§ 4
It is in the later and nominally decadent ages of the Bagdad Khalifate, when science and culture and even industry relatively prospered by reason of the personal impotence of the Khalifs, that we meet with the most pronounced and the most perspicacious of the Freethinkers of Islam. In the years 973–1057 there dwelt in the little Syrian town of Marratun-Numan the blind poet Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’arri, who wrote a parody of the Koran,[95] and in his verse derided all religions as alike absurd, and yet was for some reason never persecuted. He has been pronounced “incomparably greater” than Omar Khayyám “both as a poet and as an agnostic.”[96] One of his sayings was that “The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.”[97] He may have escaped on the strength of a character for general eccentricity, for he was an ardent vegetarian and an opponent of all parentage, declaring that to bring a child into the world was to add to the sum of suffering.[98] The fact that he was latterly a man of wealth, yet in person an ascetic and a generous giver, may be the true explanation. Whatever be the explanation of his immunity, the frankness of his heterodoxy is memorable. Nourished perhaps by a temper of protest set up in him by the blindness which fell upon him in childhood after smallpox, the spirit of reason seems to have been effectually developed in him by a stay of a year and a-half at Bagdad, where, in the days of Al Mansour, “Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, Sabians and Sufis, materialists and rationalists,” met and communed.[99] Before his visit, his poems are substantially orthodox; later, their burden changes. He denies a resurrection, and is “wholly incredulous of any divine revelation. Religion, as he conceives it, is a product of the human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education, never stopping to consider whether it is true.” “His belief in God amounted, as it would seem, to little beyond a conviction that all things are governed by inexorable Fate.” Concerning creeds he sings in one stave:—
Now this religion happens to prevail
Until by that one it is overthrown;
Because men will not live with men alone,
But always with another fairy-tale[100]—
a summing-up not to be improved upon here.
A century later still, and in another region, we come upon the (now) most famous of all Eastern freethinkers, Omar Khayyám. He belonged to Naishápúr in Khorassan, a province which had long been known for its rationalism,[101] and which had been part of the nucleus of the great Asiatic kingdom created by Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni at the beginning of the eleventh century, soon after the rise of the Fatimite dynasty in Egypt. Under that Sultan flourished Ferdusi (Firdausi), one of the chief glories of Persian verse. After Mahmoud’s death, his realm and parts of the Khalifate in turn were overrun by the Seljuk Turks under Togrul Beg; under whose grandson Malik it was that Omar Khayyám, astronomer and poet, studied and sang in Khorassan. The Turk-descended Shah favoured science as strongly as any of the Abassides; and when he decided to reform the calendar, Omar was one of the eight experts he employed to do it. Thus was set up for the East the Jaláli calendar, which, as Gibbon has noted,[102] “surpasses the Julian and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian style.” Omar was, in fact, one of the ablest mathematicians of his age.[103]
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]
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.
That Omar in his day and place was not alone in his mood lies on the face of his verse. Many quatrains ascribed to him, indeed, are admittedly assignable to other Persian poets; and one of his English editors notes that “the poetry of rebellion and revolt from orthodox opinion, which is supposed to be peculiar to him, may be traced in the works of his predecessor Avicenna, as well as in those of Afdal-i-Káshí, and others of his successors.”[118] The allusions to the tavern, a thing suspect and illicit for Islam, show that he was in a society more Persian than Arab, one in which was to be found nearly all of the free intellectual life possible in the Moslem East;[119] and doubtless Persian thought, always leaning to heresy, and charged with germs of scientific speculation from immemorial antiquity, prepared his rationalism; though his monism excludes alike dualism and theism. “One for two I never did misread” is his summing up of his philosophy.[120]
But the same formula might serve for the philosophy of the sect of Sufis,[121] who in all ages seem to have included unbelievers as well as devoutly mystical pantheists. Founded, it is said, by a woman, Rabia, in the first century of the Hej’ra,[122] the sect really carries on a pre-Mohammedan mysticism, and may as well derive from Greece[123] as from Asia. Its original doctrine of divine love, as a reaction against Moslem austerity, gave it a fixed hold in Persia, and became the starting point of innumerable heterodox doctrines.[124] Under the Khalif Moktader, a Persian Sufi is recorded to have been tortured and executed for teaching that every man is God.[125] In later ages, Sufiism became loosely associated with every species of independent thinking; and there is reason to suspect that the later poets Sadi (fl. thirteenth century) and Hafiz[126] (fl. fourteenth century), as well as hundreds of lesser status, held under the name of Sufiism views of life not far removed from those of Omar Khayyám; who, however, had bantered the Sufis so unmercifully that they are said to have dreaded and hated him.[127] In any case, Sufiism has included such divergent types as Al Gazzali,[128] the skeptical defender of the faith; devout pantheistic poets such as Jâmi;[129] and singers of love and wine such as Hafiz, whose extremely concrete imagery is certainly not as often allegorical as serious Sufis assert, though no doubt it is sometimes so.[130] It even became nominally associated with the destructive Ismaïlitism of the sect of the Assassins, whose founder, Hassan, had been the schoolfellow of Omar Khayyám.[131]
Of Sufiism as a whole it may be said that whether as inculcating quietism, or as widening the narrow theism of Islam into pantheism, or as sheltering an unaggressive rationalism, it has made for freedom and humanity in the Mohammedan world, lessening the evils of ignorance where it could not inspire progress.[132] It long anticipated the semi-rationalism of those Christians who declare heaven and hell to be names for bodily or mental states in this life.[133] On its more philosophic side too it connects with the long movement of speculation which, passing into European life through the Western Saracens, revived Greek philosophic thought in Christendom after the night of the Middle Ages, at the same time that Saracen science passed on the more precious seeds of real knowledge to the new civilization.