Iran Celebrates Khayyam’s Enduring Global Legacy

Date: 18 May 2026 - 21:56

News ID: ۱۵۰۲۰۱

TEHRAN -- Iran marked the
national commemoration day of Omar Khayyam on Monday, with senior officials honoring the 11th-century Persian polymath as a “shining star for human civilization” whose fusion of science, literature and skeptical philosophy continues to resonate nearly a millennium after his death.
Born on May 18, 1048, in Nishapur, Khayyam was a mathematician who reformed the solar calendar with extraordinary precision – calculating the tropical year as 365.24219858156 days, an accuracy unmatched until the 19th century – and a philosopher who pushed the boundaries of Euclidean geometry.
Yet his global fame was propelled by Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 English translation of the Rubaiyat, which introduced Anglo-American readers to quatrains urging carpe diem in the face of mortality.
Culture Minister Seyyed Abbas Salehi described Khayyam as a “living part of the nation’s cultural identity” and a reminder of “deep-rooted intellectualism in Persian culture,” adding that in a world trapped in “the rush of life, the confusion of narratives, and the noise of everyday routine, revisiting Khayyam’s poems can be an invitation to think, reflect, and engage in dialogue with oneself.”
President Masoud Pezeshkian called the commemoration day “a celebration of wisdom, scientific inquiry, and freedom of thought,” noting that Khayyam’s Jalali calendar remains the world’s most accurate solar calendar and that his mathematical work anticipated non-Euclidean geometry.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, writing on social media platform X, struck a more philosophical tone, warning that “in a world where rebellions and evils are the product of ignorance and false assumptions, if reason is unaware of its own ‘ignorance,’ it will be exposed to irreparable mistakes.”
Baghaei emphasized that “the value of Iranian civilization lies in the breadth of views, the diversity of perspectives, and the depth of thought regarding existence and life,” concluding that Khayyam “is not only a shining star in the Iranian world, but also for human civilization.”
Khayyam died in his native Nishapur in 1131, where his mausoleum remains a masterpiece of Islamic-Iranian architecture. His quatrains – many of disputed authenticity, with scholars arguing that only a fraction of the hundreds attributed to him are genuine – have been translated into dozens of languages, adapted by poets from Russia to India, and set to music by composers across Europe and the Middle East.