Study guide

Laili and Majnun

by Nizami Ganjavi

Overview

Original title: Layli u Majnun (Persian), the third of the five narrative poems of Nizami's Khamsa ('Quintet')
Author: Nizami Ganjavi (Ilyas ibn Yusuf), c. 1141–c. 1209, of Ganja in the Caucasus (now in Azerbaijan); he wrote in Persian
Completed: 584 AH, 1188 CE, at the request of the Shirvanshah Akhsitan; Nizami says that he wrote it in about four months
Form: Masnavi: a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets, in a short form of the hazaj metre; more than four thousand couplets in modern editions
Sources: Arabic anecdotes and poems about Qays ibn al-Mulawwah of the Banu 'Amir, the 'madman of Layla', collected in works such as the Kitab al-Aghani of Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (10th century)
Genre: Romance (dastan) of tragic love, read by many as a poem of mystical love
This translation: James Atkinson, Laili and Majnun (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1836), a free and much abridged rendering in English rhymed verse, in nineteen numbered divisions
References: In this guide 'Atk. IV.247' means Atkinson's division IV, line 247, counting the lines of the text on this site (Atkinson's printed line numbers are not reproduced)
Names in Atkinson: Kais (Qays), Laili (Layla), Syd Omri (Majnun's father, 'the Sayyid of the 'Amir'), Ibn Salim (Nizami's Ibn Salam), Noufal (Nawfal), Selim, Zyd (Zayd)
Later versions: Amir Khusraw (1299), Jami (1484), Navoi in Chaghatay Turkish (1484), Fuzuli in Turkish (c. 1535), Hatifi and many others; the opera Leyli and Majnun by Uzeyir Hajibeyov (Baku, 1908)

Context

The story of Majnun began in Arabia. Collections of poems and anecdotes from the eighth to the tenth centuries tell of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah of the Banu 'Amir, a young man of Najd in the Umayyad period (the later seventh century), who loved his kinswoman Layla, was refused her hand because he had proclaimed his love in verse, and went mad, living in the desert among wild animals and reciting poems about her until he died. He became known as Majnun Layla, 'the one possessed (by the jinn) for Layla'. Already the medieval authorities doubted whether he had existed; the poems attributed to him may be the work of many authors. The story belongs to the tradition of 'udhri love, the chaste and fatal love associated with the tribe of 'Udhra, whose lovers were said to die of their passion (Khairallah 1980) (Giffen 1971) (Vadet 1968).

Nizami Ganjavi, one of the great poets of Persian literature, lived in Ganja in the Caucasus in the later twelfth century and spent most of his life there rather than at court. His five long narrative poems, later grouped as the Khamsa or 'Quintet', are a didactic poem (Makhzan al-asrar, 'The Treasury of Mysteries'), three romances (Khusraw u Shirin, Layli u Majnun and Haft Paykar, 'The Seven Beauties') and a poem on Alexander the Great (Iskandarnama). He wrote Layli u Majnun in 1188 at the request of Akhsitan, the Shirvanshah, who asked for the story of the Arab lovers; Nizami says he hesitated because the bare deserts of Arabia offered so little for poetic ornament, but was persuaded (Rypka 1968) (Talattof 2000).

Nizami turned scattered Arabic anecdotes into a unified narrative with a beginning in the schoolroom and an end in paradise. He added or developed figures such as Ibn Salam, Layla's husband, and the war of Nawfal; he gave Layla a voice and an inner life; and he made the story a vehicle for reflection on love, madness, fate, worldly honour and the soul. His poem became the model for dozens of later versions in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other languages, and the subject of countless illustrated manuscripts (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Chelkowski 1975).

Among the later versions, those of Amir Khusraw of Delhi (1299), 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (1484), the Chaghatay Turkish poet 'Ali Shir Navoi (1484) and Fuzuli of Baghdad, whose Turkish Leyla vü Mecnun (c. 1535) is one of the masterpieces of Ottoman and Azerbaijani literature, are the most celebrated. Fuzuli's poem is more lyrical than Nizami's, interspersed with ghazels, and its Majnun is more clearly a mystical lover (Huri 1970) (Gibb 1904).

James Atkinson (1782–1852), a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company's service in Bengal and a scholar of Persian, published his Laili and Majnun in 1836, after an abridged Shahnameh (1832), for the Oriental Translation Fund. His version reduces Nizami's poem to nineteen divisions, omits the prefatory sections and many episodes and speeches, and renders the Persian couplets into English verse in the idiom of Byron and Moore. It was reprinted in 1894 as The Loves of Laili and Majnun. Modern readers can compare it with the prose version of Rudolf Gelpke (1966), Colin Turner's version (1997) and Dick Davis's verse translation (2020) (Atkinson 1836) (Gelpke 1966) (Turner 1997) (Davis 2020).

Plot overview

Kais, son of an Arab chief, and Laili, a girl of another tribe, fall in love at school. When their love becomes known, Laili's family takes her away; Kais goes mad with grief and wanders in the desert singing of her, so that he is called Majnun, 'the madman'. His father asks for Laili's hand and is refused, and a pilgrimage to Mecca fails to cure him: at the Kaaba Majnun declares that his love is holy.

Laili, confined at home, exchanges secret verses with Majnun. A rich young man, Ibn Salim, asks for her hand. The generous chief Noufal takes up Majnun's cause and defeats Laili's tribe in battle, but her father would rather kill his daughter than give her to a madman, and Noufal withdraws. Laili is married to Ibn Salim against her will and refuses him.

Majnun lives in the desert among wild beasts, who make him their king. He frees gazelles because their eyes are like Laili's; his father and mother come to beg him to return home, and die of grief when he will not. Laili and Majnun exchange letters, and once she arranges a meeting in a palm grove but does not dare to see him; he sings to her and flees.

When Ibn Salim dies, Laili, after her period of mourning, meets Majnun at last, but he is overcome and runs away. She dies of grief, asking that he be allowed to weep at her grave. Majnun dies on her tomb, guarded by his beasts, and is buried beside her. A friend, Zyd, sees them in a dream enthroned together in paradise.

Part by part

Part 1: Invocation to the Saki

1–76

Summary

The poem opens with the narrator calling on the Saki, the cupbearer, to bring wine. Wine is praised as the source of the poet's courage and song, a lamp on life's road and a key to joy; it raises the drinker to the glory of the legendary Persian kings Jamshid and Kai-Kobad.

Between the calls for the cup the speaker turns to darker matters. He has no ancestry to boast of, since all that man inherits from Adam is a troubled spirit; human life is full of guilt and betrayal. He warns against seeking the favour of kings, whose smiles attract and burn like a flame that destroys the moth. The section ends with the minstrel asking to wash the dust of sorrow from his heart.

Analysis

This prelude is Atkinson's threshold to the story, not Nizami's. Nizami's poem opens with long prefatory sections in praise of God and the Prophet, on the commission from his patron and on the poet's own art; Atkinson omits these and begins instead with a convivial address to the cupbearer, a convention of Persian poetry that English readers of the 1830s already associated with Hafiz. The effect is to frame the tragedy as a minstrel's performance at a feast (Atkinson 1836).

The wine of the opening is ambiguous in the way Persian wine usually is: it can be read as literal drink or as the intoxication of love and of the spirit. The warning against the courts of kings also has a point in Nizami's own career, for he lived at a distance from the courts that commissioned his work and repeatedly reflects on the dangers of patronage (Meisami 1987). The moth and the flame, introduced here, will return as an image of the lover destroyed by what he desires.

— No ancestors have I to boast; The trace of my descent is lost. From Adam what do I inherit? What but a sad and troubled spirit?

Atk. I.21–24

The minstrel presents himself as an heir only of human sorrow, preparing for a story in which lineage and tribal honour prove powerless.

The moth the taper's radiance tries, But 'midst the flame in torment dies:

Atk. I.55–56

The moth that flies into the candle is one of the commonest figures of Persian love poetry; here it is applied to ambition at court before it is applied to love.

Read the text

Part 2: Kais and Laili at School

1–100

Summary

Kais, the gifted son of an Arab chief, studies at a school where the sheikhs of several tribes send their children. Among the pupils is a girl of another tribe, as beautiful as the moon, with dark eyes and black hair; her name is Laili. One glance is enough to unsettle Kais, and soon the feeling is shared.

While the other children study, the two read each other's looks and write love poems to each other. They hope to keep their love secret, but everyone sees it, for love cannot disguise itself. When they are separated, Kais's passion grows; he wanders the streets in distraction, weeping, and at last goes out bare-headed and barefoot into the desert. At night he makes his way to Laili's house and kisses its door.

Analysis

The schoolroom setting is Nizami's elaboration of the Arabic legend, which tells of Qays and Layla as young people of the tribe of 'Amir who first met while herding their families' animals (Khairallah 1980) (Seyed-Gohrab 2003). A school makes the lovers' first bond an exchange of words and verses: the love is literary from the start, and the poetry that Kais will pour out in the desert has its origin in the ghazels written in class.

The section turns quickly from mutual love to public exposure. The gossip of the community, not any act of the lovers, begins the tragedy, since in this world a girl's reputation is her family's honour. Kais's departure into the desert also introduces the poem's central opposition between the settled world of houses, schools and tribes and the open wilderness where he can speak his love without restraint.

And, while the rest were poring o'er their books, They pensive mused, and read each other's looks: While other schoolmates for distinction strove, And thought of fame, they only thought of love:

Atk. II.29–32

The couplets set learning against love, and fame against devotion: the lovers 'read' each other in place of their books.

And, maddened with excessive grief, In the lone desert sought relief.

Atk. II.87–88

The first flight into the desert, which becomes Kais's home for the rest of the poem.

Read the text

Part 3: Laili's Tribe Departs

1–78

Summary

Exhausted by grief, Kais seeks comfort among the few friends who remain faithful to him, but nothing helps. He returns to the place where Laili lived, only to find it empty: her family has moved her away to the mountains of Najd. He calls her name a thousand times, and only the echo answers.

He follows her to the mountains and searches the palm groves, still calling, until the rocks repeat his lament. In the morning he addresses the breeze and asks it to carry his message to Laili: her image is always before him, her lips are sweeter than sugar, her beauty is like the sun, and she seems too pure to remain on earth.

Analysis

Two classical motifs of Arabic love poetry shape this section. The lover's visit to the deserted encampment recalls the opening of the pre-Islamic ode, in which the poet weeps over the traces of the beloved's departed tribe; and the message entrusted to the morning breeze is a favourite device of Persian lyric. Nizami's romance is built from such lyrical moments set into a narrative frame (Meisami 1987) (Khairallah 1980).

The echo that repeats 'Laili! Laili!' is the first sign that nature will answer Majnun as human society does not. His speech to the breeze also shows the conventions of the beloved's beauty, the mole, the ruby lips, the cypress figure, that Laili will be described in throughout. Atkinson's rhymed couplets render these images with the diction of English Romantic verse.

Echo alone to his lament replied; And Laili! Laili! rang around, As if enamour'd of that magic sound.

Atk. III.31–33

The name itself becomes the refrain of the poem: only the landscape answers Kais.

"Breeze of the morn! so fresh and sweet. Wilt thou my blooming mistress greet; And, nestling in her glossy hair, My tenderest thoughts, my love, declare?

Atk. III.42–45

The breeze as messenger between separated lovers is a convention of Persian poetry; it will return when Majnun claims to live on the breeze from Laili's quarter.

Read the text

Part 4: The Failed Suit and the Pilgrimage

1–258

Summary

Now called Majnun, the madman, the youth wanders singing his love. His father, Syd Omri, gives him sober advice, but love has closed his ears. The women of the household tell the father that only marriage to Laili will cure his son, and he rides with his followers to Laili's tribe to ask for her hand. His tone is proud: he offers to buy the girl like a merchant's goods.

Laili's father answers smoothly but firmly. Marriage depends on Heaven; madness is no sin, but no one would link his family to a madman; let the son's reason be restored first. Humiliated, Syd Omri returns home. Charms and philtres fail, and the family's offer of another, nobler bride drives Majnun to tear his clothes and flee to the wilderness, where he is found exhausted and brought home.

As a last hope the father takes him on pilgrimage to Mecca. At the Kaaba the old man prays that his son be freed from love. Majnun smiles and replies that his love is holy and indestructible: an earthly object kindled it, but its inspiration came from Heaven. The father returns home in despair.

Analysis

The negotiation shows the social logic of the tragedy. The love of Kais and Laili is not forbidden by any law; it is ruined by honour. Once Kais has made his passion public in songs, a marriage would confirm the scandal, and the refusal of Laili's father is reasonable by the standards of his world. The Arabic sources already present the lover's poetry as the cause of his loss (Khairallah 1980) (Giffen 1971).

The scene at the Kaaba is one of the most famous in Nizami. In the Persian, Majnun clings to the Kaaba and asks God not to cure him but to increase his love; Atkinson keeps the paradox in a gentler form, a declaration that the love is pure. The passage is the principal ground for mystical readings of the poem, in which human love becomes a stage on the way to divine love (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Davis 2020).

The words of Laili's father, 'Madness is neither sin nor crime', also matter. Medieval Islamic society did not simply condemn the majnun, the person possessed by the jinn; such a figure could be pitied, tolerated, or regarded as touched by the divine (Dols 1992).

Madness is neither sin nor crime, we know, But who'd be link'd to madness or a foe Thy son is mad— his senses first restore;

Atk. IV.107–109

Laili's father refuses the suit on grounds of honour, not hostility; the line about madness echoes medieval attitudes to the majnun.

But Majnun's love was not of earth, Glowing with heavenly truth for ever; An earthly object raised the flame, But 'twas from Heaven the inspiration came.

Atk. IV.247–250

Atkinson's version of the Kaaba scene: the earthly beloved kindles a love whose source is divine.

Read the text

Part 5: Majnun among the Beasts and the Cypress

1–208

Summary

Laili's kinsmen complain to their chief of a frantic youth who wanders near their camp singing love songs that everyone repeats, to the shame of the tribe. The chief threatens to kill him. Warned in time, Syd Omri sends men to find his son; they hear only wild beasts, but find Majnun safe beside a spring, for the tigers, wolves and hyenas have left him untouched.

Brought home, Majnun asks his father's pardon. Syd Omri answers with a long sermon of practical wisdom: be patient, seek wealth, keep company with the prosperous, and do not let a woman make your heart her sport. Majnun replies that his state is not his choice but God's decree, and tells a fable of a partridge that laughed and lost the ant it had caught, to explain why he cannot laugh.

A few days later he breaks out again, chained and in a purple sash, and wanders singing until he reaches a garden where a gardener is about to cut down a cypress. He begs him to spare the tree, which has Laili's shape. The gardener drops his axe in shame.

Analysis

This section introduces two lasting features of Majnun's life in the desert: the beasts that do not harm him, and his habit of seeing Laili in everything. His father's speech is a set piece of worldly counsel in the manner of Persian wisdom literature, and Majnun's reply turns it upside down: what the father calls weakness of will he calls destiny. The question of whether the lover chooses his suffering is one the poem never settles (Seyed-Gohrab 2003).

The cypress is the conventional image of the beloved's tall, straight figure. Majnun treats the metaphor as literal, and his plea to the gardener is both a madman's confusion and a lover's piety: anything that resembles Laili shares in her sanctity. The episode anticipates the later scene with the gazelle, where the same logic leads him to free an animal because it has her eyes.

Tiger and ravenous wolf pass'd by him, The fell hyena came not nigh him;

Atk. V.40–41

The beasts' respect for Majnun is the first hint of the wild kingdom he will rule later.

I sought not, I, misfortune — but it came — I sought not fire, yet is my heart all flame:

Atk. V.137–138

Majnun's answer to his father: love is a fate he suffers, not a choice.

And why? Look there, and be forewarn'd by me, 'Tis Laili's form, all grace and majesty;

Atk. V.199–200

In the cypress Majnun sees Laili's figure; the conventional comparison becomes a reason to save the tree.

Read the text

Part 6: Laili's Secret Grief

1–82

Summary

The narrative turns to Laili. Her beauty is described in the conventional images of Persian poetry, but behind it lies a hidden grief, for she has no one to share her sorrow. She climbs to the terrace each day to look for Majnun in the distance, smiling in public while absence burns within.

Below the harem walls she hears young and old reciting Majnun's songs, and they console her. Laili, who is as eloquent as she is beautiful, writes her own verses of love and throws them from the rampart to a passing stranger, who carries them to Majnun. A secret exchange of letters and tokens begins between them.

Analysis

Laili is the poem's other great sufferer, and her suffering is defined by enclosure, as his is by wandering. He may cry out in the desert; she must keep the fire of absence hidden, 'light nor smoke' betraying it. Scholars have stressed that Nizami gives Layla a voice and an inner life largely absent from the Arabic anecdotes, where she is chiefly the object of Qays's poems (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Talattof 2000).

The circulation of Majnun's songs is significant. His verses spread through the tribes and come back to Laili through other people's mouths, so that poetry is the only bridge between the lovers. Laili, too, is a poet. The exchange is the first of several letters in the poem, culminating in the pair of letters in Part XV.

The fire of absence on them prey'd, But light nor smoke that fire betray'd;

Atk. VI.35–36

Laili's love must burn invisibly; her concealment contrasts with Majnun's public lament.

Voices of young and old she heard Beneath the harem-walls reciting Her Majnun's songs; each thrilling word Her almost broken heart delighting.

Atk. VI.49–52

Majnun's poetry reaches Laili only as public property, recited by others.

Read the text

Part 7: Laili in the Grove of Palms

1–107

Summary

Spring has come, and the birds sing, though the nightingale sings mournfully like Majnun. Laili goes with her companions to a garden and then to a grove of palms more beautiful than the fabled garden of Irem. Beneath a cypress she secretly speaks to her absent lover and assures him that she is still his.

A voice interrupts her with a reproach: Majnun is tossed on the waves of despair while Laili enjoys herself in gardens. She weeps, until she realises that the voice belongs to one of her own playful attendants, who has guessed her secret. Her mother has seen it too, and laments her choice; but Laili goes on loving, believing her secret safe.

Analysis

The section is built on contrast. The reproaching voice sets Majnun and Laili against each other line by line, his suffering against her apparent pleasure, and the device states a question that readers have asked ever since: does the confined woman suffer less than the wandering man, or simply less visibly? The answer the poem gives, through Laili's tears, is that the comparison is unjust.

The garden is Laili's counterpart to Majnun's desert. It is a space of enclosed, cultivated beauty, the paradise-garden of Persian tradition, but it is also watched: her attendants and her mother see through her disguise. On the importance of gardens and plants in Nizami's imagery, see van Ruymbeke (Van Ruymbeke 2007).

But bulbuls, through the mountain-vale, Like Majnun, chant a mournful tale.

Atk. VII.14–15

The bulbul, the Persian nightingale, is the traditional lover of the rose; here it becomes Majnun's double.

O noble youth, still thou art mine, And Laili, Laili still is thine!"

Atk. VII.71–72

Laili's private vow, spoken where she believes no one hears.

Read the text

Part 8: The Suit of Ibn Salim

1–34

Summary

On the same day in the Grove of Palms, a splendid young man of noble birth, Ibn Salim, rides past with his followers and sees Laili. He falls in love at once, asks her parents for her hand, and scatters gold to win them.

Laili's parents consent, but ask that the wedding be delayed, since she is still young, 'the sweet pomegranate still was green'. Ibn Salim accepts the promise and departs.

Analysis

This short section introduces the rival, whom Nizami calls Ibn Salam; Atkinson spells the name in more than one way (Ibn Salim here, Ibn SalAm in Part XI in the text as printed). He is not a villain. He is rich, noble and in love, everything Laili's family could want, and he obtains by wealth and status what Majnun could never obtain by poetry.

Atkinson's version is abrupt here. The marriage is agreed in a few lines, and the delay requested by the parents creates a pause during which Noufal's war will take place.

In her no ripen'd bloom was seen, The sweet pomegranate still was green;

Atk. VIII.27–28

The parents ask for delay on account of Laili's youth; the fruit image belongs to the poem's language of gardens.

Read the text

Part 9: Noufal's War

1–270

Summary

In the desert Majnun is found by Noufal, a generous Arab chief famed for his valour, who has been out hunting deer and finds instead a 'human shade'. Noufal takes him home, and for a time kindness works: Majnun eats, dresses, drinks and laughs, though he never stops repeating Laili's name. Friendship, however, cannot fill the place of love, and Majnun tells his host that he will die unless Laili is given to him.

Noufal resolves to win her by force. He leads a band of warriors to the camp of Laili's tribe and demands the bride; her father refuses, and battle follows. In the first day's fighting Majnun appears among the combatants and cries out, 'Why combat thus when all are on my side?' On the second day, with reinforcements, Noufal is victorious.

The elders of the defeated tribe offer him the girl. Laili's father declares that he will obey any command, even to burn or behead his own daughter, but he will never give her to a madman and disgrace his tribe. Noufal relents and withdraws. Majnun reproaches him bitterly for letting the gazelle escape, and returns to the desert.

Analysis

The war shows the limits of heroic action in this poem. Noufal is the generous warrior of Arabic tradition, but his sword can win a battle and still achieve nothing, because the obstacle is not military but moral: the honour of Laili's father. The bloodshed is described in the grand manner of Persian epic, with arrows like birds drinking blood, and then judged futile: 'in vain / Blood has bedew'd this thirsty plain'.

Majnun's behaviour in the battle is the section's sharpest touch. He cannot take sides, because his love embraces Laili's tribe as well as his own, and he is accused of disloyalty by his allies. The madman's indifference to factions has been read both as comic and as a sign of a love that transcends worldly divisions (Seyed-Gohrab 2003).

The father's speech also reveals an ethnic tension: he has been taunted as 'Persian' and insists that he is an Arab. The detail is a reminder that the story is Arab, retold by a Persian poet for a Persian-speaking court in the Caucasus.

Game — but what game? — alas! a human shade, So light it scarcely touch'd the ground.

Atk. IX.35–36

The hunter finds a man where he sought a deer, the first of the poem's many identifications of Majnun with the creatures of the wild.

For friendship leaves a vacuum still, Which love, and love alone, can fill:

Atk. IX.89–90

Noufal's kindness revives Majnun only for a time; the poem places love above friendship.

Why combat thus when all are on my side?

Atk. IX.151

In battle Majnun cannot treat Laili's people as enemies.

Read the text

Part 10: The Gazelles in the Snare

1–68

Summary

The minstrel resumes his tale. Like a caged bird, Majnun escapes from Noufal's household and rides into the wilderness. He comes upon a hunter about to cut the throat of a deer caught in his net. Majnun begs him to spare it: it is a sin to shed a gazelle's blood, and its large black eyes are like Laili's.

The hunter answers that the game is his by right. Majnun dismounts and gives him his horse in exchange, and the hunter rides off laughing. Majnun gazes at the freed animal and sees Laili's eyes in it, but the gazelles bound away, and he spends the night alone and despairing in a cave.

Analysis

The gazelle is the commonest image of the beloved in Arabic and Persian poetry, and this episode, one of the best known in the story, turns it into an act. Majnun pays for the animal's freedom because it resembles Laili, just as he saved the cypress; the image of love becomes an ethic of compassion for living things. The musk-pod, for which the musk-deer is hunted, is compared to beauty, always the prey of power (Seyed-Gohrab 2003).

The episode also marks a turning point in Majnun's life. He gives up his horse, the sign of his status as an Arab chief's son, and the vanishing of the gazelles leaves him alone at nightfall. From now on he belongs to the wilderness.

Which clouds in death that large black eye. Beaming like Laili's, lovingly.

Atk. X.35–36

The gazelle's eye, a stock image for the beloved's eye, is the reason Majnun spares the animal.

Majnun, delighted, view'd his purchased prize, And in the gazelle's sees his Laili's eyes;

Atk. X.57–58

The resemblance comforts him for a moment before the animals flee.

Read the text

Part 11: Laili's Marriage

1–128

Summary

Laili's defeated father returns home, blaming his loss on magic. Laili hears him decide her fate. Meanwhile the fame of her beauty brings many suitors, and Ibn Salim returns with magnificent gifts, presented by his friends as a lion of Yemen, rich and brave. Laili's father accepts him at once, 'flung his own offspring in the dragon's mouth'.

The wedding is celebrated with drums, pipes and dancing, while Laili sits apart weeping, loving Majnun alone. When the bridegroom comes to take her, she meets him with hatred and swears that she will never be his: it is her father's will, not hers, and she would rather die by his sword. Ibn Salim realises that his hopes are vain.

Analysis

The marriage is the central reversal of the plot, and it is told from Laili's side. The poem makes clear that she has no part in the decision; the comparison of her father to a man who throws his child to a dragon is the narrator's judgement on the match. Her defiance on the wedding day is the boldest act she is allowed. In Nizami's poem she refuses Ibn Salam her bed and the marriage is never consummated, a point essential to her later claim to be Majnun's 'still' (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Davis 2020).

Atkinson's diction, with its 'sweet Narcissus' and 'fragile crystal', keeps to the conventional language of beauty even at this moment, but the content is harsh. A wedding feast in which the bride is the only mourner is a telling image of the gap between public ceremony and private feeling.

And to be joined, in a moment's breath, To another! — Death, and worse than death!

Atk. XI.97–98

Laili's view of the marriage: union with anyone but Majnun is a kind of death.

"Hop'st thou I ever shall be thine? It is my fathers will, not mine!

Atk. XI.115–116

Laili's refusal of Ibn Salim on the wedding day.

Read the text

Part 12: The Traveller's Slander

1–162

Summary

Majnun hears of the marriage and grows wilder. Overcome by a perfume he thinks comes from Laili, he falls senseless under a palm. A passing traveller wakes him roughly and tells him that Laili has forgotten him in her husband's arms, adding a long tirade on the falseness of women.

Majnun dashes his head on the ground until it bleeds. The narrator reflects that grief produces madness as the earth produces herbs, and that Heaven forgives what frenzy does. Majnun laments the rose that the gardener sold for gold. The traveller, seeing the harm he has done, begs forgiveness and admits that Laili is still true, faithful a year after her wedding. Majnun nevertheless reproaches her absent figure for broken vows, and dedicates his 'martyr-life' to her.

Analysis

The traveller's speech is a catalogue of misogynist commonplaces, and the poem places it carefully: it is spoken by a stranger who withdraws it, and it is refuted by everything we know of Laili. Even so, Majnun's last speech repeats the accusation, showing how jealousy survives the knowledge that it is unfounded.

The narrator's comment that 'Love sanctifies the erring thought' is a key to the poem's moral attitude. Madness born of love is excused and even sanctified; the theme connects with the medieval Islamic tradition of the 'wise fool' whose disorder hides a higher truth (Dols 1992). The word 'martyr' at the end of the section anticipates the tradition, already in the Arabic sources, that those who die of chaste love are martyrs (Giffen 1971).

Love sanctifies the erring thought, And Heaven forgives the deed by frenzy wrought.

Atk. XII.75–76

The narrator's defence of the love-mad: what frenzy does is forgiven.

'Tis not in gold to purchase love, Above all wealth, all price above;

Atk. XII.105–106

Majnun condemns the 'gardener' who sold the rose, that is, Laili's father.

Read the text

Part 13: The Father's Last Visit

1–160

Summary

Syd Omri mourns his son like Jacob mourning Joseph. Old as he is, he searches the wilderness until a herdsman leads him to a cave like a grave, where a serpent plays harmlessly around Majnun's neck among scattered bones. At first his son does not know him; then they embrace.

The father pleads with him to come home and take his place as chief before his father dies, so that the family's house and goods are not lost to strangers. Majnun wishes he could obey, but he is the slave of love: the world has been swallowed up, and he sees nothing but Laili. Syd Omri blesses him and goes home, where he dies soon afterwards.

When a pilgrim brings the news, Majnun goes to his father's grave, throws its dust over his head, and is seized with remorse and fever. Too late, he understands the worth of the father's care that he scorned.

Analysis

This is one of the most moving sections of the poem and a necessary counterweight to the celebration of love. Majnun's devotion to Laili has a cost, paid by others: the father who has spent his life on him dies without an heir to his house. The comparison with Jacob and Joseph sets a scriptural pattern of paternal grief against the lover's single-minded passion.

Majnun's reply shows that he understands what is asked of him and cannot do it. The poem refuses an easy choice between the father's world of duty, lineage and property and the lover's world of absolute devotion; Majnun's remorse at the grave shows that both are real. Commentators who read the poem mystically see in this renunciation the abandonment of worldly ties that the spiritual path demands; others stress its human tragedy (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Talattof 2000).

He sees a serpent winding round his neck, Playful, not destined to destroy:

Atk. XIII.31–32

Even the serpent does not harm Majnun, a sign of his strange peace with the wild.

To me the world is swallow'd up— I see Nothing but Laili — all is lost to me,

Atk. XIII.99–100

Majnun's answer to his father's plea: love has replaced the world.

Read the text

Part 14: The King of the Beasts

1–108

Summary

Majnun leaves his father's tomb and returns to the wilderness, barefoot and fearless. The wild animals gather round him as their king: tigers, wolves and panthers lick the ground before him, lions and fawns meet in peace, vultures and eagles shade him with their wings. He sleeps on a lion's mane, like Solomon ruling the creatures. He loves especially a young fawn, which he kisses and feeds, thinking of Laili.

The narrator illustrates the gratitude of beasts with a story. A tyrannical king kept a den of man-eating dogs for his enemies. One wise courtier, fearing he would one day be thrown to them, secretly fed the dogs for years. When the king condemned him, the dogs fawned on him instead of tearing him apart. The courtier told the king that a dog repays a bone, while he had repaid long service with death; the king repented.

Analysis

The image of Majnun among the beasts is the most frequently illustrated scene of the poem in Persian miniature painting, where he sits emaciated in the desert ringed by animals (Chelkowski 1975). It reverses the human world: society has rejected him, but the wild creatures make him their king, and natural enemies live in peace around him. The comparison with Solomon, who in Islamic tradition commanded animals and jinn, gives the scene a prophetic aura.

The fable of the dogs, an inset story typical of Nizami's method, draws a moral from the scene: kindness tames even ferocity, and animals can be more grateful than kings. It is also a muted reproach of human society, which has shown Majnun less understanding than the beasts show him.

Like Suliman, o'er all extends his reign; His pillow is the lion's shaggy mane;

Atk. XIV.21–22

Majnun as a new Solomon, king of the beasts.

A dog has feeling — thou hast none— A dog is thankful for a bone;

Atk. XIV.103–104

The courtier's rebuke to the tyrant: animals are better than ungrateful men.

Read the text

Part 15: The Letters, Selim and the Hermit's Tale

1–256

Summary

A horseman comes to Majnun with a message. He has seen Laili weeping; she told him she was madder than Majnun, begged him to find her lover, fainted when he sang Majnun's songs, and gave him a letter. Majnun takes it trembling. Laili begins by praising God, who gave her a love that time defies; she is a wife against her will but still his, as the moon is to the sun.

Majnun writes his reply with the messenger's pen. He calls Laili's beauty his Kaaba, reproaches her for being 'bought and sold', then checks himself, and ends by asking whether they will not both be blessed in heaven.

A generous chieftain, Selim, who has often sent Majnun food and clothes, visits him among his beasts. Majnun refuses the robes and the banquet, which he gives to the animals, saying he lives on the morning breeze from Laili's quarter, on gums and grass. He tells the tale of a hermit who lived on grass and told a scornful courtier that he did not know its sweetness; the king who heard him fell at the hermit's feet.

Analysis

The exchange of letters, in Nizami two formal epistles opening with praise of God, is the emotional centre of this part of the poem. Each lover writes in the elevated style of Persian epistolary convention, and each mixes devotion with reproach. Laili's description of her lover as one whose love is 'an emanation from above' and Majnun's 'Thy beauty is my Kaba shrine' carry the poem's interweaving of erotic and religious language a step further (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Bürgel 1988).

The messenger's portrait of Laili uses letters of the Arabic alphabet: her curls are like the letter jim, her figure like alif, her mouth like mim. This is a standard Persian conceit, which Atkinson preserves with its transliterated names.

Selim's visit and the hermit's tale show Majnun's life as a kind of asceticism. Like the Sufi or the zahid (ascetic), he renounces clothing, food and wealth; his refusal to kill even birds aligns him with the hermit who lives on grass. Whether this is holiness or self-destruction is the question the poem leaves open (Dols 1992).

Her ringlets twisted like the graceful Jim, Her shape an Alif, and her mouth a Mim;

Atk. XV.19–20

The beloved described through letters of the Arabic alphabet, a convention of Persian poetry.

Though far from thee — a wife against my will, I am thine own affianced partner still:

Atk. XV.101–102

Laili's letter: her marriage is a legal fact, but her faith is unchanged.

Thy beauty is my Kaba shrine, The arc of heaven, for ever mine;

Atk. XV.135–136

Majnun's letter turns the beloved into his place of worship.

Read the text

Part 16: The Mother's Plea

1–74

Summary

In a brief return of reason Majnun asks after his mother, and Selim brings him to her. She weeps over his wasted body, kisses him and begs him to come home, reminding him that birds return to their nests at night and that she watched over his cradle.

The darkness returns. Majnun replies that there is no hope for him: his soul is a caged bird, and he would rather live among beasts than in a house where human care only increases his misery. He kisses her feet and runs back to the mountains. Soon afterwards she dies. When Selim brings the news, Majnun weeps tears of blood at her grave, then returns to his solitude, indifferent to the wealth he has inherited.

Analysis

The mother's plea repeats the father's in a softer key and with the same outcome. The image of the nest sets the home against the desert once more; Majnun's reply turns the image round, so that the home becomes the cage. The death of both parents completes his separation from family and tribe.

The section is brief in Atkinson, but its place in the sequence is significant: the lover who renounces everything for love is left as the 'sole heir' of an estate he does not want. Inheritance, the concern of the father, means nothing to him.

Thy nest; — and birds, though distant in their flight, Always return to their own nests at night.

Atk. XVI.25–26

The mother's image of home.

Oh, better will it be for me to stray 'Mid mountain-glens, and herd with beasts of prey,

Atk. XVI.43–44

Majnun chooses the beasts over the household.

Read the text

Part 17: The Meeting in the Palm Grove

1–195

Summary

Laili, kept a prisoner at home, slips out one dark night to the gate and meets a holy old man who helps the distressed. She asks him to find Majnun and arrange a meeting, giving him a jewel from her ear; Majnun is to sing his verses beneath her window as a signal.

After a long search the old man finds Majnun among his beasts and leads him to the Grove of Palms; the animals withdraw like a retinue. But Laili changes her mind: she is married, and must not risk her honour; let him sing, and she will listen. Majnun, smelling her perfume on the air, sings a long song of love and longing, ending with a cry for wine to keep sad reality away. Then he springs up and rushes off, and Laili goes home in sorrow.

Analysis

The lovers come within reach of each other and do not meet. Laili's refusal is not coldness but a choice of honour and fidelity over desire, and the poem treats her decision with sympathy: 'woman's mind' may seem to change 'without the power to change'. The distance between them is preserved precisely when it could be closed, and the medium that crosses it is again song.

Majnun's song gathers the paradoxes of his love. Grief has become his companion; grief and Laili 'seem of each other born'; they are two bodies with one heart. Some scholars see here the logic of 'udhri love, which feeds on separation and would be destroyed by possession (Khairallah 1980) (Giffen 1971). The closing call for wine echoes the opening invocation of the Saki.

The lamp thus lit, Love's temple to illume, Will not enlighten, but the heart consume;

Atk. XVII.108–109

Laili's reason for refusing the meeting: their love, brought into the open, would destroy them.

Familiar to the pangs which scorn relief, Grief smiles upon me, and I smile on grief.

Atk. XVII.152–153

Majnun has made a companion of grief.

We are but one — two bodies, and one heart.

Atk. XVII.159

The idea of the lovers' unity, which returns at their final meeting.

Read the text

Part 18: The Youth from Baghdad

1–135

Summary

Majnun's songs are now read as far away as Baghdad, and people long to see the man whose constancy is a wonder of the world. A young man of Baghdad who has known love's pains rides out to find him and asks to live with him for ever.

Majnun laughs at the request: what can a man of comfort know of such a life, among beasts and stones? The youth offers food and wine and argues that everything changes; he too was once bound by love, but freed himself, for love is only the fire of youth. Majnun rejects the 'traitor-thought': he is the king of love, and his love is a flower nurtured in heaven, which cannot be uprooted. The youth stays a few days listening to his songs, then leaves.

Analysis

This episode shows Majnun becoming a legend within the poem itself. His poems circulate in the cities, and he is sought as a 'prodigy', a saint of love. Nizami is reflecting on his own material: the Majnun of the Arabic tradition was above all a poet, credited with a large body of verse, and the stories about him were transmitted with those verses (Khairallah 1980).

The young man's argument, that love is a passing fire of youth, is the voice of common sense, and Majnun's reply is a declaration of permanence. His phrase 'king of love' answers the image of the king of the beasts; his sovereignty is over a realm that is not of this world.

The very martyrdom of love.

Atk. XVIII.8

Majnun's fame as a martyr of love draws visitors to the desert.

I am myself the king of love; and now Glory in my dominion: and wouldst thou

Atk. XVIII.112–113

Majnun claims a kingship of love in reply to the visitor's worldly wisdom.

Read the text

Part 19: Ibn Salim's Death, the Lovers' Meeting and their Deaths

1–571

Summary

Laili, guarded by her husband in a tower, weeps for years. Then Ibn Salim dies of a fever. Laili mourns him outwardly as custom requires, but her tears are for Majnun. After the two years of a widow's seclusion she sends her faithful servant Zyd to bring Majnun to her. They meet but cannot speak; they stand gazing all day. Laili asks why the bulbul is silent before the rose, and Majnun answers that they are two bodies with one heart, two tapers with one flame. Then a frenzy seizes him; he tears his garment and runs off into the desert with his beasts.

Having seen his madness, Laili loses all hope. In autumn she falls ill, and before she dies she asks her mother to let Majnun weep at her grave and to tell him that she died for him. Her mother dies of grief over her body. Zyd brings the news to Majnun, who falls senseless, then runs to her tomb, embraces the stone and mourns her as a rose blighted by the wind. He wanders away and comes back, and Selim's last attempt to comfort him fails. Majnun prays to God to set him free, lays his head on the tomb and dies.

His beasts guard his body for a year, so that no one dares approach. At last his bones are found, washed, and buried beside Laili. Zyd dreams of the lovers enthroned in a paradise garden, sharing a cup, and a voice tells him that they are reaping in heaven the reward denied them on earth. The narrator reflects on the transience of the world and ends by calling the Saki to fill the cup to the love that lives for ever.

Analysis

The last section is the longest in Atkinson's version and gathers many separate episodes of Nizami's ending. The lovers' final meeting is the poem's most debated moment: when union is at last possible, Majnun flees. Readers have seen in this either a failure of nerve, the triumph of madness, or the logic of a love that has become independent of its earthly object. The narrator's own comment, that his love was 'chaste and pure as heaven' and mingled with 'joys above', points to the spiritual reading (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Davis 2020).

Laili's death speech gives her a final voice and a final assertion of fidelity. Her death in autumn and the image of the plundered garden complete the poem's language of flowers. Majnun's death on the tomb, guarded by the beasts, fulfils the 'udhri ideal of the lover who dies of love, and the burial of the two in one grave is the only union the world allows (Giffen 1971).

Zyd's dream, in which the lovers sit enthroned in the garden of Irem, transforms the tragedy into a vision of reward. The closing address to the Saki brings the poem back to its opening frame and to its central ambiguity: the wine may be earthly or heavenly, and so may the love it toasts.

Speechless with love unutterable, they Stood gazing at each other all the day.

Atk. XIX.117–118

At their last meeting the lovers, whose bond has been made of words, cannot speak.

Two bodies with one heart and spirit the same; Two tapers with one pure celestial flame;

Atk. XIX.153–154

Majnun's statement of the lovers' unity, echoing his song in Part XVII.

Sever'd in life, how cruel was their doom! Ne'er to be join'd but in the silent tomb!

Atk. XIX.506–507

The shared grave as the lovers' only union on earth.

Saki! Nizami's strain is sung; The Persian poet's pearls are strung;

Atk. XIX.564–565

The closing return to the Saki frames the whole poem as a minstrel's song.

Read the text

Characters

Banu 'Amir

Kais / Majnun: The son of Syd Omri, a chief of the Arab tribe of 'Amir. He falls in love with Laili at school, and the refusal of her hand drives him to madness and life in the desert, where he becomes a poet whose songs spread across Arabia and a king among the beasts. His madness is ambiguous throughout: a disease to his family, a disgrace to Laili's tribe, and to the narrator a sign of a love that is 'not of earth'. The historical Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, if he existed, lived in the seventh century.
Syd Omri: Majnun's father, a rich and proud chief (the name renders 'the Sayyid of the 'Amir'). He asks for Laili's hand, takes his son to Mecca, and searches the desert for him; he dies of grief when Majnun will not come home to inherit his place.
Majnun's mother: She begs her son to return home 'like birds to their nests', and dies soon after his refusal.

Laili's tribe

Laili: The beloved, beautiful, eloquent and a poet herself. Confined at home, married against her will to Ibn Salim, she remains faithful to Majnun, writes to him, arranges meetings and finally dies of grief. Her sufferings are hidden where his are public; Nizami gives her an inner life and voice that the Arabic sources largely lack.
Laili's father: A chief who refuses Majnun because the youth's madness and his public songs would dishonour the tribe. Defeated by Noufal, he declares that he would rather kill his daughter than give her to a madman, and he marries her to Ibn Salim.
Laili's mother: She sees through her daughter's secret and laments it; Laili confides her last wishes to her, and she dies of grief over her daughter's body.

Rival

Ibn Salim (Ibn Salam): A noble and wealthy young man who falls in love with Laili at first sight and wins her family's consent with gifts. Laili refuses him on their wedding day; he keeps her guarded and dies of a fever, 'unloved, unpitied'.

Ally

Noufal (Nawfal): A generous Arab chief who finds Majnun while hunting, takes him home, and makes war on Laili's tribe on his behalf. He wins the battle but withdraws when Laili's father refuses to yield, and Majnun reproaches him for letting 'the gazelle slip away'.
Selim: A wealthy and charitable chieftain who brings Majnun food and clothing, takes him to his mother, brings him news of her death, and visits him for the last time at Laili's grave.

Laili's servant

Zyd (Zayd): Laili's faithful messenger, who brings Majnun to their final meeting, carries the news of her death, and dreams of the lovers in paradise.

Stranger

The traveller: A passer-by who tells Majnun that Laili has forgotten him and denounces the falseness of women, then confesses his lie and assures him of her fidelity.

Messenger

The holy old man: A hermit who helps the distressed; Laili sends him to bring Majnun to the Grove of Palms.

Visitor

The youth from Baghdad: A young man who has read Majnun's poems and wants to live with him; he argues that love passes with youth, and is answered by Majnun's claim to be 'the king of love'.

Frame

The Saki: The cupbearer addressed by the narrator at the beginning and end of Atkinson's version; the wine he brings is both convivial and symbolic.

Themes

Love as madness

The hero's name means 'possessed' or 'mad', and the poem never decides whether his madness is a disease, a disgrace or a gift. His family seeks cures from charms, physicians and pilgrimage; Laili's tribe treats him as a scandal; the narrator excuses him because 'Heaven forgives the deed by frenzy wrought'. Medieval Islamic culture offered several ways of understanding madness, from illness to possession by jinn to holy folly, and the poem uses them all (Dols 1992).

The madness also brings freedom. Majnun can say and do what the sane cannot: speak his love publicly, refuse to take sides in war, live among beasts, reject wealth and inheritance. His disorder is a refusal of the order of tribe, family and honour.

Human and divine love

The poem's religious language, the Kaaba scene, the prayers at the start of the letters, the description of Laili's beauty as Majnun's 'Kaba shrine' and the closing vision of paradise, has encouraged readers to treat Majnun's love as a figure for the soul's love of God. In Sufi literature Majnun became the type of the lover annihilated in the beloved (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Bürgel 1988).

Nizami does not, however, write an allegory. Laili is a woman, and the poem takes the social and emotional realities of the lovers' situation seriously. The poem holds the human and the spiritual together; the closing toast 'to the love that lives for ever' can be read in either sense.

Honour, family and society

What separates the lovers is not hatred but honour. Laili's father cannot give his daughter to a man whose songs have made her name public; Majnun's father wants an heir; Laili must obey her parents and later her husband, and keep a widow's seclusion. The poem portrays these obligations with sympathy and shows their cost (Meisami 1987).

The deaths of both of Majnun's parents and of Laili's mother show that the love affects whole families. The lovers' devotion is admirable but not innocent of consequences.

Separation and union

The lovers are almost always apart, and their union is achieved only in words, letters, songs and finally the grave. When they could meet, in the palm grove, Laili refuses; when they do meet, Majnun cannot speak and flees. The poem suggests that the love depends on distance: separation is its substance, not merely its obstacle (Khairallah 1980).

The lovers' unity is nevertheless asserted repeatedly: 'two bodies, and one heart', 'two tapers with one pure celestial flame'. The shared grave and the dream of paradise give this unity a final form.

Poetry and fame

Majnun is a poet, and his songs are what ruin him and what make him immortal. They spread through the tribes, are recited under Laili's walls, are read in Baghdad, and bring visitors to see 'the martyrdom of love'. Laili is also a poet. The poem reflects on the power of verse to publish what should be private, and on its capacity to outlast the lovers themselves.

Nature and the wild

The desert is Majnun's refuge from society, and its creatures become his companions and subjects. The animals' peace around him recalls the paradise in which natural enemies lie together, and his compassion for the gazelle and the deer extends love beyond the human. Nizami's world is thick with plants and gardens too, and Laili is constantly described through flowers, trees and fruit (Van Ruymbeke 2007).

Fate and the transience of the world

Majnun claims that his love is not his choice but 'Fate's decree', and Laili speaks of being 'by destiny thus sundered'. The narrator repeatedly turns from the story to reflect on the treachery of the world, the passing of kings, and the certainty of death, a habit of Persian narrative poetry that gives the romance the weight of a meditation on mortality.

Motifs

The name 'Laili'

Majnun repeats the name so constantly that the rocks and forests echo it. The name becomes a kind of prayer, and its repetition marks both obsession and devotion.

Messengers

The breeze, strangers, a horseman, a hermit and Zyd carry words between the lovers. Almost all their contact is mediated, which keeps them apart while connecting them.

Visits to the desert

Father, mother, Noufal, Selim, the traveller and the youth from Baghdad all come to Majnun in the wilderness and try to bring him back. Each visit ends in the same way, with Majnun returning to his solitude, and the repetition gives the poem its rhythm.

Inset tales

Majnun and the narrator tell short fables: the partridge and the ant, the king and the dogs, the king and the hermit. In the manner of Persian narrative poetry they draw moral lessons from the story.

Wine and the Saki

The poem begins and ends with calls to the cupbearer, and wine appears in Majnun's songs and Noufal's feasts. In Persian poetry wine can mean pleasure, love or mystical intoxication.

Symbols

The gazelle

The traditional image of the beloved, with its large dark eyes. Majnun frees gazelles from a hunter's net and loves a fawn among his beasts because they resemble Laili.

The cypress

The tall straight tree is the image of the beloved's figure. Majnun saves a cypress from the gardener's axe, Laili sits beneath one, and at her death Zyd says that 'the cypress-tree' has been overthrown.

The rose and the bulbul

The nightingale's love for the rose is the classic Persian image of lover and beloved. Laili calls Majnun 'the bulbul' and herself 'the rose'; Majnun mourns 'the rose' sold by the gardener and blighted in the garden.

The moon

Laili is 'the moon' throughout: beautiful, distant and unattainable. In her letter she describes herself as the moon and Majnun as the sun, divided by destiny; at the end a voice names her 'that sparkling moon'.

Critical debates

Did Majnun exist?

The Arabic tradition preserves many poems and anecdotes attributed to Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, but already the early compilers recorded doubts about his existence, and reports that the poems were invented by others. Modern scholars generally regard Majnun as a literary figure who gathered round himself a body of verse and stories, rather than a recoverable historical person.

As'ad Khairallah's study treats the Majnun legend as a structured myth of love, madness and poetry, and the collections studied by Lois Giffen show how the Arab theorists of love made him an exemplary case (Khairallah 1980) (Giffen 1971) (Vadet 1968).

Mystical or human love?

Many readers, following later Persian and Turkish tradition, read the poem as an account of mystical love, in which Laili stands for the divine and Majnun's madness for the annihilation of the self. The Kaaba scene, Majnun's asceticism and the vision of paradise support this reading.

Others argue that Nizami's poem is not a Sufi allegory but a romance that takes earthly love seriously and only borrows the vocabulary of mysticism. Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab's monograph argues for a layered reading in which love, madness and mystical longing interpenetrate without being reduced to one another (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Bürgel 1988) (Talattof 2000).

What kind of madness?

Majnun's madness can be read through medieval medicine, which treated love-sickness as a disease of melancholy; through popular belief in possession by jinn; or through the religious figure of the holy fool. Michael Dols's study of madness in medieval Islamic society uses Majnun as a central example of how these frameworks coexisted (Dols 1992).

The poem itself presents competing diagnoses through different speakers, and its narrator's sympathy for the 'love-lorn soul' complicates any purely medical reading.

Nizami's transformation of the Arabic legend

Scholars debate how far Nizami reshaped his sources. He arranged the anecdotes into a continuous plot, introduced or expanded episodes, and set them in a courtly Persian framework of description and reflection. Julie Scott Meisami reads the poem in the context of medieval Persian court poetry and its ideals of love and kingship; others emphasise Nizami's moral and philosophical concerns (Meisami 1987) (Seyed-Gohrab 2003) (Rypka 1968).

His remark that the Arabian desert offered little scope for ornament has often been quoted to show his awareness of the gap between his rough source and the refined Persian romance.

Laili's voice and agency

Laili is confined, married against her will and finally dies of grief, but she also writes poetry, refuses her husband, arranges meetings and declines one for reasons of her own. Recent criticism has asked whether Nizami gives her real agency or makes her the passive image of the beloved, and how her suffering compares with Majnun's more spectacular grief (Talattof 2000) (Seyed-Gohrab 2003).

Fuzuli and the later tradition

The story was retold many times after Nizami, and scholars disagree about whether later versions are imitations or independent masterpieces. Fuzuli's Turkish Leyla vü Mecnun, with its lyrical interludes and more explicitly mystical Majnun, was praised by E. J. W. Gibb and has been translated into English by Sofi Huri, with a history of the poem by Alessio Bombaci (Gibb 1904) (Huri 1970). Jami's and Navoi's versions also reshape the story to their own theological and literary aims.

Atkinson's abridgement

Atkinson's Laili and Majnun was the first English verse version and for long the best known. It is free and heavily abridged: the preface, many episodes, and much of Nizami's reflection and rhetoric are omitted, and the Persian couplets are recast in the diction of English Romantic verse. Readers comparing it with Gelpke's prose version, Turner's version or Davis's verse translation will find many differences of detail and tone (Atkinson 1836) (Gelpke 1966) (Turner 1997) (Davis 2020).

Its value is historical as well as literary: it shows how a scholar of the 1830s, writing for readers of Byron and Moore, presented a Persian classic in English. E. G. Browne's survey of Persian literature gives the context of the later British reception (Browne 1906).

Key passages

And, while the rest were poring o'er their books, They pensive mused, and read each other's looks: While other schoolmates for distinction strove, And thought of fame, they only thought of love:

The narrator · Atk. II.29–32

The schoolroom scene sets love against learning and fame. The lovers 'read' each other as others read books, an image of a love that begins in words and writing.

But Majnun's love was not of earth, Glowing with heavenly truth for ever; An earthly object raised the flame, But 'twas from Heaven the inspiration came.

Majnun, at the Kaaba · Atk. IV.247–250

Majnun answers his father's prayer for a cure by declaring that his love is holy. The distinction between the earthly object and the heavenly inspiration is the basis of the mystical reading of the poem.

I sought not, I, misfortune — but it came — I sought not fire, yet is my heart all flame:

Majnun, to his father · Atk. V.137–138

Majnun rejects his father's advice by arguing that love is a destiny he suffers, not a choice. The question of the lover's responsibility for his madness runs through the poem.

The fire of absence on them prey'd, But light nor smoke that fire betray'd;

The narrator, of Laili · Atk. VI.35–36

Laili's suffering is as great as Majnun's but must remain invisible. The couplet defines the contrast between his public and her hidden grief.

Majnun, delighted, view'd his purchased prize, And in the gazelle's sees his Laili's eyes;

The narrator · Atk. X.57–58

Having given his horse to free the gazelles, Majnun sees Laili in the animal. The traditional image of the beloved becomes the reason for an act of compassion.

Love sanctifies the erring thought, And Heaven forgives the deed by frenzy wrought.

The narrator · Atk. XII.75–76

The narrator's comment on Majnun's self-wounding defends the madness of love as sanctified and forgiven, a key to the poem's moral sympathy.

Like Suliman, o'er all extends his reign; His pillow is the lion's shaggy mane;

The narrator · Atk. XIV.21–22

Majnun as king of the beasts, compared to Solomon, who in Islamic tradition ruled the animals. The scene was a favourite subject of Persian painters.

Though far from thee — a wife against my will, I am thine own affianced partner still:

Laili, in her letter · Atk. XV.101–102

Laili distinguishes the legal fact of her marriage from the truth of her faith. Her letter gives her a voice of her own and asserts a fidelity that the slanderous traveller denied.

Familiar to the pangs which scorn relief, Grief smiles upon me, and I smile on grief.

Majnun, singing to Laili · Atk. XVII.152–153

Majnun has made grief his companion and the very medium of his love. The chiasmus captures the paradox of a love that lives on separation.

Sever'd in life, how cruel was their doom! Ne'er to be join'd but in the silent tomb!

The narrator · Atk. XIX.506–507

The lovers are united only in the grave. Zyd's dream of their union in paradise follows immediately, turning tragedy into consolation.

Questions for study

Why do Laili's parents refuse Majnun, and is their refusal unreasonable by the standards of their world?
Consider honour, the public nature of Majnun's songs, and the words of Laili's father in Part IV and after Noufal's victory.
Is Majnun's madness presented as a disease, a disgrace or a sign of holiness?
Compare the views of his father, Laili's tribe, the narrator ('Love sanctifies the erring thought') and Majnun himself.
How does the poem contrast Laili's suffering with Majnun's?
Think about enclosure and wandering, hidden and public grief, the terrace and the desert, and the reproaching voice in Part VII.
Why does Majnun flee when he finally meets Laili after Ibn Salim's death?
Consider the earlier scene in the Grove of Palms, his songs about grief, and the narrator's comment on his love as 'chaste and pure as heaven'.
What role do the wild animals play in the poem?
Look at the beasts who spare him, the gazelles, the fawn, the fable of the dogs, and the beasts that guard his body after death.
Can the poem be read as an allegory of mystical love? What in the text supports or resists such a reading?
Weigh the Kaaba scene, the letters, Zyd's dream and the closing toast against the realistic treatment of family and marriage.
How does the poem present Majnun's relations with his parents?
Compare the father's visits and advice, the mother's plea, their deaths, and Majnun's remorse at their graves.
What is the function of the messengers and visitors who come to Majnun in the desert?
Consider Noufal, the traveller, Selim, the horseman, the hermit and the youth from Baghdad: what does each offer, and how does Majnun respond?
How does Nizami's poem transform the Arabic legend of Qays and Layla?
Think about the addition of a unified plot, the schoolroom, Ibn Salam, Laili's voice, and the frame of reflection and religious language.
What is gained and lost in Atkinson's abridged verse translation?
Consider his omission of Nizami's prefaces, his opening and closing addresses to the Saki, his Romantic diction, and his treatment of names.