The Authentic Rubaiyyat of Oman Khayaam - Tapa dura

'The Rubaiyyat' is a work of the Sufi tradition. Within it we can only discover that which we are capable of discovering. Wine is here a metaphor for love and drunkenness for spiritual ecstasy. His work is more spiritual than hedonistic; The reader should take up these verses and see in them what he can see. (Prof. Leonard Lewin, University of Colorado)

In his world-famous collection of quatrains, the RUBAIYYAT, Omar Khayaan celebrates the feelings of sorrow and joy that we go through when we put our faith in the Divine Spirit and leave the 'reality' of earthly priorities behind us. In images of drunkenness, his verses speak of mystic union with the Divine Self. The quatrains were translated into the English in 1859 by E. Fitzgerald, making them available to Europeans for the first time. The nineteenth century reader was given a rendering which portrayed a wine-inspired poet, a sceptical and fun-loving freethinker, without fully bringing out the mystical aspects of the work. This led to misinterpretations.