INTRODUCTION
The Circle in which we ebb and we flow,
Neither beginning, nor an end does know.
The Riddle stands as posed long ago:
Where do we come from? Where do we go?
Despite the passage of nine centuries, this is an essentially modern story. It tells how a mathematical genius was persecuted for his philosophical beliefs and rebellious poems, how the two rival worlds of Christianity and Islam slowly moved towards their most violent embrace in the First Crusade of 1096, and how a friend of emperors and queens was suddenly abandoned to the wolves once the appeasement of orthodox clergy became more important in a civil war than the life-long devotion of a friend, astronomer, doctor and musician.
Omar Khayyam has been the world's favourite poet since the late nineteenth century. His slim book of poems has been in print in a hundred languages in a hundred lands because of Edward FitzGerald's masterful translation in 1859, contributing, it is said, more phrases, weight by weight, to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined. The consequences have been spectacular. Astronomers have named a crater on the moon after Khayyam and some mathematicians regard him as one of the top ten intellects in all history. As long ago as 1079, he calculated the average length of the year to within 5 seconds of the figure an atomic clock would have produced at the time. Such is his popularity that countless commercial establishments are called Omar Khayyam from British Columbia to Vietnam.
Yet until now, there has not been, in any language, a detailed study of his life and his world to merit the name of biography. Indeed, such has been the excitement during the preparation of this book that the BBC's World Service devoted a whole programme to it, the Times Literary Supplement announced its coming and the Chinese National Radio sent its reporter in London to interview its author.