About the Book
Omar Khayyam's Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination is a twelve-book series of which this book is the second volume, subtitled Khayyami Millennium: Reporting the Discovery and the Reconfirmation of the True Dates of Birth and Passing of Omar Khayyam (AD 1021-1123). Each book is independently readable, although it will be best understood as a part of the whole series.
In the overall series, the transdisciplinary sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi shares the results of his decades-long research on Omar Khayyam, the enigmatic 11th/12th centuries Persian Muslim sage, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, physician, writer, and poet from Neyshabour, Iran, whose life and works still remain behind a veil of deep mystery. Tamdgidi's purpose has been to find definitive answers to the many puzzles still surrounding Khayyam, especially regarding the existence, nature, and purpose of the Robaiyat in his life and works. To explore the questions posed, he advances a new hermeneutic method of textual analysis, informed by what he calls the quantum sociological imagination, to gather and study all the attributed philosophical, religious, scientific, and literary writings of Khayyam.
In this second book of the series, Tamdgidi lays down an essential foundation for the series by revisiting the unresolved questions surrounding the dates of birth and passing of Omar Khayyam. Critically reexamining the manner in which Omar Khayyam's birth horoscope as reported in Zahireddin Abolhassan Beyhaqi's Tatemmat Sewan al-Hekmat (Supplement to the Chest of Wisdom) was used by Swāmi Govinda Tīrtha in his The Nectar of Grace: Omar Khayyam's Life and Works (1941) to determine Khayyam's birth date, Tamdgidi uncovers a number of serious internal inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies that prevented Tīrtha (and, since then, other scholars more or less taking for granted his results) from arriving at a reliable date for Khayyam's birth, hurling Khayyami studies into decades of confusion regarding Khayyam's life and works. Tamdgidi then shares in the book the detailed account of his own discovery of Khayyam's true date of birth for the first time, a finding that eluded Khayyami studies for centuries and is bound to revolutionize the studies for decades to come.
Tamdgidi then turns his attention to the task of definitively establishing the true date of passing of Omar Khayyam. Conducting an in-depth, superposed analysis of Beyhaqi's Tatemmat Sewan el-Hekmat (Supplement to the Chest of Wisdom), Abdorrahman Khazeni's Mizan ol-Hekmat (Balance of Wisdom), Nezami Arouzi's Chahar Maqaleh (Four Discourses), and Yar Ahmad Rashidi Tabrizi's Tarabkhaneh (House of Joy), amid other relevant texts, he succeeds in firmly reconfirming and further discovering, in a textually reliable way, not only the year, the season, the month, and the day, but even the most likely time of day at which the poet mathematician, astronomer, and calendar reformer died as a solar centenarian, completing his 102nd solar year age.
Strange is that these discoveries are made just in time as we approach the first solar millennium of Omar Khayyam's birth date on June 10, AD 1021, at sunrise of Neyshabour, Iran, and the ninth solar centennial of his passing on June 10, AD 1123, on the eve also of his birthday, closing the circle of his life's "coming and going."
About the Author :
Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Ph.D., is the founding director and editor of OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics) and its journal, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699), which have served since 2002 to frame his independent research, pedagogical, and publishing initiatives. Besides his currently in progress work published in the book series Omar Khayyam's Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination (Okcir Press), he has previously authored Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma (Okcir Press), Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism (Routledge/Paradigm) and Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (Palgrave Macmillan). Tamdgidi has published numerous peer reviewed articles and chapters and edited more than thirty journal issues. Mohammad H. Tamdgidi is a former associate professor of sociology specializing in social theory at UMass Boston and has taught sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Oneonta.
Review :
"... a masterpiece in Omar Khayyam studies ..." -- Jafar Aghayani Chavoshi (Ph.D., University of Paris, 1997), Professor of Philosophy of Science at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, specializing in Philosophy, Epistemology, and History of Mathematics and Science, and in Omar Khayyam Studies; From his Foreword to the last book of the Omar Khayyam's Secret series
"Among the results of consistently following the QSI [Quantum sociological imagination] methodology in Tamdgidi's Omar Khayyam's Secret series is that of the immense achievement of its help to end the impasse that had developed in Khayyam studies, in discovering and reconfirming the dates of his birth and death (1021-1123), accounting for and verifying of the body of works attributed to him in art, astronomy, medicine (as shared in his "Nowrooznameh" and implied in his poetry's stated healing aims), music, philosophy, science and poetry, including his authorship of the Robaiyat .... Book one of the series, for example, introduces the series and the QSI method, as developed by Tamdgidi. The second book focuses on presenting the discovery and reconfirmation of Khayyam's birth and death dates, while book three discloses how that discovery (along with horoscopic origins of pen name) led to the independent confirmation of his authorship of a collection of robaiyat." -- Winston E. Langley, Professor Emeritus of Political Science & International Relations, Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School for Policy & Global Studies, and a former Provost (2008-2017) of the University of Massachusetts Boston; From his Foreword to the last book of the Omar Khayyam's Secret series
