Note 104 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

His name, Omar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyámi, seems to point to Arab descent. “Al-Khayyámmi” means “the tent-maker”; but in no biographic account of him is there the slightest proof that he or his father ever belonged to that or any other handicraft.104 Always he figures as a scholar and a man of science. Since, therefore, the patronymic al-Khayyámi is fairly common now among Arabs, and also among the still nomadic tribes of Khuzistan and Luristan, the reasonable presumption is that it was in his case a patronymic also.105 His father being a man of some substance, he had a good schooling, and is even described in literary tradition as having become an expert Koran scholar, by the admission of the orthodox Al Gazzali, who, however, is represented in another record as looking with aversion on Omar’s scientific lore.106 The poet may have had his lead to freethought during his travels after graduating at Naishapur, when he visited Samarkhand, Bokhara, Ispahan, and Balk.107 He seems to have practised astrology for a living, even as did Kepler in Europe five hundred years later; and he perhaps dabbled somewhat in medicine.108 A hostile orthodox account of him, written in the thirteenth century, represents him as “versed in all the wisdom of the Greeks,” and as wont to insist on the necessity of studying science on Greek lines.109 Of his prose works, two, which were of standard authority, dealt respectively with precious stones and climatology.110