Abstract: In the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, based upon verses composed by an eleventh-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, the English Victorian poet Edward FitzGerald eloquently portrays human life in an indifferent, deterministic universe that lacks any evident purpose and is bereft of divine Providence. The poem’s suggested response to such a universe is an unambitious life of hedonism, distraction, and gentle despair. It is curiously modern, and those considering the adoption of anything like its worldview might want to read it, and to think about its implications, very carefully.

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This too-long essay tries to set forth one perspective on a life lived without a religious faith broadly approximating the Restored Gospel. In order to do this, I’ll be quoting extensively from a once widely read and still somewhat famous poem called the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It was written, depending on your point of view, in either early twelfth-century Persia or late nineteenth-century England. (More on that question later.)

Let me first introduce the two men involved in its production, Omar Khayyám and Edward FitzGerald. The first of them, Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī, was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher — an at least nominal Muslim — who also wrote poetry. As his name indicates, he was born in Nishapur, Khorasan (which is to say, in modern-day northeastern Iran), on 18 May 1048, thereafter spending at least part of his childhood in Balkh (which is located in modern Afghanistan). In the English-speaking world, he is most commonly known as Omar Khayyám.

The second element of that nickname, Khayyám, means something like “tentmaker.” It wasn’t really a surname in his time, though. Rather, it was a byname from his father’s craft or from that of some family [Page viii]ancestor. (Many of our modern Western surnames — e.g., Farmer, Carpenter, Smith, Forrester, Cooper, Bridger, Sawyer, Weaver, Carrier, Porter, Bauer, and Zimmerman — have similar origins.)

Khayyám, as I often call him, was educated in Samarkand and then moved to Bukhara, both of which are located within the borders of modern Uzbekistan. It is said that he was extremely hardworking: By day, he taught algebra and geometry. In the evening, he attended the Seljuq court as an advisor to Sultan Malik-Shah I. At night, he studied astronomy and worked on a revised calendar that had been commissioned by the sultan. After a very productive life of 83 years, he died on 4 December 1131 in his home city of Nishapur. His younger compatriot Farid al-Din Attar (ca. 1145–1220), one of the greatest of Persian mystical poets, is buried in the same cemetery as Khayyám.

Khayyám is known for his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), as well as for treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, and music. (The sciences were less specialized in those days; there were fewer scientists and much less scientific literature to master before one could launch one’s own career.) In his astronomy work, Khayyám argued, among other things, that the stars are stationary and that the universe doesn’t revolve around the Earth. He is particularly famous for his work on calendrical reform, which I’ve already mentioned. The resulting “Jalali calendar,” as it is often known, has been in use since the eleventh century. It was reformed in the twentieth century, but it is still used in Iran and Afghanistan. One of the reasons for this is that it is more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, the dominant western calendar since it was created five centuries after Khayyám’s. The Gregorian year is 365.24 days, whereas Omar Khayyám measured the length of a terrestrial year out to 365.24219858156 days.

Along the way, perhaps in spare moments, Khayyám also wrote brief verses on scraps of paper. These are, in modern transliteration,