Layla and Majnun by Nezami (Translated by Peter J. Chelkowski, further editing by Farshad Torkashvand) Commentary

 

Layla and Majnun

"Layla and Majnun" is perhaps the most popular romance in the Islamic world. Versions appear in prose, song, and poetry in almost every language within the vast area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chinese border. But because of the psychological depth and universality invested in the story, Nizami's epic still serves as the model for all others.

The poem was commissioned by Shirvanshah Akhse­tan, a Caucasian ruler proud of his Iranian origin and a benefactor of Persian culture. In the preface of "Layla and Majnun," Nizami explains that one beautiful day, while he was perusing a collection of his own poetry in his garden, a messenger from Shirvanshah arrived and presented to him a letter in the ruler's hand. De­scribing Nizami as "the universal magician of elo­quence,"' Shirvanshah asked the poet to create a romance based not on a Persian epic, but on a simple Arab folk-tale, the story of Majnun, the love-mad poet, and Layla, the sequestered beauty.

For centuries, this legend had been a popular theme of the short love sonnets and songs of the Bedouins who lived in the Arabian peninsular, and during the early days of the Muslim era, it had been absorbed and embel­lished by the Persians. Majnun is traditionally identified with a poet known as Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, who probably lived in the second half of the seventh century A. D. in the Najd desert of Arabia. One of the earlier written accounts of the Majnun story is presented in the Treatise on Poetry and Poets by Ibn Qutayba, who died in 275 A. H. / 899 A. D.² In the Anthology of Poetry, written by Ibn Dawud,³ a close contemporary of Ibn Qutayba, there are poetic passages ascribed to Majnun. In the comprehensive collection of literary records known as the Books of Songs, compiled by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani⁴ in the tenth century, there are also many poems and anecdotes attributed to Majnun. Although it is probable that there was more than one love-crazed poet called Majnun—that is, "possessed by a jinn or a genie; a madman"—in 1946 the Russian scholar Krachkovski erased most doubts as to his historical identity.⁵

Neither the arid desert setting nor the spare plot of Majnun and Layla's romance inspired Nizami's poetic vision. The story, he commented, offered "neither gardens nor royal festivities, neither streams nor wines nor happiness. In the arid sands and rugged mountains, the poetry sinks into grief."⁶ But Nizami could not refuse the royal commission; furthermore, his dearly beloved son Muhammad urged him to accept it. And so he expanded and deepened the plot and the personalities, creating from the fragmentary versions a full-scale dramatic poem.

For his romance, Nizami chose an easy meter, the short^. Hazaj mussadas which scans as follows  Hazaj means trilling of a singer, a twanging, joyful sound in which Arabic and Persian poems are often sung; mussadas means composed of six feet. Nizami found in this easy, straight, and happy meter a counterbalance to the gloom of the story and the aridity of the desert environment. He also sought to enliven the desert setting with rhapsodic descriptions of nature—its dawns, dusks, and skies filled with glittering stars. As in his other poems, he allegorized the changing seasons to. enrich its background.

"Layla and Majnun" is comprised of at least 4,000 distichs. Nizami wrote that it took "less than four months" to compose and that if he had had nothing else to do he would have finished it in an even shorter period of time.' This implies a trance-like state of writing, for it averages to at least L000 distichs or 2,000 lines per month. It probably did not include the thorough research Nizami undertook in order to develop back­ground material for the poem.

The exact number of distichs has long been a source of scholarly fascination and controversy, especially since those that are considered apocryphal alter the plot significantly. Vahid Dastgerdi's critical edition, based on thirty manuscripts copied between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, totals 4,650 distichs. Dastgerdi considers 600 of these to be spurious, added by later writers and scribes who also transposed an additional 40o distichs to cover their handiwork. R. Gelpke con­siders Dastgerdi's the only authoritative text and based his prose adaptation of "Layla and Majnun" upon it.⁸

E. G. Browne, H. Masse, and A. J. Arberry, how­ever, have translated many passages as authentic which Dastgerdi and Gelpke consider interpolations. E. E. Ber­tels, the Russian editor of the Persian text published in 1965, found 4,659 distichs valid, using the ten most famous manuscripts—the earliest dating from the four­teenth century. They are in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the British Museum, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and in collec­tions in libraries and museums in the Soviet Union. It is, of course, possible that Nizami himself rewrote the poem, making his own changes and additions. Many of the great poets who imitated Nizami included so-called spurious passages and plots, and their poetic sensibility should be respected.

Some manuscripts of "Layla and Majnun" bear the date 584 A. H. / 1188 A.D. as the year it was completed; others, 588 A. H. / 1192 A.D. ; still others, as was common in copied manuscripts, give both dates. The earlier year is supported in the text by abjad, the Arabic alphabetical system which assigns numerical values to letters. In the course of the poem, Nizami tells us that he is forty-nine years old, but as his birth year is disputed, this infor­mation does not help in setting the date of the poem.

Whatever its length and its exact date of completion, there is no doubt that Nizami used all the material, written and oral, available to him, adding, altering, and transforming as his poetic genius prompted, in order to create this tragic masterpiece. He brought together in splendid tension the sparsensess of the Arabian desert and the opulence of the Persian garden. As R. Gelpke states: "Nizami preserves the Bedouin atmosphere, the nomads' tents in the desert and the tribal customs of the inhabi­tants, while at the same time transposing the story into the far more civilized Iranian world. . . . Majnun talks to the planets in the symbolic language of a twelfth-century Persian sage, the encounters of small Arabic raiding parties become gigantic battles of royal Persian armies and most of the Bedouins talk like the heroes, courtiers, and savants of the refined Iranian civiliza­tions."⁹

Nizami's originality, however, lies not so much in these brilliant scenic descriptions, but rather in his psychological portrayal of the richness and complexity of the human soul when confronted with intense and abiding love. Majnun's compulsions, anxieties, frustra­tions, and passions are not slighted as he moves inexorably toward an ideal love that involves renunciation and, ultimately, transcendence.

Even at its most blissful, love is accompanied by pain which separation only intensifies. "Yet do not think," Nizami says, "that such a pain is to be deplored, for it rewards the person by relieving him of himself. Having killed the self, the lover becomes identified with the beloved."¹⁰ Many critics have interpreted this as mystical love. But if there is a mystic strain in Nizami, it is subtle and covert; it never destroys or blurs the sharp psycho­logical and the physical identity of its protagonist. It is virtually impossible to draw a clear line in "Layla and Majnun," or in any of Nizami's poetry, between the mystical and the erotic, the sacred and the profane.

The psychological profile of Layla is less deeply drawn, but her enduring love is no less extraordinary an achievement. Although she reluctantly defers to the will of her family and her tribe and marries another, she will not share his bed. Dying, she asks to be dressed as a bride, to be joined in purest ecstasy with her beloved Majnun.

Nevertheless, true to his need to present all facets of human experience in his tales, Nizami included these observations in the romance :

Woman does not keep her promise—not even one in a thousand.

Woman does only what satisfies her.

Woman is faithless from beginning to end.

Woman loves you—until the next man appears on the horizon.

Woman is more lustful and passionate than man.

Woman is not trustworthy.

Woman is a cheat. Woman is deceitful. Woman is perverse.

Woman causes sufferance; fidelity is not her game. Woman is peace on the surface; she is turmoil within. Woman's enmity is destructive.

Woman's friendship corrupts.

Woman's qualities are too numerous to count."

In the story of "Khosrow and Shirin," after many mis­fortunes caused by inner and outer forces, the lovers are finally united and spend several happy years to­gether before their deaths. In contrast, Layla and Majnun are scourged by separation, social ostracism, self-denial, and spiritual and physical suffering from the very begin­ning until their tragic ends. It is quite possible that, to soften the tragedy, Nizami wrote a second version, weav­ing into it the love story of Zayd for his cousin Zaynab, which parallels that of Majnun and Layla. The couples become messengers for one another and to some degree are able to mitigate the relentless curse of separation. But Layla and Majnun's love remains unconsummated; Majnun cannot bear physical duality, declaring that he already carries Layla spiritually within his soul. His fate is unyielding and, to a large extent, self-imposed. In a popular Arabic saying, Majnun declares : "From the time Layla was a little girl and her breast had not yet developed, I loved her. We were two little children looking after grazing sheep. I wish we had never grown up, nor had the sheep."

The expanded version of "Layla and Majnun" closes with a vivid dream sequence, replete with nightingales, golden fruit, perfumed flowers, and crystal streams. Majnun and Layla, sitting on magnificent carpets, are radiantly embracing, wine cups in hand. Many scholars believe this to be an interpolation, but if its date can be drawn from the moving dedication to Shirvanshah's crown prince, in which Nizami counsels his son Muham­mad whom he addresses as a boy of fourteen, the entire Zayd—Zaynab addition may well be Nizami's own work. The opportunities it offers for love's consummation certainly heighten the drama and the poignancy of its renunciation.

Imitators of Nizami's "Layla and Majnun" can be listed by the hundreds, and the romance is popular even today. According to E. E. Bertels and A. Hikmat, count­ing only the most famous versions, there are twenty in Persian, forty in Turkish, three in Azarbaijani, one in Uzbek, one in Kurdish, and two in Tajik. It is truly a treasury of the human spirit. As the Turkish poet Hamdi wrote at the end of the fifteenth century, in the intro­duction to his rendering of "Layla and Majnun" " layla and Majnun' is the furnace of love's fire, yet it is the rose garden of the soul."¹²

1.   Vahid Dastgerdi, critical edition of "Layla and Majnun" (Teheran, 1313 A. H. / 1933 A.D. ; reprinted 1333 A. H. / 1954 A. D.), p.25.

2.   Ibn Qutayba, Kitab al-Shi‘r wa           ara (Beirut, 1964).

3.   Ibn Dawud, Kitab al-Zahra (The Book of the Flower) (Chi­cago, 1932).

4.   Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-Aghani (Beirut, ¹955)•

5.   I. Y. Krachkovski, "Die Friihgeschichte der Erzahlung von Macnun and Laila in der Arabischen Literatur," translated by H. Ritter, Oriens, 1955, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-5o.

6.   V. Dastgerdi, op. cit., p.25.

7.   Ibid., p.29.

8.   Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun, translated from the Persian and edited by R. Gelpke (London, 1966), p.220.

9.   Ibid., p.218.

1o. Dastgerdi, op. cit., p. 84.

1. Ibid., p.151.

12. E. J. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry (London, 1965), vol. 2, p. 175.