Pezeshkian and the Instrumentalisation of Khayyam: What an Ancient Polymath Reveals About Tehran's Soft Power

When Iran's president invokes a medieval mathematician-poet on a national commemoration day, the choice is never just about literature. The framing tells you something about who Tehran wants to be seen as — and who it is speaking to.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanamiddle-east4-minute read18 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On 18 May 2026, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian marked the national commemoration day of Omar Khayyam with remarks carried by Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency. His words framed Khayyam as a figure who fused scientific inquiry and literary expression — a template, presumably, for what a modern Islamic civilization might look like if it were true to its own intellectual heritage. The statement was flag-waving of a particular kind: cultural, not military. But it was flag-waving nonetheless.

That requires context. The Islamic Republic has a long history of selectively appropriating pre-Islamic and classical Persian figures — from Ferdowsi to Khayyam to Rumi — as proof that Iran was a civilisational centre long before European colonialism and long before the 1979 revolution. The operative word is "selectively." Khayyam, whose philosophical verses express doubt, wine, and agnosticism in equal measure, would seem an odd patron saint for a theocratic state. Yet he has become precisely that — flattened into a symbol of rationalism-within-tradition, a figure who proves that Islamic civilization was once ahead of Europe in mathematics and astronomy, and can be again.

Pezeshkian, a former cardiac surgeon who took office in 2025, has made repeated use of cultural diplomacy since assuming the presidency. His government has sought to project an image of reformist-minded modernity that contrasts with the hardline security apparatus that still dominates Iranian politics. The Khayyam commemoration fits that pattern: it is a statement directed partly inward, at a domestic audience hungry for cultural prestige, and partly outward, at a region and a world that Iran wants to engage on terms of intellectual parity rather than sanctions-inflicted weakness.

The Rubaiyat, Khayyam's quatrain collection, was popularised in the English-speaking world through Edward FitzGerald's 1859 translation — a work that became one of the most widely read volumes of poetry in the West during the early twentieth century. That Western appetite for Khayyam is itself a useful fact for Tehran: it suggests an existing audience predisposed to associate Iran with sophisticated, humanistic culture rather than the clerical apparatus and nuclear confrontations that dominate headlines in Western capitals. Every commemoration of Khayyam is, implicitly, a reminder that Iran's civilizational claims predate the current political dispute.

There is, however, an obvious tension in the state's embrace of Khayyam. The poet's verses question orthodoxies — religious, philosophical, political. "I sent my Soul through the Invisible," runs one famous quatrain in FitzGerald's rendering, "some letter of that After-life to spell / And by and by my Soul returned to me / And answered 'I myself am Heaven and Hell.'" A regime that has historically punished dissent with imprisonment and execution is not obviously hospitable to that kind of epistemological scepticism. The question is whether the state is simply borrowing Khayyam's prestige while discarding his philosophical substance — or whether the dissonance itself tells us something about the contradictions inside Iran's current political settlement.

What seems clear is that the instrumentalisation runs in more than one direction. The Khayyam commemoration is also a reminder that Tehran has a sophisticated understanding of how soft power operates in a multipolar world. The United States and its allies have long deployed cultural prestige — Hollywood, Western academic institutions, the dollar as a carrier of institutional trust — as instruments of influence. Iran is doing something structurally similar, albeit with fewer financial resources and a more contested international reputation. It is investing in civilizational narrative rather than military hardware as a way of reshaping the terms on which the world engages with it.

That strategy has limits. A commemoration statement in Persian, translated into English by state media, reaches an audience that has already chosen to listen. The harder task — demonstrating that the Islamic Republic genuinely embodies the intellectual openness Khayyam represented — is not one that a single presidential statement can discharge. Western governments and international media outlets that frame Iran primarily through the lens of nuclear non-proliferation, regional proxy conflicts, and human rights will not easily be redirected by a mathematician-poet from eleven centuries ago. The question of whether Iran's soft-power ambitions can survive its own record is one that the Pezeshkian government has not yet answered — and may not be able to, given the structural constraints under which it operates.

The Khayyam commemoration matters, then, less as a statement of cultural achievement and more as a signal of intent. Tehran wants to be understood on civilizational terms. It wants space in the international conversation that goes beyond the conflict frame. Whether it can earn that space — and whether the internal contradictions of a state that venerates a sceptic while punishing scepticism will eventually collapse the effort — is the more durable question beneath the presidential remarks.

This article draws on Iranian state media reporting and established biographical sources on Omar Khayyam. The specific text of President Pezeshkian's remarks on 18 May 2026 was sourced via IRNA, the Islamic Republic's official news agency.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/Irna_en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khayyam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masoud_Pezeshkian