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Our history teems with caricatures. The Vikings ? Longships descending on monasteries out of Northern Sea mists , horned helmets , irascible Thor and his hammer , Valhalla. Following the ninth century
Norse raids on monastic settlements in the British Isles , these images lean heavily on the biased accounts of surviving monks. Meanwhile the Swedish Vikings sailed south-eastward down broad , flowing
rivers to the land of the Slavs. Their trade reached as far as the imperial Byzantine capital of Constantinople and the Islamic cities beyond the Caspian Sea. Here in what we now call Central Asia ,
our version of the past provides further historical stereotypes. ‘Hordes’ of horse-riding pastoral nomads raising the dust of the steppe , spending the night in their yurts. Fierce warrior tribes
on horseback , always prone to converge in forbidding numbers on the ‘civilised’ regions of the West.
Contrary to the present-day views of Islam , humanist philosophy and tolerance were widespread throughout the Islamic world between the ninth and thirteenth centuries.Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was a philosopher , astronomer , poet and mathematician who was educated at Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan) , an Islamic centre for scholarly study to rival those of Baghdad and Cordoba. The libraries of these places provided the source of many a text that , after translation by travelling western scholars , provided
inspiration for the ‘Renaissance’ of Europe. Muslim mathematicians adopted the Hindu numerical system (including zero) and made contributions to both trigonometry and algebra. Engineers advanced water
technology in constructing irrigation canals , waterwheels , pumps and aqueducts while their astronomy , medical skills and chemistry were far more advanced than anything the west could offer. In 1859 ,
Darwin’s Origin of Species was published and in that same year , an obscure poet called Edward Fitzgerald brought out an anonymous pamphlet , The Rubaiyat (“quatrains”) of Omar Khayyam :
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint , and heard great Argument
About it and about ; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow
And with my own hand laboured it to grow :
And this was all the harvest that I reaped –
‘I came like Water , and like Wind I go.’
The Moving Finger writes ; and having writ ,
Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line ,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Look not above , there is no answer there.
Pray not , for no one listens to your prayer.
Near is as near to God as any Far ,
And Here is just the same deceit as There.
The authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain , being based on manuscripts written long after his death. Fitzgerald was the very model of the Victorian gentleman-scholar , living
(like Darwin) on a private income. His apparently very free translation of the original Persian verses eventually became world-famous but he himself has remained a little-known figure , possibly owing to the literary
establishment’s distaste for anything that proves too popular. The ancient Athenian criticism of Aristides the Just is said to have
occurred because people eventually became irritated by hearing him always referred to as ‘the Just’.
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