Page:Quatrains of Omar Khayyam (tr. Whinfield, 1883).djvu/48

xxiv :IV. Báháríya—Poems in praise of spring, gardens and flowers.
 * V. Kufríya—Irreligious and autinomian utterances, charging the sins of the creature to the account of the Creator, scoffing at the Prophet's Paradise and Hell, singing the praises of wine and pleasure—preaching ad nauseam, "Eat and drink (especially drink), for to-morrow ye die."
 * VI. Munáját—Addresses to the Deity, now in the ordinary language of devotion, bewailing sins and imploring pardon, now in mystical phraseology, craving deliverance from "self," and union with the "Truth" (Al Hakk), or Deity, as conceived by the Mystics.

The "complaints" may obviously be connected with the known facts of the poet's life, by supposing them to have been prompted by the persecution to which he was subjected on account of his opinions. His remarks on the Houris and other sacred subjects raised such a feeling against him that at one time his life was in danger, and the wonder is that he escaped at all in a city like Nishapur, where the odium theologicum raged so fiercely as to occasion a sanguinary civil war. In the year 489, as we learn from Ibn Al Athir, the orthodox banded themselves together under the leadership of Abul Kasim and Muhammad, the chiefs of the Hanefites and the Shafeites, in order to exterminate the Kerrámians or Anthropomorphist heretics, and succeeded in putting many of them to death, and in destroying all their establishments. It may be also that after the