Samarkand

Samarkand, renowned and award-winning Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf’s second novel, was published to critical acclaim in French in 1988 and translated into English by Russell Harris. Written in the historical fiction genre, the novel focuses on the life of eleventh-century Persian poet, scientist, mathematician, teacher, and philosopher Omar Khayyám, whose poetry collection Rubaiyat came from his Sufi mystic background. Through the story of Khayyám’s life, we learn about the Seljuk Empire at the height of Persian civilization.

The novel is set in the city of Samarkand, a multicultural metropolis of lush tent life that was the greatest city in the world at the time when Khayyám lived there. Divided into four parts, Maalouf dedicates its first half of the novel to a somewhat historically accurate recreation of Khayyám’s life. The second half is spent tracing a fictional attempt to recover the original manuscript of the Rubaiyat by an obsessed American scholar.

The first two parts of the novel are titled “Poets and Lovers” and “The Assassins’ Paradise.” The novel opens on a scene from Omar Khayyám’s early life, when he first comes to Samarkand from his birthplace of Nishapur. The Sufi mystic and poet is attacked as an indecent and ribald poet whose writing about women and wine is a mockery of Islam. Dragged off the street by thugs, Khayyám is brought before a judge for punishment. However, the judge sees the brilliance and genius of Khayyám’s writing. Instead of sentencing him to be beheaded, the judge gives the young man a notebook of Chinese-made paper and tells him to write his poems down instead of just singing them in the streets. This notebook will become the manuscript of the Rubaiyat.



We witness the great figures of the day through Khayyám’s eyes – people such as the rulers of Persia, Sultan Alba Arslan and the king of the Shah Seljuks, whose interests lay more in science than in ruling, and who built himself an astronomical observatory in order to devote maximum time to his research. Khayyám meets the famed Vizir Nizam ul Mulk, whose Machiavelli-like innovations in the science of governing are still seen as brilliant to this day. He also becomes good friends with another scientist, Hasan al-Sabbah. When Nizam offers the role of spymaster to Khayyám, the poet rejects the position, instead recommending his new friend Sabbah, who takes to the work much more readily than Khayyám predicted.

At the same time, Khayyám falls in love with another poet – Jahan, the female court poet of the Sultan. They have a nine-year love affair that ends tragically when Turkish nomads attack Samarkand and Jahan is killed.

In the meantime, Sabbah eventually rejects his role at court and, instead, founds the order of the Assassins – a secretive group of elite warriors who are determined to rid Persia of its multicultural permissiveness, bringing the region closer to their interpretation of Islam. After Jahan’s death, the ruthless Sabbah steals the original manuscript of the Rubaiyat, hiding it in the Fortress of Al-Hashashin, also known as the Fortress of Death. This stronghold is so well defended that invaders wouldn’t breach it for 150 years. Nevertheless, eventually, the fortress is destroyed – and presumably, the manuscript along with it. Khayyám himself grows old and dies in the city of his birth.



The third and fourth parts of the novel are titled “The End of the Millennium” and “A Poet at Sea.” Jumping forward in time to the turn of the twentieth century, the novel traces the attempts of a fictional American scholar named Benjamin O. Lesage to locate and bring back the original Rubaiyat manuscript. In 1896, Lesage travels to Persia, where he is caught up in the fledgling democratic movement that arose after the assassination of Shah Naser al-Din Shah Qajar.

During his adventures, Benjamin meets one of the Shah’s granddaughters, Shireen, a princess who has found the missing manuscript and wants to shepherd it into safekeeping. The pair lives for a while in Persia, witnessing the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, which attempted to get out from under the yoke of British and Russian imperialism by establishing the Iranian Republic with its own parliament. The wars during this time between supporters of the old regime, funded and armed by British and Russian interests, and democratic reformers at first led to widespread modernization but was definitely put down by Russian troops in 1911.

In 1912, Benjamin and Shireen leave the Iranian Republic to live in America, but unfortunately, they decide to cross the Atlantic Ocean on the newly launched ship the Titanic. When the ship capsizes after hitting an iceberg, they make it into lifeboats and are saved, but although they arrive safely in New York City, the manuscript they were bringing with them is lost on the bottom of the ocean. Undone by this loss, Shireen deserts Benjamin on the dock – she cannot bear life without the work of art that she has spent so much time trying to protect.