Omar Khayyám on theodicy

Omar Khayyám on theodicy. Irreconcilability of the transcendental and the imminent. Mehdi Aminrazavi
In: Journal of Islamic Philosophy, 11 (2019), p. 33-44.

Abstract

The philosophical and theological thoughts of Omar Khayyām, the Persian mathematician, astronomer, and the likely author of the Rubāʿiyyāt (Quatrains), has remained a neglected area of scholarship. Much of the scholarship on Khayyām in the last few centuries has primarily been focused on his Quatrains, and to a lesser extent, on his views on mathematics and geometry. Despite Khayyām’s significance, his six philosophical treatises were not even edited nor published until recently, which is perhaps why they have remained relatively obscure. In this article, Khayyām’s dual views on theodicy are presented notwithstanding that he is the only figure we know of in the annals of Islamic intellectual history who adopted two opposite positions—simultaneously— with regard to the problem of evil. This article postulates that Khayyām’s dual positions on theodicy can only be understood if they are placed in their proper contexts; philosophically, theodicy is explainable, while on a more experiential level it is not. Conclusions may vary, depending on whether we are looking at the presence of evil from a transcendental or an imminent perspective.