Samarkand
SynopsisPlot
Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alleged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.
Story
About this book
Amin Maalouf's novel Samarkand follows two timelines connected by a single manuscript. In eleventh-century Persia, the poet and scholar Omar Khayyam is accused of offending Islamic codes. The judge assigned to his case recognizes his talent, spares him, and gives him a small blank book, urging him to keep his unconventional ideas within its pages. That book becomes the seed of what will be known as the Rubaiyaat, and Maalouf builds his story around the manuscript's long, precarious life through centuries of political turmoil.
The novel's second timeline moves to a later period, when an American academic becomes consumed by the search for the original Khayyam manuscript. His pursuit draws him into Persia's own struggles for constitutional change, and the story eventually reaches the maiden voyage of the Titanic, binding the manuscript's fate to one of the most well-known maritime disasters in history.
Maalouf, a Lebanese-born writer who has worked in both Arabic and French, constructs the novel as a chain of encounters between poetry, power, and chance. The historical settings shift from Samarkand and Isfahan to early twentieth-century Tehran and the North Atlantic, with each location shaping the manuscript's survival or vulnerability.
