IN BRIEF
In brief, Qays ibn al-Mulawwah of the Banu ‘Amir tribe falls in love with his classmate Layla bint Sa‘d. As the two grow older, the intensity of their love increases. Although Layla, too, is truly smitten by love, it is Qays who publicly and unreservedly pronounces his obsessive passion in elegiac lyrics, thus earning the epithet Majnun (literally, “possessed” or “mad”).
Majnun’s incessant poetic expression of Layla’s beauty and
his astonishingly outrageous public conduct alarm Layla’s parents. Concerned
about their daughter’s reputation as well as the honor and standing of the
tribe, her parents ensure that the lovers are kept apart. When Qays’s father
asks for Layla’s hand in marriage to his beloved son, Layla’s family flatly
refuses the proposal, a response that seems harsh but, in the light of Majnun’s
scandalous conduct, not necessarily unreasonable.
As Majnun continues wandering aimlessly through the desert,
bonding with wild beasts, living an ascetic life, and composing verses about
his obsession with Layla, his father lures him into visiting the holiest of
Muslim sites, the Ka‘ba, in the hope of curing him of his obsessive love.
There, Majnun pleads to Allah to make him “a hundred-fold” more “possessed” in
his love for Layla.
ANOTHER MARRIAGE
In the meantime, Layla’s father gives her in marriage,
against her will, to an affluent, but shallow, man named Ibn Salam. The marriage
never consummates as Layla insists on preserving her chastity. She remains
faithful to her true love, Majnun, until Ibn Salam dies of rejection,
disillusionment, and grief.
A number of times, Majnun is offered the chance to visit his
beloved, to speak with her in person. Towards the end of the story, when Layla,
through the inter-mediation of a young, faithful devotee of Majnun, appears to
him, he still refuses to have physical (or sexual) contact with her. Majnun
strives to realize “perfect love” in Layla, a love that transcends sensual
contact with the beloved, a love that is free from selfish intentions, lust,
and earthly desires.
AN ALLEGORY? PROFANITY?
Precisely for this reason, many commentators have
interpreted Nezami’s Laili and Majnun as a Sufi (Islamic mystical)
allegorical narrative, where the lover seeks ultimate union with, as well as
annihilation in, the Beloved (i.e. the Divine or the Truth). Majnun’s harsh
life in the desert, then, has been compared to the ascetic life of Muslim mystics
who rejected earthly pleasures and renounced worldly affinities.
Accordingly, his excessive devotion to Layla represents his
unique and steadfast devotion to Ideal Love, the Divine—which explains why, in
spite of his incessant yearning for his beloved Layla, he is incapable of
physical intimacy with her. It is with the idealized image of the beloved—in
the person of Layla—that Majnun is infatuated. When Layla falls mortally ill
and passes away, Majnun, too, loses his one and only purpose in life, his sole
means towards the realization of True Love. When he learns about the death of
his beloved, he at once seeks her gravesite. Weeping and moaning, he presses
himself against her gravestone and breaths his final gasps, and dies. The
lovers ultimately unite, but only in death.
Nezami’s romance of Laili and Majnun is a
multilayered, complex text, which makes it
open to contrasting, and perhaps contradictory, readings. While a Sufi
(mystical) reading of it is plausible, one can justifiably read it as a conventional,
yet immensely rich and enthralling, love-story. Despite the abundance of
mystical motifs and metaphors, the profane dimensions of the poem cannot be
overlooked.
Nezami’s unparalleled narrative proved considerably influential during the subsequent centuries. While allusions and references to Layla and Majnun can be readily found in divans (collections) of poets before Nezami’s time, his version led several noted poets, in a host of languages, to compose original texts modeled after Nezami’s work. In Persian alone, one should mention Amir Khusraw Dehlawi’s masterpiece Majnun and Laili (completed c. 1299) and ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s Laili and Majnun (composed c. 1485). Other notable renderings of the story are by Maktabi Shirazi, Hatefi, and, more notably, Fuzuli. The latter became considerably influential in Ottoman Turkey.
*This studied is by Wali Ahmadi, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Ahmadi focuses on the musical history of Layla and Majnun, an Arabian love story which will come to life in Ann Arbor with a new production from Mark Morris Dance Group and The Silk Road Ensemble on October 13-15, 2017.
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