Chapter 6 Omar Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat and Rumi’s Masnavi Interpreted. The Politics and Scholarship of Translating Persian Poetry 1Truth and Poetry of TwoPersian Poets In 1072,the youngphilosopher Omar Khayyamenteredthe CentralAsian capital of scholarshipSamarkand.Ashewalkedthroughthe city,hefound amob assault- ingastudentofthe greatphilosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna).Khayyam intervened to save thestudent.But hisreputationasaphilosopherand poet of hereticmateri- alistverseshad preceded Khayyamand when thecrowd discovered whohewas, they turned on himand roughedhim up.Khayyam wasthen broughtbeforeSa- markand’sleading qadi (judge/magistrate),Abu Taher. Insteadofcondemning thephilosopher,who challenged thestricturesoforthodoxtheology, AbuTaher recognised hisintellect, butwarned Khayyamofutteringhis critical poetry openly. Theqadihandedthe philosopherabeautifulnotebookintowhich he should write hiswitty andthought-provoking quatrains,instead of speaking hispoems openly andthereby endangeringhis ownsafety. This notebook wastobecomethe manu- script that marked thebeginning of the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, whichwould gain global fame in thenineteenthcentury andbecomefor decadesthe second most printedbookinthe Englishspeakingworld afterthe Bible. This is how Amin Maalouf has it in the opening of his historic fiction novel Samarcande.¹ In areview afew years later,Rashid noted that “Omar Khayyam is treated likeamedieval Salman Rushdie”,onlythat backinthe Middle Ages, dur- ing the days of glorious scientific Islam,hewas not condemned to death by the orthodoxy but protected by an Islamic jurist.² The almostsimultaneous publica- tion of Samarcande and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988 preclude Maalouffrom having been influenced by Khomeini’sinfamous fatwa against the British Indian author ayearlater,but Rashid’scommentary pointstothe rise of political Islam and its growingintolerance of contrarian views in the 1980s, which had also seen the ban of Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat in Iran after the revolution in 1979.³ Maa- Amin Maalouf, Samarcande (Paris:Jean-Claude Lattès, 1988), 4–17. Ahmed Rashid, “Poetry Lovers TrickedbyaDrowned Manuscript: Samarkand – Amin Maalouf,” TheIndependent,21September 1992. The ban was largely lifted under Khatami (1997–2005). In the early2000s Khayyam was portrayedbythe Iranian stateasareligious figure whofoughtagainst superstition, ignorance OpenAccess. ©2020 Friedrich Rosen, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639544-008 1Truth and Poetry of TwoPersianPoets 341 louf’shero Omar Khayyam in contrast stood for an epoch in which Islam was synonymous with science, poetry,and whenameasure of protection of literary freedom existed. Maalouf’sstory of Khayyamand the Ruba’iyat is skilfullynarrated and his portrayal is accurate in three regards: 1) the life dates of the philosopher Khayyam and his period of studyinSamarkand under the protection of Abu Taher; 2) the portrayal of Khayyam as aphilosopher in the tradition of Ibn Sina; 3) the intellectual appeal and aversion to orthodoxy in the vexing qua- trains. But the beginningsofthe manuscript of the Ruba’iyat that Maaloufcrafts never were. It is, in fact,very unlikelythat the historic Omar Khayyam, the re- nowned philosopher,astronomer and algebraist,everwas the poet and author of asignificant corpus of poetry,not to speak of the over one thousand qua- trains, which brought him posthumousglobal fame. The fusion of the Ruba’iyat attributed to Khayyam and the actuallyproven philosophical tracts of Khayyam in Samarcande is emblematic of manyartistic reproductions and some of the non-fiction reception of Khayyam as aphilosopher-poet since the nineteenth century.⁴ The wittyand contemplative Ruba’iyat in conjunction with the evoca- tive life and work of the eleventh to twelfth century mathematician-philosopher have been offering rich material to be incorporatedinto new,contemporary nar- ratives. The most important modernembedding of Khayyam occured when in 1859,the Englishman EdwardFitzGerald published his interpretation of the Ru- ba’iyat as an exotic Epicurean escape from stifling Victorian ennui, which gave rise to aglobalfollowing of thoseafflicted with fin de siècle decadence and cyn- icism. The popularity of the Ruba’iyat and theirmysterious and contestedorigins also attracted scholarlyattention and debate and Friedrich Rosen’spresentation in Copenhagen on Omar Khayyam’sworldview in 1908 reflectedthe prominence Khayyam had gainedinacademicresearch. Rosen’stranslation of the Ruba’iyat into DieSinnsprücheOmarsdes Zelt- machers was one among hundreds.But Rosen’sdirect and largely faithful trans- lation from PersiantoGerman, accompanied by acomprehensive introduction to the times, life and philosophyofOmar Khayyam, was the most significant for popularising the Ruba’iyat for aGerman-reading audience and remains the can- and spiritual darkness. “AyatollahSentences Author to Death,” BBC,14February 1989;Peter Murtagh, “Rushdie in HidingAfter Ayatollah’sDeath Threat,” Guardian,15February 1989;Jos Coumans, TheRubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. An Updated Bibliography (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2010), 16. Michael HamiltonMorgan, Lost History. TheEnduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists,Thinkers and Artists (Washington: NationalGeographic,2007), 107–10;GerhardSchweizer, Der unbe- kannte Islam. Sufismus – die religiöse Herausforderung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007), 133. 342 Chapter 6. Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat and Rumi’s Masnavi Interpreted onical translation today. Rosen, his Sinnsprüche and their popularity in German lands have so farbeen neglected in Western scholarlydebates about the global resonanceofthe Ruba’iyat and Khayyam. Beyond remedying this black hole in German literary studies thatarose out of the adverse circumstances of the Nazi and post-war periods, Rosen’sknowledge production speaks to alargerhis- tory of German Persophilia, as formulatedbyDabashi.⁵ Enabled and influenced by his movement and encounters along the arteries of the BritishEmpire, his diplomatic career and his experience of messy German Weltpolitik, Rosen em- bedded his Sinnsprüche in aculturalreadingofthe Persianate and the wider Is- lamicate world with which he intended to portray aMiddle East full of different intellectual currents between free-thinking and oppression that werereflective of the human condition and in the shape of Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat part of world lit- erature. Although Khayyam was recognised as aphilosopher and the Ruba’iyat well- liked among Persian speakers,before the Ruba’iyat developed amass following in the West through FitzGeraldian popularisation Khayyam was traditionallynot considered one of the most important Persian poets. Apoet central to the canon of Persian literature,philosophy, spirituality and religion, also before his de-Is- lamicisation in Western translations in the twentieth century,was Jalal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi.⁶ Along with twoother updated republicationsofhis father on Persianlanguageand literature from the mid-nineteenthcentury,in1913 Rosen re-issued Georg Rosen’s1849 translation of Rumi’s Masnavi,anextensive mystical poem of 26,000 double verses considered acornerstone of Sufi Islam.⁷ Friedrich Rosen introduced his father’sGerman translation with alengthyde- Sol Gittleman, “The Reception of EdwardFitzGerald’sRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Eng- land and Germany,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1961); Joachim Wohlleben, “Die Rubajat des Omar Chajjam und die deutsche Literatur.Eine glücklose Begegnung,” Literaturwissen- schaftliches Jahrbuch 12 (1971– 1903): 43 – 96;Mehdi Aminrazavi, TheWine of Wisdom. The Life, Poetryand Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications,2005); JosCou- mans, “An ‘Umar KhayyāmDatabase,” in TheGreat ‘Umar Khayyām. AGlobal Reception of the Rubáiyát,A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 245–52; JosBiegstraat- en, “Khayyam, Omar Xiv. Impact on Literature and Societyinthe West,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 15 December 2008. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khayyam-omar-impact-west; Sayed Fayruz Abadi, “Iranology in Germany[in Persian],” BukharaArts and CultureJournal,2020/ May2011,160 –75;Dabashi, Persophilia,141– 47. Annemarie Schimmel, Maulāna Dschelāladdin Rūmī.Aus dem Diwan (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 5; Rasmus Elling, “Takingthe Islam Out of It,” Naqd. Tisdsskrift for Mellemøstenes Litte- ratur 5(2003): 24–50;Rozina Ali, “The ErasureofIslam from the Poetry of Rumi,” New Yorker, 5January 2017. Sari Abdallah Efendi, Tuti-Nameh;GeorgRosen, Elementa Persica;Rosen and Rosen, Elemen- ta Persica. 2OmarKhayyam’sLifeand Scholarship 343 scription of the mystical poetry of the Sufi Rumi, basedonhis own studies and encounters in Iran, India, Turkey and Berlin. Complementary to Rosen’s Khayyam, his Rumi provides areadingthat was more central to Rosen’sunder- standing of the Islamicate world, his political actions and his personal affinities. Sufi Islam,Rosen posited, had been maligned and overlooked in Europe but by necessity stood at the centre of organic development in the Muslim world. In bothcases straddling the line between domesticating and foreignising Khayyam and Rumi, Rosen attempted to familiarise his German audience with the culture and historical context around the sourcetexts, while seeking to ren- der into German the rhythm and idiosyncracies of the original poetry.⁸ What fol- lows then is an analysis of these paratexts of Rosen’stranslated publications of Khayyam and Rumi.Rosen’sKhayyam is analysed in political