Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence

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In this 4th book of his Omar Khayyam’s Secret 12-book series, Mohammad H. Tamdgidi conducts a hermeneutic study of Khayyam’s last keepsake philosophical treatise on the universals of existence, a treatise Khayyam hoped his peers would also judge to be more useful than volumes.

Publication Date: October 1, 2021


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Description

Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination

Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy

The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence

Author: Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Publication Date: October 1, 2021

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699)
Volume XVII, 2021, Monograph Series: Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation


Description

Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination, authored by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, is a 12-book series of which this is the 4th volume, subtitled Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence. Each book, independently readable, can be best understood as a part of the whole series.

Having confirmed in the prior three books of the series the true dates of birth and passing of Omar Khayyam, his pen name origins, and his authorship of a robaiyat collection, Tamdgidi explores in this fourth book the origins, nature, and purpose of such a collection by applying the series’ quantum sociological imagination method to hermeneutically explore the ontological structures of the Robaiyat in Khayyam’s last written treatise.

Khayyam’s treatise, found in the early 20th century and still largely ignored or misread, radically challenges the mythical narratives built over the centuries about him as one who thought existence is unknowable, having died not solving its riddles. Strangely, his treatise instead offers a logically coherent and brilliant worldview of someone who has found his answers as far as human existence is concerned. Khayyam even goes so far as confidently saying he hopes his peers would agree that his brief treatise is more useful than volumes.

Offering the Persian text and his new English translation of the treatise, Tamdgidi undertakes in this book a detailed clause-based hermeneutic study of the treatise. He also explores its broader intellectual and historical contexts by examining its relation to the book “Savior from Error” by Khayyam’s junior (by more than three decades) contemporary foe, Muhammad Ghazali, while questioning the long-held belief that the treatise was requested by and addressed to Fakhr ol-Molk, a son of the famous vizier Nezam ol-Molk.

Tamdgidi finds instead that the treatise was written in AD 1095-96, a few years earlier than thought, for another son of Nezam ol-Molk, Moayyed ol-Molk, who served at the time Soltan Muhammad, Malekshah’s son. The treatise was intended as a philosophical foundation to move the post-Malekshah Iran in a more independent direction by way of influencing his son, Muhammad. Ghazali in his book, likely written to please Ahmad Sanjar (Malekshah’s younger son who disliked Khayyam) and his vizier at the time, Fakhr ol-Molk, anonymously chastised Khayyam as a philosopher, duplicitously feeding the cynical metaphors that some theologians and Sufis hurled at Khayyam down the centuries.

Khayyam’s treatise unveils his vision of existence as a participatory universe where the subject has objective status, shedding a new light on the ontological structures of the Robaiyat. His “succession order” thesis of existence is an alternative Islamic creationist-evolutionary worldview that offers a prescient quantum conceptualist vision of the universe as a unitary, relatively self-reliant, self-knowing, and self-creative, substance lovingly created by an absolutely good God in His own image. Existence is essentially good but, due to its good volitionally self-creative nature, can be potentially subject to incidental defects that are nevertheless knowable and curable to build both a spiritually fulfilling and a joyful life in this world. Other than God’s Necessary Existence there is no “another world”; judgment days, heavens, and hells are definitely real this-worldly, not after-worldly, existents. In Khayyam’s view, human existence can be what good we artfully make of it, starting here-and-now from our own personal selves in our this-worldly lifetimes. It is to creatively realize such an existence that the Robaiyat must have been intended.


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 currently in progress work published in the 12-book series Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (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.

It was during his undergraduate studies at U.C. Berkeley and in the course of his mentorship by the painter and design architect Jesse Reichek (1916-2005) that Tamdgidi’s notion and project “human architecture” was born. During his graduate studies at SUNY-Binghamton, he was mentored in methods, theory, and world-systems studies by Terence K. Hopkins (1928-1997) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), and further in dialectics by Dale Tomich and on space and society by Anthony D. King, amid a uniquely autonomous and flexible transdisciplinary Graduate Program in Sociology founded by T. K. Hopkins.


Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence — by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence

Published by: Okcir Press (an imprint of Ahead Publishing House) • Belmont, Massachusetts • First Edition: October 1, 2021

448 pages • 6×9 inches • Includes references and index

Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2021917120

ISBN: 9781640980181 (hard cover with dust jacket: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781640980198 (soft cover: alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781640980204 (ePub ebook)
ISBN: 9781640980211 (PDF ebook)

CITATION: Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. 2021. Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence. (Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. XVII, 2021. Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation.) Belmont, MA: Okcir Press.

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, and others).


Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence — by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi


Table of Contents

Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Book 4: Khayyami Philosophy: The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Last Written Keepsake Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence

About OKCIR—i

Published to Date in the Series—ii

About this Book—iv

About the Author—viii

Notes on Transliteration—xvii

Acknowledgments—xix

Preface to Book 4: Recap from Prior Books of the Series—1

Introduction to Book 4: The Unique Significance of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence, His Last Written in Persian for Keepsake7

CHAPTER I—The Persian Text and A New English Translation of Omar Khayyam’s “Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence” (Resaleh dar Elm-e Kolliyat-e Vojood)17

CHAPTER II—Hermeneutic Analysis of Clauses 1-19 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence: Descending the Succession Order45

1. Opening the Analysis: Clause [1]—The Introduction—46

2. Clause [24]—How Ancients Sought After Knowledge—56

3. Clause [2]—The Basic Nature of Existence—58

4. Clause [3]—Three Terms: “Substance” and Its Two Universal Types,“Body” and “Spirit”—65

5. Clause [4]—The Significance of the Attribute of Divisibility for Khayyam—69

6. Clause [5]— Khayyam Introduces the Two Kinds of Spiritual Substance and Their Ten-Fold Status Gradations—72

7. Clause [6]—The Ten-Fold Triads of Intellects, Selves, and Spheres, and How Khayyam’s Odd and Unusual Depiction of the Active Intellect as the First Intellect Actually Resolves a Seeming Contradiction in His Scheme—75

8. Clause [7]—No Intellect Without Self, No Self Without Intellect, Motivating the Spheres—84

9. Clause [8]—The Role Played by Love in Setting the Spheres in Motion—87

10. Clause [9]—The Self, Being Motivated by Its Love for the Intellect, Sets the Sphere in Motion, Necessitating Its Numbered Parts—88

11. Clause [10]—Number Is a Universal, Necessarily Infinite, While Its Odd and Even Parts Are Numerically Limited—90

12. Clause [11]—The Durability of Universal Existents—92

13. Clause [12]—Body is Divisible, But Not All Body Is Subject to Generation and Decline—94

14. Clause [13]—Possible Existents Coming Into Being in Succession Like the Alphabet or Numbers, From A Beginning—96

15. Clause [14]— Khayyam (Re)introduces His Notion of “Succession Order”—99

16. Clause [15]—Humans Become Human When They Know the Succession Order and Their Place in It, Realize That They Are Essentially Spirit, And Learn How to Detach From and Govern Their Body—102

17. Clause [16]—Humankind’s Alienation From Its Essence, And the Need to Overcome It to Avoid Enduring Suffering—106

18. Clause [17]—The Existential Conflict Facing Humankind in Its Journey Back to God—109

19. Clause [18]—The Significance of the Attribute of Divisibility, or Not, for Khayyam—111

20. Clause [19]—The Necessity of Safeguarding the Spirit From Bodily Attachments—112

21. A Summary of the Clauses 1-19 of the Treatise—115

CHAPTER III—Hermeneutic Analysis of Clauses 20-50 of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence: Ascending the Succession Order121

1. Clause [20]—The Self Emulates the Intellect, Though Cannot Reach the Intellect’s Nobility—121

2. Clause [21]—The Vanity of the Self in Considering Its Knowledge Higher than the Intellect, Becoming Manifested in Corresponding Vain Sensations—123

3. Clause [22]—Self is Nobler than Body Yet Tending Instinctively to Be Vain, But Body is by Its Nature Vain, Being Composed of Matter and Form—125

4. Clause [23]—The Humankind, in Body, Is Subject to Many Influences Causing Its Vanity—126

5. Clause [24]—How the Ancients, and Presumably Also Khayyam, Preferred to Impart Universal Knowledge, Which in Khayyam’s View Would Necessarily Lead to the Knowledge of the Details—127

6. Clauses [25-30]—Classification Categories: Genus, Kind, Differentia, Property, and Accident (and Its Subtypes)—128

7. Clause [31]—Motions and Fixations Found in the Spheres, Elements, and Natural Compounds—132

8. Clause [32]—How the Universals Shape Human Life—134

9. Clause [33]—The Types of Rhetorical Speech, According to Khayyam—137

10. Clause [34]—Human Nature, Behavior, and Habits—139

11. Clauses [35-38]—On Proving the Existence of God, Revealing Khayyam’s Holistic, Subject-Included, View of Existence—142

12. Clause [39]—Necessary and Possible Existents Defined—145

13. Clause [40]—Properties of Bodies—146

14. Clause [41]—Properties of Bodies Depending on the Extent of Human Knowledge of Them—147

15. Clause [42]—The Problem of Becoming Overfamiliar with What Otherwise Are Strange Properties of Bodies—148

16. Clause [43]—Whoever Imagines the Real Meaning of This, Can Be Freed from Many Problems—149

17. Clause [44]—The Four Paths to the Knowledge of God—152

18. Clause [45]—The Path of Theologians—152

19. Clause [46]—The Path of Philosophers—153

20. Clause [47]—The Path of Ismailis—158

21. Clause [48]—The Path of Sufis—161

22. Clause [49]—The Heaven on Earth—163

23. Clause [50]—The Hell on Earth—168

24. A Summary of the Clauses 20-50 of the Treatise—172

CHAPTER IV—Understanding the Succession Order and Its Active Intellect: Comparative Notes on Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence179

1. “Selselat ol-Tartib” or “Selseleh Marateb”?: The Difference Between “Succession Order” and “Hierarchical Order” and Why It Matters in Relation to the Order’s Descending and Ascending Curves—180

2. Where In the Universe is the “Active Intellect”?: How Khayyam’s View Compares to Those of Avicenna, Farabi, and Ikhwan al-Safa—185

3. The Emotion of Love Defining the Mediating Role of the Self: The Active Intellect Needs Humankind as Much as the Other Way Around Because They Are Both Folds of the Same One Substance—189

4. Self-Reflection is A Necessity for the Active Intellect Down and Up the Succession Order: The Necessity of Seeking Self-Knowledge in Khayyam’s Ontological Worldview—193

5. Subject-Included Objectivity: Rethinking the Relation of Spirit and Body as An Expression of the Age-Old Question of the Relation of Mind and Matter—196

6. The Active Intellect Is Not Veiled from the Seeker and Linking with It Is a Necessity for Gaining Self-Knowledge —199

7. Everything Is Number: Khayyam’s Pythagorean Interests in Portraying the Active Intellect’s Unfolding and Infolding in the Descending and Ascending Curves of the Succession Order—201

CHAPTER V—The Foe Who Wrongly Spoke: How Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence Compares to Muhammad Ghazali’s Book “Savior from Error”207

1. Rereading Khayyam’s Account of the Four Paths to the Knowledge of God—208

2. Muhammad Ghazali in Auto/biographical and Historical Contexts—214

3. A Summary of Ghazali’s Book, “Savior from Error”—219

4. Comparatively Evaluating Ghazali’s Book, “Savior from Error”—239

CHAPTER VI—Moayyed ol-Molk or Fakhr ol-Molk?: Who Requested Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence and When Was It Written?249

1. What Do the Variations of Names Across Extant Copies of the Treatise Tell Us About Its Requester—250

2. Who Was the More Capable Son of Nezam ol-Molk, Moayyed ol-Molk or Fakhr ol-Molk?—254

3. When Was Khayyam’s Treatise Written?: A Gist of What Transpired Following the Death of Nezam ol-Molk and Soltan Malekshah—259

4. What Befell Nezam ol-Molk’s Two Sons After His Death: Moayyed ol-Molk and Fakhr ol-Molk in Early Historical Accounts—265

5. Moayyed ol-Molk: The True Requester of Omar Khayyam’s Treatise Written In 488 LH—273

CHAPTER VII—Interpreting Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence in Light of Its Intellectual and Historical Contexts As a Whole279

1. The Descending Curve of the Succession Order—280

2. The Ascending Curve of the Succession Order—303

3. The Succession Order as a Whole—315

CHAPTER VIII—The Ontological Structures of the Robaiyat in Omar Khayyam’s Treatise on the Science of the Universals of Existence321

Conclusion to Book 4: Summary of Findings347

Appendix: Transliteration System and Book 4 Glossary—375

Book 4 Cumulative Glossary of Transliterations388

Book 4 References—397

Book 4 Index—401


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