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Xayyam is perhaps the most well-known Iranian poet around the world, but who he is and where the poetry attributed to him has come from is in effect a matter of precarious historical consensus, based upon partial information and interpretation, among the Easterners and the Westerners. Truth be told, the character we know today as Xayyam is a confidence man wrapped in the hazy mist of fleeting eons. Consequently, what this book undertakes to bring into light is that how the character named Xayyam and the poetry attributed to him are in fact the collective product of a myriad of differing or opposing conceptions of him by the historical and contemporary opinion-holders, and that how these diverse and incoherent conceptions which through the reiteration implemented by a monologic tendency gain a superficial consistency in the passage of time turn into a priori universal norms for judging poetry in particular and life in general.

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Reza Parchizadeh (b. June 16th, 1980) is an Iranian politico-literary writer as well as a veteran of the Student Uprising of July 1999 in Tehran, Iran.

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