The Man Who Went to the Wilderness

In 1188, at Ganja, a city that is now in Azerbaijan, Nizami Ganjavi composed Laylā and Majnūn as one of the five treasures of his Khamsa. He took a legend already told in Arabic: Qays ibn al-Mulawwaḥ, a boy of the Banu ʿAmir, who loved Laylā, was refused the marriage, and went into the wilderness until people called him Majnūn, the possessed, the mad. Nizami made the wound Persian, courtly, and long enough to live in.

The families will not have the match. That refusal is social, not mystical. Qays’s poems make the love public; publicity makes it unmarriable. He leaves the tents. The desert becomes the only room that will have him. Animals keep him company because people will not. This is not yet a symbol. It is a man without a household.

Laylā is not a silent prize. In Nizami she speaks, marries another under pressure, and dies of a grief the poem does not treat as a pretty illness. Qays outlives her only long enough to die on her grave. The cinema of the story, night, sand, the name shouted into empty air, is easy to love. The ease is a danger. A poem can be magnificent about self-loss without self-loss becoming an instruction.

Later Sufi readings heard in Majnūn the lover of God, the ego stripped, the desert as tawḥīd. Those readings are old and they are interpretation. They are not the only truth of a masnavi that also knows tribal honour, a forced marriage, and a man who stops eating. To baptize the wilderness too quickly is to leave Laylā behind again, as if she were a ladder.

Do not glorify the destruction. Allow the poem its own wound. Nizami is a maker of beauty; beauty is not evidence that the love was wise, or that the families were right, or that madness is a rank in heaven. What survived is a name pair the world still uses when it wants to mean: this wanting did not get to become a house.