The Story of Layla and Majnun

By -
The Story of Layla and Majnun, by Nizami


Layla and Majnun is one of the world's great love stories, akin to Romeo and Juliet or...Aeneas and Dido, maybe.  The story dates from around the 7th century AD, and various versions of it were floating around until Nizami, a Persian poet, collected and shaped the material into one long marrative poem in 1188.  After that, the story's popularity spread across a couple of continents and is still influential today.  The introduction in my copy speculates that the lovers may have been real people who became legendary.

Layla and Qays know each other from childhood; both are Bedouin, though belonging to different tribes.  They fall in love as children, but when they grow older and Layla's parents realize that she is already attracting boys, they keep her sequestered in the family tent.  Layla, imprisoned, must act as though all is well.  Qays, however, starts reciting poetry in public and acting like a madman, which earns him the nickname Majnun (madman).  Without his Layla, he cannot care for anything else.  Eventually he runs off into the wilderness, becoming a sort of hermit and forgetting to eat.  He cares only to compose poetry that he hopes the wind will carry to his love.

Majnun with his animals
This all kind of backfires on him, because his father goes to propose a marriage between the two lovers, and Layla's father refuses on the grounds that Majnun goes around acting crazy all the time.  If not for that, it would be fine.

So Layla gets married off to a very nice, very rich princely kind of guy, who then loves her so much that he puts up with her refusal of him.  Majnun goes back to hermiting and gathers wild animals around him, who are tamed by his gentleness and devotion to Love.   Then everybody dies.


I am clearly a grumpy old lady, because I have no patience for Majnun and his antics.  He and Layla could have been fine.  (I also have no patience for Catherine and Heathcliffe, so.)

The part I liked best was where they exchange a couple of letters, and Layla points out that Majnun is free to act however he wants, whereas she, as a woman, is confined to the role she must play.  He gets all the attention, and she mostly gets to suffer in silence.

I guess I'm not good at appreciating great romances.  But now I know the story.


Comments

  1. FaithJanuary 24, 2016 at 5:10 PM

    I never could stand Cathy and Heathcliffe either. I had only very vaguely heard of this tale, so I greatly appreciate your review! Now I know more!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more