Layla and Majnun

Layla and Majnun is a story of tragic love originating in Arabic literature, centered on the historical figures of the seventh-century poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, nicknamed Majnun, meaning possessed or mad, and his beloved Layla al-Amiriyah, both said to have come from the Najd region of present-day Saudi Arabia. Its most celebrated poetic treatment is the Persian narrative poem by Nizami Ganjavi, composed in Persian in 1188 as the third part of his Khamsa, a cycle of five long narrative poems. Nizami's version recounts how Qays's consuming, publicly declared love for Layla, forbidden by her family, drives him into the wilderness in a state of obsessive devotion that earns him his epithet, transforming a regional love story into one of the most influential romances in Islamic literature. Through Nizami's poem the story passed from Arabic into Persian, Turkish and various Indic literary traditions, inspiring countless later adaptations and cementing Layla and Majnun's status as one of the archetypal tragic love stories of the Islamic world, often compared to Romeo and Juliet in the West.