edina. In the century after his death the Islamic rulers (called Caliphs or successors to the Prophet) expanded their jurisdiction from the Arabian Peninsula west to Morocco, north to Spain and Armenia and eastwards to Persia, Palestine, Syria and even to the borders of India. By the time another century had passed, however, the over-extended Saracenic empire had begun to disintegrate, and Baghdad had emerged as the centre of an independently functioning eastern part. In 1055, the Sultan of the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, assuming complete control over what was by then the Oriental Islamic Empire.
             Baghdad is crucial to any story of the history of humanism. It was there that the transmission of Classical learning to the West really began. Learned Jews and free-thinking Persians with roots in both the Byzantine and Saracenic cultures were the heroic preservers of Greek, Roman and Oriental knowledge for more than five centuries. The result was that the ancient Classics, translated from the original Greek to Arabic by the Persian and Jewish scholars at the university and other centers of learning in Baghdad, eventually found their way to the Muslims in Spain. When Sicily, under Muslim control for 130 years, fell to the Normans in 1091 it, too, became a thriving source for the spread of Arabian science and medicine into the rest of Europe. From such centers powerful ideas from antiquity were disseminated, typically by Jewish scholars who traveled from monastery to monastery throughout Christian Europe. Thus were the sparks of learning provided for the flickering candles in those lonely outposts, where Christian monks labored to translate the Greek and Arabic into Latin and, in the process (no doubt unknowingly) to ignite the conflagration of the Italian Renaissance.
             The story of Omar Khayyam's role in all this is a fascinating one. He was born in the eleventh century, at Nishapur. His birthplace was, at that time, the third or fourt...