Summary
Dževad Karahasan: The Seed of Death
This is the first book of a multi-religious novel about Omar Hajjam, the great Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet from the 12th century. In the background, the novel gives a precise picture of the dramatic epoch in which Hajjam lives - the collapse of the Arab empire, the appearance of the Crusaders and the West on the historical stage, the meeting of great cultures, the appearance of steppe peoples who bring "fresh blood" into Islamic societies, in which they appear mainly as conquerors, only to relatively quickly cultivate and drown in the culture they "conquered". In the foreground of the novel plot is the character of Omar Hajjam, surrounded by a series of notable historical characters from his era. Just as these historical figures enable the novel to thematize everything that began in the era it is being talked about (terrorism, fundamentalism, attempts to realize communist ideas in the form of a state) that would follow us even today as a cultural and political reality of the era in which we live, fictional characters give an insight into the intimate life of the hero. Hajjam knows an awful lot and is constantly learning more, but it is precisely his vast knowledge that forces him to see that man cannot acquire reliable knowledge; opposite him stand his contemporaries, who, probably because they live in times of great earthquakes and demolitions, construct a solid point for themselves in their spirit - their fundamentalist faith in something, from which they then draw the illusion of security in a time of general insecurity.
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