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Atheistrepublic.com made the following meme which claims:

enter image description here

lf instead of studying religion, men would have devoted to develop mathematics - algebra.

lf logic of science would have occupied the place of Sufism, faith and superstition.

Religion that divides human beings would have replaced by humanism...

The same meme was reposted on EOHT.info. Mukto-mona.com claims the quote is from one of his Arabic poems but doesn't give any citation.

lly
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Sakib Arifin
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    These phrases don't even make sense, I'll try to find the Persian origins. If they exist, we should be able to get a source. – daraos Nov 23 '16 at 09:35
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    @daraos I'm going to go with bad translation. Or just bad English if its fake. –  Nov 23 '16 at 09:58
  • @fredsbend I know, I'm looking for other translations now. – daraos Nov 23 '16 at 10:14
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    While searching for keywords, unsuccessfully so far, I started to wonder why I'm doing it. I learn something interesting in the process, sure, but I don't see why anyone should spent time searching for a source if the person who makes the claim didn't bother. I can make up such quotes right now within a few minutes and it would be my job to provide a source. "random guy on the Internet said X" is not a reputable claim. – daraos Nov 23 '16 at 11:11
  • If a claim shared by 95 and liked by 426 people is not notable, then what is notable? – Sakib Arifin Nov 23 '16 at 14:41
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    @MohammadSakibArifin It's very notable, but you should use more-convincing sources to show the notability. http://www.atheistrepublic.com/gallery/omar-khayyam-if-logic-occupied-place-faith-superstition ; http://www.eoht.info/page/Omar+Khayyam ; – DavePhD Nov 23 '16 at 15:14
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    @MohammadSakibArifin a much longer version of the supposed quote is here: http://www.arabhumanists.org/humanism/arab-humanist-quotes/ – DavePhD Nov 23 '16 at 15:21
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    @MohammadSakibArifin This 11 April 2005 article by Alamgir Hossain is the oldest version of the claim I can find so far: http://www.islam-watch.org/m-hussain/myth_islams_contribution.htm – DavePhD Nov 23 '16 at 15:39
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    @MohammadSakibArifin don't you think that 426 people is a very small amount? This is less than 0.001% of the population of Iran. And also people just liked the words, they have not expressed belief that this is correct. I agree with Daraos: it is trivial to create hundreds of them in few seconds. Or as **Omar Khayyam wrote in 1121 "The problem with internet quotes is that you can't always depend on their accuracy"** – Salvador Dali Nov 23 '16 at 23:06
  • @DavePhD The article cites a lot of things without any citation. – Sakib Arifin Nov 24 '16 at 09:46
  • Atheist Universe says the quote is from his poem rubaiyat. http://atheistuniverse.net/profiles/blogs/the-so-called-islamic-golden-age-was-it-really-islamic – Sakib Arifin Nov 24 '16 at 10:04
  • Wiki entry of the poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam – Sakib Arifin Nov 24 '16 at 10:05
  • Found the poem Rubaiyat: https://archive.org/stream/TheRubaiyatOfOmarKhayyam-FirstVersion-Illustrated/TheRubaiyatOfOmarKhayyam-FirstVersion-Illustrated_djvu.txt – Sakib Arifin Nov 24 '16 at 11:50
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    @MohammadSakibArifin I was looking at the archive-dot-org document yesterday, but couldn't find anything similar to the quote. I searched the OCR text by keywords. – DavePhD Nov 24 '16 at 12:28
  • It's definitely **not** from the Rubaiyat. [Even the quatrains unpublished by Fitzgerald](https://archive.org/details/quatrainsofomark00omar) don't discuss algebra, which couldn't be worded any differently in any translation. It's also not four lines long. – lly Jun 18 '18 at 11:05
  • It's not in any of the Arabic poems translated in *The Wine of Wisdom*, but it only has about half of the 25 that are claimed to exist. The rest might not be available in English translation; most scholars who deal with Khayyam don't bother with the Arabic poems at all. – lly Jun 18 '18 at 11:07
  • Khayyam is claimed to have written a lot of stuff, not all of it well-authenticated, and what is authenticated not always well-translated. It would be essentially impossible to prove that he did not write a given piece, though if one could identify the source then it would be possible to demonstrate a poor or misleading translation. – Daniel R Hicks Jun 19 '18 at 00:01

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