Note 111 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

Beyond question the poet-astronomer was undevout; and his astronomy doubtless helped to make him so. One contemporary writes: “I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great (scientists) who had such belief.”111 The biographical sketch by Ibn al Kifti, before cited, declares that he “performed pilgrimages not from piety but from fear,” having reason to dread the hostility of contemporaries who knew or divined his unbelief; and there is a story of a treacherous pupil who sought to bring him into public odium.112 In point of fact he was not, any more than Abu’ l-Ala, a convinced atheist, but he had no sympathy with popular religion. “He gave his adherence to no religious sect. Agnosticism, not faith, is the keynote of his works.”113 Among the sects he saw everywhere strife and hatred in which he could have no part. His earlier English translators, reflecting the tone of the first half of the last century, have thought fit to moralize censoriously over his attitude to life; and the first, Prof. Cowell, has austerely decided that Omar’s gaiety is “but a risus sardonicus of despair.”114 Even the subtler Fitzgerald, who has so admirably rendered some of the audacities which Cowell thought “better left in the original Persian,” has the air of apologizing for them when he partly concurs in the same estimate. But despair is not the name for the humorous melancholy which Omar, like Abu’ l-Ala, weaves around his thoughts on the riddle of the universe. Like Abu’ l-Ala, again, he talks at times of God, but with small signs of faith. In epigrams which have seldom been surpassed for their echoing depth, he disposes of the theistic solution and the lure of immortality; whereafter, instead of offering another shibboleth, he sings of wine and roses, of the joys of life and of their speedy passage; not forgetting to add a stipulation for beneficence.115 It was his way of turning into music the undertone of all mortality; and that it is now preferable, for any refined intelligence, to the affectation of zest for a “hereafter” on which no one wants to enter, would seem to be proved by the remarkable vogue he has secured in modern England, chiefly through the incomparable version of Fitzgerald. Much of the attraction, certainly, is due to the canorous cadence and felicitous phrasing of those singularly fortunate stanzas; and a similar handling might have won as high a repute among us for Abu’ l-Ala, whom, as we have seen, some of our Orientalists set higher, and whose verse as recently rendered into English has an indubitable charm. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, has added much to Omar. But the thoughts of Omar remain the kernels of Fitzgerald’s verses; and whereas the counsel, “Gather ye roses while ye may,” is common enough, it must be the weightier bearing of his deeper and more daring ideas that gives the quatrains their main hold to-day. In the more exact rendering of those translators who closely reproduce the original he remains beyond question a freethinker,116 placing ethic above creed, though much given to the praise of wine. Never popular in the Moslem world,117 he has had in ours an unparalleled welcome; and it must be because from his scientific vantage ground in the East, in the period of the Norman Conquest, he had attained in some degree the vision and chimed with the mood of a later and larger age.