This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Outside the world of medieval Islamic astronomy, Omar Khayyam is known chiefly as a poet, through the Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains that became famous in the West largely through later translation. The trouble is that the authorship, extent and even philosophical stance of the Rubaiyat remain genuinely disputed among scholars, since a large body of verse was attributed to Khayyam after his death by writers holding very different views from one another.
That disputed philosophical stance runs in two directions at once. Some readings find in the quatrains a hedonism sitting uneasily beside orthodox Islam, wine and pleasure celebrated in verses that seem to reject religious constraint outright. Other readers find instead a coded Sufi mysticism, symbolic language that reconciles with orthodox belief once its imagery is read correctly. Scholars have not settled which reading, if either fully, reflects verses Khayyam himself actually composed.
One further confusion is worth separating out cleanly: Khayyam the eleventh century Persian polymath is a distinct historical person from Kerry Thornley, a twentieth century Discordian founder who adopted the nickname Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, a modern borrowing of the name rather than any claim of identity with the medieval poet and scientist himself.