’s enticing about the past. Everything so much simpler. But in fact
every period in history people complained about the same thing and were nostalgic of the past.
Anyway, the novel is beautiful the beginning part. I wish the author has spent more time in
Samarkand. There is one particular passage where Khayyam talks about art and science.
He argues that science is ever changing while art pretty much
stays the same because needs change but humans emotions are always the same.
One of the problem I face when reading novels based on real people is my mind keeps asking
questions whether this is true or made up. Dashing between fact and fiction. I try to just focus on
the story if it is convincing but your mind wanders if it’s history or fiction. But the
novel too seems conflicted so ends up being to factual than fictional. This makes a bit dull in
book three and four as it loses focus from the poetry book to Iran and its tumultuous history.
The novel’s theme seems to be that the survival of a book for a thousands of years is nothing
short of a miracle. The fact that we can still read Khayyam’s poems is pretty extra-ordinary.
Now while we are here, let me tell you about Khayyam. He’s
my favourite poet. It’s true. I had his poetry books long before I read this novel.
Khayyam was born in Nishapur in 1043, only 20 years after the death of Ferdowsi,
another giant of Persian literature which I talked about in another video. Ferdowsi and Khayyam
were both from the same region of Iran, called Khorasan or simply a land of the sun in Arabic.
I think Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Persian book of kings,
must have had a huge influence on Omar Khayyam’s poetry and his general outlook
on life and must have made him quite a pessimist. I will explain that later.
Khayyam’s name means tent-maker, perhaps an occupation of his parents. His somewhat
humble background is reflected in his poetry that emphasises that as humans we are nothing special.
He was a gifted kid so he was educated by great teachers of the time. in 1070 he went to Samarkand
where the novel begins. Later he went to Isfahan to set up an observatory to measure the length of
the years to help the Persian calendar which is a solar calendar unlike the Islamic calendar which
is lunar. He wrote a few scientific books but for us it is his poetry that is most interesting. He
died in his hometown at the age of 83 in 1131. He is considered a sufi poet. What is sufi?
It was a movement in Islamic Iran, mostly among poets, intellectual, and philosophers.
The most famous sufi poet is of course Rumi who was born in modern day Afghanistan and
spent most of his life in Turkey, thus the name Rumi or someone from Rome.
Sufi simply means people who were wearing woollen cloaks, who believed in the power of love and
always talked about wine. But wine is taught to be only symbolic and love is the love for god.
And Dervish simply means poor. So these were the people who had abandoned the worldly pleasures
so to speak and devoted their lives to mediation, poetry and god.
But Khayyam’s poetry is a bit more materialistic and this worldly than other sufi poets like Rumi.
Khayyam’s subjects are usually wine, earthly pleasures, criticisms of the religious
people. But the main subject seems to be the meaninglessness of life and how it is fleeting.
The most important symbolism is clay. Humans aren’t special. We just a pile of clay, we come
from earth and end up there. that’s all there is to it. So you might as well enjoy your life here
and now. It’s very zen if you think about. In a lot of his poems he rejects the afterlife or the
promise of heaven or hell. I think he was a man science so he understood the mechanics of nature
pretty well and it was through poetry that he was expressing his true feelings about things.
According to Sadegh Hedayat whose novel the Blind Owl I discussed in another video,
Khayyam was an atheist or at least didn't believe in soul being separate from the body,
and was very much against the orthodoxy of religious view of life. When he talks
about wine, it means literary wine as antidote for existential suffering. Even
Christopher Hitchens quoted Khayyam in his book, the Portable Atheist.
Whether an atheist or not he really captured the imagination of Victorian England in the 1870s
when his Rubaiyat was translated by Edward Fitzgerald. This was a tough time in England among
the intellectual elites as Darwin had published his Theory of Evolution by natural selection
so god was questioned and man was nothing but animals. Khayyam’s poems captured the mood as
people had to accept their fate that there was no afterlife, enjoy it while it lasts. I think that’s
the main message of Khayyam: life is too short and you only have one chance. Be good and be happy.
I think Khayyam is more anti humanist than atheist. As you know humanism
grew in Europe as a rejection of religious dogma. For humanists
humans are scared, all humans are equal and almost godly creature
that owns the earth and can do anything they want. Own it , divide it or even destroy it. Khayyam
says humans are nothing special. You’re just as important as the pot clay that you step on.
Yesterday in the marketplace I saw a potter Kicking into shape a piece of clay under
The clay spoke in its misshapen tongue I was once like you, be tender
According to Mehdi Aminrazavi and Glen Van Brummelen in their brilliant article
in the Stanford encycloedia, Khayyam displays two trends. In his philosophical books he is a devout
Muslim but with a more focus on existential experience rather than divine substance.
But through poetry his questions the meaning of life. Therefore he proposes that one should
enjoy the here and now. He is closer to Buddhist view of existence than that of Islam. In Islam
like Christianity, the promise of heaven is pretty strong, so one has to sacrifice the
joys and pleasures of this world. But Khayyam’s poetry the focus is on now. Here is an example.
“A book of verses underneath the bough A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness And wilderness is paradise now.”
Here is another one.
Look not above, there is no answer there; Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer;
Near is as near to God as any Far, And Here is just the same deceit as There.
You to the mosque, with howling hymn and prayer, I to the temple of the vine, repair,
The one true God in diverse ways to seek; I find him here--but do you find him there?
“I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell”
The sphere upon which mortals come and go, Has no end nor beginning that we know;
And none there is to tell us in plain truth:
Whence do we come and whither do we go. (Whinfield 2001, 132)
“Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is certain - This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies - The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”
Okay, now let me explain how Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh had a huge impression on Khayyam.
Shahnameh is full of dead kings. It’s practically a graveyard of all the great,
and no so great kings. When you read it, it strikes you how fleeting and meaningless
life appears. All those powerful and almost goldy kings are all dead.
You realise no matter how important a person you are, you will have the same fate one day. Khayyam
poems are full of examples of how great kings have turned into dust. But, I could be completely wrong
in this. Perhaps Khayyam never read Shahnameh. If you know something please leave a comment.
Now back to the novel. It tries to do too many things. Just like this video. For one
moment I talk about a novel from Lebanon and the next moment I get distracted and
talk about Khayyam’s poetry. Half way the author is side-tracked and ends up talking
about the history of Islamic civilization, Iran and 19th century politics and many
other things. Khayyam’s Rubiyat is still there but in the background.
However, it is a really good novel. It is short and has some great insights
into the lives of the people in Iran and especially Omar Khayyam himself.
A multi-talented man. A brilliant scientist and a genius poet whose outlook on life seems very
contemporary. When you read his poems you won’t believe they were written a thousand years ago.
Let me know what you think. As usual please leave a comment down below. Thank you.