Khayyam’s Tent: A Secretive Autobiography: 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from His Tavern of Happiness — by OMAR KHAYYAM (Logically Re-Sewn and Translated in Verse by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi)

Description

Khayyam’s Tent: A Secretive Autobiography: 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from His Tavern of Happiness — by OMAR KHAYYAM

Logically Re-Sewn and Translated in Verse by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Author: Omar Khayyam

Translator & Compiler: Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Publication Date: June 10, 2025

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699)
Volume XXVI, 2025, Monograph Series: Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation

Description

This book offers the original Robaiyat of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123) as a tent of 1000 logically sewn quatrains serving the poetic Wine of his secretive autobiography. It is an epic, at once a personal, world-historical, and cosmic search for true human happiness. He composed it to be highly readable so that it can be read by all, continually, and today, before it is too late, like a prayer book or a rosary of pearls or ruby stones, since it was meant to be not only reflective but also generative of search for happiness. If you begin reading it, you must do so at least once to its end, so that in later readings any of its parts can be recalled amid the unitary architecture of its philosophical, spiritual, and scientific wisdom rendered as an astounding and most beautiful work of art. Khayyam was right; there is nothing on Earth like his Wine.

His poetic “book of life” was intended to be released posthumously, so its existence was not known to his contemporaries. Following his death, it was released but became scattered and its logical unity was shattered by natural and social disasters and scribal poetry alphabetizing styles, some quatrains wandering into other poets’ works and others becoming misattributed to him. The Robaiyat as shared in this book were logically re-sewn and newly translated in verse by the sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi during his integrative study of all of Khayyam’s works as reported in his unprecedented 12-book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (2021-2025).

Following a summary of his series’ findings, Tamdgidi presents in this book nothing else but Khayyam’s Robaiyat, including the Persian originals and his verse translations (his study of them having been shared in his series, especially its Books 8-11). The poems, comprising songs of doubt, hope, and joy, are logically organized to address three questions, based on the 3-phased method of inquiry Khayyam himself introduced in his other writings.

Quatrains 1-338 of Part 1, Songs of Doubt, open by explaining his epic’s secretiveness and address the question “Does Happiness Exist?” Their order follows a logically inductive reasoning through which Khayyam delves from surface portraits of unhappiness to their deeper chain of causes. Quatrains 339-685 of Part 2, Songs of Hope, address the second question “What Is Happiness?” Their order follows a logically deductive reasoning through which he moves from methodological to explanatory and practical quatrains. Quatrains 686-1000 of Part 3, Songs of Joy, address the third question “Why Can Happiness Exist?” Still deductively ordered, they show how happiness can be made possible through his poetry’s Wine itself, realizing that one can never become truly happy by bringing sadness to others since human self and society are always twin-born and universal. Hurting another is always a hurting of that self in you that represents that other. For Khayyam, happiness can be possible by way of joyful, creative, and constructive humanizing efforts by own example, like his Robaiyat, which must also start from our inner and interpersonal todays and spread globally.

Khayyam’s Robaiyat represented the tent of which he was a “tentmaker,” his poetic pen name having been inspired by his true birth date horoscope chart as discovered by Tamdgidi and reported in his series for the first time. The metaphor also underlies the numerical geometry of its triangular unity, proportional to the dazzling Grand Tent (Triplicity) features of his birth chart, the same way he embedded his own triangular golden rule in the mysterious design of Isfahan’s North Dome. A metaphor of the Robaiyat as Simorgh (or Phoenix) songs is also hidden in its deep structure. Khayyam’s Robaiyat are his Simorgh’s millennial rebirth songs served in his tented tavern as 1000 sips of his bittersweet poetic Wine of happiness.

Reviews

“… a masterpiece in Omar Khayyam studies …” — Jafar Aghayani Chavoshi (Ph.D., University of Paris, 1997), Professor of Philosophy of Science at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, specializing in Philosophy, Epistemology, and History of Mathematics and Science, and in Omar Khayyam Studies. From his Foreword to the last book of Tamdgidi’s 12-Book Omar Khayyam’s Secret series.

“Indeed, for this reader, who was exposed at an early age to Khayyam, through the work of Edward FitzGerald, encountering the Omar Khayyam’s Secret series was like the astronauts who experienced seeing the Earth for the first time from outer space. It was nothing I could have imagined, from prior experience. … In Khayyam’s work, especially his poetry, one finds the pathos of the tragedian, with the author of Gilgamesh, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe calling; one comes face to face with anxiety, doubt, and the absurd, and tastes Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Kobo Abe; one confronts subtleties of the most refined kind and meets Buddha, Pushkin, and the practical genius of Da Vinci and Bacon; and one, confronted with the heart and matters of faith and reason, love and happiness, finds voices from Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Aquinas, to Zara Jacob, Jefferson, and Bonhoeffer. Happiness, for example, is not only a state of well-being, but a process of continuing liberation. … While Khayyam’s life is a major story of fierce intellectual passion and a like devotion to ideals of philosophy, science, and poetry (and modes of living that combined those of the solitary and the celebrated, the private and the public), there is an area that is also part of his identity that cannot be overlooked without an injustice to scholarship, history, and human culture. It is the role of satire — that which humorously criticizes defects of reason, science, philosophy (including theology), politics, history, custom (however sacred), even in face of deep disappointments or lived catastrophes. Welcoming the comedy, as Aristophanes, Cervantes, Vico, Erasmus, Santayana, and Chekhov knew, is part of coming to know, of wisdom, of ensuring human flourishing. One may say that Khayyam could be regarded as the first true humanist. All that is human find unhidden expressions through him.” — Winston E. Langley, Professor Emeritus of Political Science & International Relations, Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School for Policy & Global Studies, and a former Provost (2008-2017) of the University of Massachusetts Boston. From his Foreword to the last book of Tamdgidi’s 12-Book Omar Khayyam’s Secret series.

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. 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.

Besides his 12-book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (2021-2025, Okcir Press), Tamdgidi has previously authored Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma (2020, Okcir Press), Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (2009, Palgrave Macmillan), and Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism (2007, Routledge/Paradigm). He has published numerous peer reviewed articles and chapters and edited more than thirty journal issues.

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.

Khayyam’s Tent: A Secretive Autobiography: 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from Omar His Tavern of Happiness — by Omar Khayyam (Logically Re-Sewn and Translated in Verse by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi)

Published by: Okcir Press (an imprint of Ahead Publishing House) • Belmont, Massachusetts

First Edition: June 10, 2025, published in continued celebration of Omar Khayyam’s True Birth Date Millennium (AD 1021) and 9th Centennial of his Passing (AD 1123)

212 pages • 6×9 inches • Includes 1 illustration, and index

Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2025908981

ISBN: 9781640980587 (hard cover with dust jacket: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781640980594 (soft cover: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781640980600 (ePub ebook)
ISBN: 9781640980617 (PDF ebook)

CITATION: Khayyam, Omar (Author), and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (Translator and Compiler). 2025. Khayyam’s Tent: A Secretive Autobiography: 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from His Tavern of Happiness, Logically Re-Sewn and Translated in Verse. Belmont, MA: Okcir Press. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. Vol. XXVI, 2026. Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation.

Where to Purchase this Book: The various editions of this volume can be ordered from the Okcir Store and all major online bookstores worldwide (such as Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Google Play, Apple, and others).

Table of Contents

Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2025. Khayyam’s Tent: The Secretive Autobiography of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123): 1000 Bittersweet Robaiyat Sips from Omar His Tavern of Happiness, Logically Re-Sewn and Translated in Verse. Belmont, MA: Okcir Press.

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