A friend of mine recently expressed in anguish, “Please! don’t throw stones at my crazy lover!” (Koi Patthar Se Na Maare, Mere Deewane Ko!) referring to the famous Urdu lines of a popular Bollywood song. Bollywood fans who have heard the song will instantly recognize that she was referring to Majnun. Surprisingly, for a Muslim, the image of stones thrown at a lover are all too familiar and they would readily agree with them. How come? Isn’t it strange? But then, at times, aren’t conversations amusing?
We could be talking about something in common, using exactly the same vocabulary, nodding in agreement, but never once realizing that we could be meaning different things. So, who was Majnun? What does he mean to me? What place does he occupy in Muslim imagination? Why is he still relevant?
Majnun Layla, with probably over a hundred versions of the epic, written centuries before “Romeo and Juliet,” is one of the most influential love stories in the poetry of almost every Muslim society. The story goes as follows: Qays, a poet living in the sixth century (first century of Islam), falls in love with a beautiful woman named Layla and starts composing poetry proclaiming his undying love for her. All his beginnings started with her and all his endings ended with her. He asks Layla’s father for her hand in marriage but is refused. She is instead married to a noble and rich merchant. When he hears about his beloved’s marriage, he is devastated!
Though he comes from a wealthy family, he now finds everything in life meaningless. So great was his love for Layla that he is absolutely possessed by it, goes crazy, and spends his life wandering the desert in search of her. As one poet expressed,
He roamed through the desert asking for her whereabouts and in the process lost his own whereabouts!
People once saw him take care of a dog and when questioned he replied,
I only take care of this dog because I once saw it in the vicinity of Layla.
His heart was shattered into a million pieces, but he still managed to find his beloved in each of those million pieces. On account of completely absorbing his love for Layla in his entire being, Qays came to be known as Majnun Layla: “Layla’s Madman” or “one possessed by Layla” (the word Majnun is Arabic for crazy or one who is possessed). Over the centuries, Majnun’s undying love has inspired countless poets. Sa’di, the Master of Speech, exclaimed:
When the eyes of Majnun would fall asleep they would see only Layla, only Layla!
Sadly, unable to see her lover, Layla dies of heartbreak. Later, near Layla’s grave, Majnun is found dead as well!
Muslims cast Majnun as a hero of this heartbreaking tale and he soon became an influential figure — a symbol and personification of love. They ambiguously but beautifully integrated the carnal and spiritual love. Layla, of course, symbolized the Divine Beloved and Majnun became the archetypal lover. Earthly love, the love for human beauty, was metaphorical love and only served as the experiential means to eventually know the Divine Truth, the Real Love. For these passionate lovers, like Majnun, experiencing and living with the Beloved became a mode of their very existence.
This comes as no surprise because the Muslim mind is theocentric and everything in this world serves as a reminder of God. After all, God says in the Qur’an:
So wherever you [might] turn, there is the Face of Allah.
So widespread is Majnun’s influence among Muslims that only passing references to “torn feet” (wandering through the desert his feet tore and bled causing flowers to bloom in the sand), “broken collar” (unable to bear the fire of separation, he broke his collar and tore open his shirt) or “stone in the hand” (the desert wanderer was stoned by the city dwellers) suffice to bring to mind the image of a passionate lover in search of his beloved. For example, the brilliant Shahab Ahmed points out a couplet from Mirza Ghalib in his compelling and powerful, “What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,”
In my childhood, Asad! I, too, at Majnun, Had raised a stone — ‘ere I remembered my own head!
Here the great Ghalib (whose name was Asad) alludes to one of the most famous motifs of the Majnun-Layla legend: the scene where Majnun, having walked through the desert, comes upon a town — only for the people, alarmed at the sight of this disheveled madman, to set their children upon him to stone him back into the desert. The motif sums up the tension — if not the outright incompatibility between life of True Love, and the life of the city and society which does not recognize the true meaning of love, and also fears the destabilizing effects of the Truth of the Lover. In this couplet, Ghalib first inserts himself into the Majnun-Layla story as one of the children of the city going out in the street to stone Majnun; and then inserts the Majnun-Layla story into himself when he realizes, stone-in-hand, that he, too, might one day be Majnun.
However, this process of meaning-making, integration, internalization, and personification of Majnun, may, of course, shock not only “fundamentalists,” but also many of the “secular” educated. Contrary to popular understanding, meaning-making, unlike information transfer, is a complex and dynamic process. It is a function of several variables with one of them being our own lived experience. However, in modern times, many of us have come to assign more authenticity and authority to one vector: orthodoxy and legal rulings. This analytical reflex to fall back on orthodoxy is not restricted to religion alone and can be observed in our social, political and economic institutions as well. To view tradition and meaning-making processes through a single and narrow lens is in direct contradiction with our own lived experiences. Orthodoxy plays its part but so does philosophy, spirituality, poetry, art, history, physical sciences, fiction, literature, humor, architecture, music, food, etc. To choose one over the other is effectively considering others as inferior or irrelevant and, frankly speaking, doing injustice to their own selves and the tradition.
But, maybe, this goes beyond choosing one vector over another for meaning-making. The critical question is, are we even engaged in meaning-making? After all, isn’t the modern man made to believe that his is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe? Without the direction of meaning, man’s existence has been reduced to a mere shadow engaged with only the magnitude of the visible. For Majnun and lovers like him, the meaning of their lives was loving and being totally aware of the Divine Beloved. Who, then, is the beloved of the Modern World? Who, then, is the Layla of the Modern Man? Matter? How delusional is it to serve matter when it is itself subservient to human will? Unfortunately, modern man, enchanted with the city life, represents the child with the stone in hand ready to drive away lovers like Majnun to the desert.
The Messenger of God, Prophet Muhammad (SAW), said:
God is beautiful and He loves beauty
and he also reported from God (Hadith Qudsi):
I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known.
The lovers understood that had it not been for His Beauty and His Love, the universe would not have existed. For them, everything in this universe was then a conscious observer because He is Alive and it is His Love that subsists it! Matter was only a veil between them and their Beloved. It was a form. It was the froth. As Majnun said,
I pass by these walls, the walls of Layla And I kiss this wall and that wall It’s not Love of the walls that has enraptured my heart But of the One who dwells within them
But today, we are enraptured with the walls and the veils and in the process become like the froth. We refuse to acknowledge the Beloved who dwells behind these walls, let alone love Him. Without the Beloved, however, we are merely chasing shadows and forms. Isn’t it in the very nature of form to annihilate itself? So, what does this tell about those who chase these forms?
However, for lovers, every particle of this universe, in its own unique way, is engaged in an act of awareness — an act of worship — an act of consciousness — an act of love. Man has been made the custodian to participate and engage in this act of love. Instead, by engaging in relentless destruction of our environment and everything around us, we are basically preventing an act of love. Is it any wonder that without the coolness of love our planet is warming up? It would do well if we remember that we are not the owners but mere custodians. The only thing we truly own are our delusions and illusions. Why, then, are we not engaged in this act of love?
In absence of a beloved, we have come to attach immense importance to our own “self.” A “self” that continuously evolves over time but yet is incomplete at any given instance of time. We are lost in multiplicity with no unity. For Muslims, however, the central principle is Oneness (Tawhid) which integrates the outward with the inward. This apparent multiplicity is only an outward “self,” a veiled projection of the center, the inward “Real Self,” the Beloved. Where else do the unlimited ideas, endless desires, infinite hopes, limitless potential, and desire for eternal happiness originate from? The Prophet (SAW) said:
He who knows himself knows his Lord
Veiled from the Beloved, we have become strangers to our own self. We live a life of shadows. Are we willing to engage in this act of love and penetrate the veils to meet the Beloved? Are we willing to walk on the path of passionate lovers like Majnun? The choice has always been ours: Do we choose to be lost in the universe? or Do we choose for the universe to be lost in us?
… And Allah knows best.
Shahid has a Masters in Engineering from UCLA and works in the tech industry. He views the world with the eyes of a poet, analyzes it like an engineer, and at the core is a lover. He is skeptical of the overly optimistic belief that technology will save us from all our vices. He is instead of the opinion that technology is a means to achieving the end goal of building people with the right kind of heart, mind, and will. Through his writings he attempts to explore what it means to be a human: possess all the properties of an ocean but yet be a drop in the ocean of love. You can follow him on Facebook and Medium.