Be Fair, Who Is Worse?

No. 330

O mufti, we outwork thee, plain to see;
and, drunk as ever, soberer than thee;
thou drink’st men’s blood, and we the blood of the vine —
be fair — the worse blood-drinker, thou or me?*

Philosophical Reflection

Khayyam’s quatrains rarely name their adversary. Here he does. “O mufti” — the jurist who issues legal rulings binding on the community — is addressed face to face, and the poem opens not with complaint but with a scoreboard: we outwork you, we are soberer than you, now be fair and answer us. The directness is itself a philosophical act. It refuses the distance that allows institutional authority to remain unexamined. The mufti’s power depends, in part, on not being addressed as the mufti — on speaking from a position rather than occupying one. Khayyam addresses him.

The comparative forms do precise work. More industrious, more clear-headed — these are not compliments Khayyam claims for himself by default but claims he inverts from the conventional accounting. In that accounting, the tavern is the site of waste and the juridical court the site of productive authority. Khayyam refuses it. The wine-drinker is more productive and clearer of mind. “Drunk as ever, soberer than thee” is not paradox for decoration; it is a claim about what happens when authority is exercised through self-deception rather than honest reckoning. The mufti who has convinced himself that condemnation is justice is more deeply intoxicated than any drinker — and less capable of clear sight. Sobriety, in Khayyam’s accounting, is not the absence of wine but the presence of honest perception.

The argument then turns on blood. In Persian idiom, khūn khordan — to drink blood — means to exploit, to prey on, to consume what belongs to another. Khayyam makes the metaphor literal and then splits it in two. There are two kinds of blood-drinker here: the one who takes the vine’s blood, and the one who takes men’s. The vine gives freely; the grape is pressed and the wine is honest — the drinker knows what he takes and from whom. The mufti’s consumption is not honest in this way: it moves behind the veil of sanctified authority, consuming livelihoods, freedoms, and reputations under the name of legal order. The transparency of the transaction makes all the difference. One blood-drinker can be named; the other cannot name himself.

“Be fair — who is the worse blood-drinker, thou or me?” The appeal to fairness, equity, the balanced judgment — is the cut that decides the poem. Fairness is the stated instrument of juridical authority. It is the mufti’s professional virtue, the ground of his standing in the community, the justification for his power to rule. Khayyam applies it to the mufti himself. The demand performs its own answer while appearing to invite the mufti’s judgment: this is the trap. A mufti who applies fairness honestly to the comparison can only find one conclusion. A mufti who refuses to find it proves Khayyam’s point by other means. Either way, the poem has won.

The wine-drinker knows what he does. He does not perform innocence or dress appetite in the language of virtue. The mufti’s condition is precisely the reverse: what he does is concealed — from himself, or from the community — and the apparatus of religious authority is the concealment. This is the deeper charge behind the wit. To know one’s own transaction, to name what one takes and from whom, is the form of clarity that Khayyam considers authentic. The institution has surrendered it for something it calls piety but cannot bear to examine.

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Footnote

* Source: Tarabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 330, translated by Kam Austine for Philosophy in Verse.

Related Treatises: Risāla fī al-Kawn wa al-Taklīf, Ḍarūrat al-Taḍādd fī al-Wujūd

Internal Themes: #MockingTheSacred #ReligiousAuthority #MoralInversion #Hypocrisy #JuridicalAuthority #PersianPhilosophy #ClericalCritique #Sobriety

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Published as part of Philosophy in Verse — The Omar Khayyam Project