Layla and Majnun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
For other uses, see Layla and Majnun (disambiguation).
"Majnun" redirects here. For places in Iran, see Majnun, Iran.

A miniature of Nizami's narrative poem. Layla and Majnun meet for the last time
before their deaths. Both have fainted and Majnun's elderly messenger attempts to
revive Layla while wild animals protect the pair from unwelcome intruders. Late
16th-century illustration.
Nizami Rug
Part of a series on
Nizami Ganjavi
The Khamsa or Panj Ganj
Maḵhzan al-asrār
Khosrow and Shirin
Layla and Majnun
Haft Peykar
Eskandar-nāma
Related topics
Akhsitan I
Toghrul III
Farhad (Persian literature)
Campaign on granting Nizami the status
of the national poet of Azerbaijan
Monuments
Nizami Mausoleum • Nizami Museum of Azerbaijani Literature • Nizami Gəncəvi (Baku
Metro) • in Ganja • in Baku • in Beijing • in Chișinău • in Rome • in Saint
Petersburg •

in Tashkent
vte
Majnun Layla (Arabic: ‫ مجنون ليلى‬Majnūn Laylā, 'Layla's Mad Lover';[1] Persian: ‫لیلی و‬
‫ مجنون‬Leyli o Majnun) is an old story of Arabic origin,[2][3] about the 7th-century
Najdi Bedouin poet Qays ibn al-Mullawah and his ladylove Layla bint Mahdi (or Layla
al-Aamiriya).[4] "The Layla-Majnun theme passed from Arabic to Persian, Turkish,
and Indian languages",[5] most famously through the narrative poem composed in
584/1188 by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, as the third part of his Khamsa.[4][6]
[7][8][a] It is a popular poem praising their love story.[9][10][11] Lord Byron
called it “the Romeo and Juliet of the East.”[12]

Qays and Layla fall in love with each other when they are young, but when they grow
up Layla’s father doesn't allow them to be together. Qays becomes obsessed with
her, and his tribe Banu 'Amir and the community gives him the epithet of Majnūn (
‫" مجنون‬crazy", lit. "possessed by Jinn"). Long before Nizami, the legend circulated
in anecdotal forms in Iranian akhbar. The early anecdotes and oral reports about
Majnun are documented in Kitab al-Aghani and Ibn Qutaybah's Al-Shi'r wa-l-Shu'ara'.
The anecdotes are mostly very short, only loosely connected, and show little or no
plot development. Nizami collected both secular and mystical sources about Majnun
and portrayed a vivid picture of the famous lovers.[13] Subsequently, many other
Persian poets imitated him and wrote their own versions of the romance.[13] Nizami
drew influence from Udhrite love poetry, which is characterized by erotic abandon
and attraction to the beloved, often by means of an unfulfillable longing.[14]

Many imitations have been contrived of Nizami's work, several of which are original
literary works in their own right, including Amir Khusrow Dehlavi's Majnun o Leyli
(completed in 1299), and Jami's version, completed in 1484, amounts to 3,860
couplets. Other notable reworkings are by Maktabi Shirazi, Hatefi (d. 1520), and
Fuzûlî (d.1556), which became popular in Ottoman Turkey and India. Sir William
Jones published Hatefi's romance in Calcutta in 1788. The popularity of the romance
following Nizami's version is also evident from the references to it in lyrical
poetry and mystical mathnavis—before the appearance of Nizami's romance, there are
just some allusions to Layla and Majnun in divans. The number and variety of
anecdotes about the lovers also increased considerably from the twelfth century
onwards. Mystics contrived many stories about Majnun to illustrate technical
mystical concepts such as fanaa (annihilation), divānagi (love-madness), self-
sacrifice, etc. Nizami's work has been translated into many languages.[15] Arabic-
language adaptations of the story include Shawqi's play The Mad Lover of Layla.[16]