The Original Star-Crossed Lovers

By Supriya Savkoor

Long before Romeo and Juliet, there was Laila and Majnu, the ultimate star-crossed lovers who generations of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African cultures celebrated through poetry, plays, art, and later film. 

The original story is based on a real event, about a Bedouin shepherd named Qays (or Qais) ibn al-Mulawwah back in the 7^th century. Qays fell in love with Laila (or Layla) bint Mahdi ibn Sa’d, a young girl from his tribe, and wrote many poems about his undying love for her. However, when Qays asked Laila’s father for her hand in marriage, he was refused, and soon, Laila was married off to another man and moved away. Qays became devastated and left home to wander the wilderness and deserts where he continued to compose poetry but quickly descended into madness. He thus earned the nickname Majnun or Majnu, meaning mad or crazy.

Qays’s poetry and the Arab stories about him and his love were already popular and well known in the region during those times and were told and retold many times over the centuries until the great Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi wrote what became the masterpiece version. Ganjavi, who coincidentally first wrote a famous epic poem about Farhad and Shireen, the star-crossed lovers Heidi wrote about, researched both secular and mystical sources about Laila and Majnun and used techniques from the Persian tradition of poetry to make the tragic love story more vivid, boosting its popularity immensely.

After Ganjavi’s version came out – three centuries before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet – the story of Laila and Majnun spread like wildfire through Azerbaijan, Turkey, and eventually to India, where it’s still considered the penultimate story of star-crossed lovers. 

Take a look at some of the art this famous couple inspired.

From Mashhad, Iran, Majnun eavesdrops on Layla's camp

 

An Afghani rendering of the young lovers

A Tajik miniature painting shows
Layla and Majnu as young classmates

A tapestry from Mughal India shows
a desolate Majnu out in the wilderness

From a modern Malaysian performance

The story is so entrenched, so much a part of the cultures it spread to, the term Majnun or Majnu is commonly used in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, North Africa, even Somalia to describe anyone who is madly in love, as does the phrase “Laila-Majnu” itself (often describing blushing newlyweds, for example). In Turkey, where Majnun is known as Mecnun, when someone says they “feel like Mecnun,” it means they feel possessed, often by love. 

It could be said that most popular Bollywood movies retell the Laila and Majnu story in one way or another, but India has made at least a dozen or more films specifically about Laila and Majnu in many languages, including, curiously, Persian, Malay, and Pashtun. The Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov set the story to music and made what is considered to be the Middle East’s first opera, premiering in Baku in 1908. In the 19^th century, Isaac D’Israeli (the father of Benjamin D’Israeli, the future British prime minister) translated the epic poem from the Persian into the English, expanding the audience to the west.

Beyond the Indian films, the story has been referenced in much popular media, including Sufi qawwali poem-songs, bestselling novels by authors Orhan Pamuk and Khaled Hosseini, the famous Layla song by Eric Clapton (which even quotes a line from Qays's poetry), and the kitchy disco song Laila from the Indian film Qurbani. The couple has also been the subject of a Tajik Soviet film-ballet from the 1960s, at least one Iranian film from the 1930s, and a contemporary Yo Yo Ma concert.

Over time, the story has taken on slightly different retellings. In one recounting, Layla and Majnun were classmates, that Majnun wrote poems to Layla instead of paying attention to the teacher, and so received lashings in class. Every time Majnun was beaten, Layla would magically bleed, thus causing her family the consternation that leads to them separating the couple. In another version, Layla’s brother Tabrez protests Majnun’s love for his sister, and in the midst of their quarrel, Majnun accidentally kills Tabrez, which incurs the wrath of Layla’s family.

The graves in Bijnore 

In one rural town in India, many believe that the couple hailed, not from the Arab world, but from the north Indian state of Sindh. And when Laila’s family opposed the union, the pair sought refuge in the tiny Rajasthani desert village of Bijnore in India, where they eventually died. The local government maintains a tomb that purportedly contains the couple’s bodies. Not far from the tomb is a well that the locals say the couple regularly visited together. Each year, the town hosts a two-day fair in June to commemorate the couple, and hundreds of newlyweds and lovers attend.

Whatever actually happened, fact and fiction have blended to create one of legend and literature's most enduring star-crossed couples.

Off The Beaten Track: Sexy Beirut

Today's Off The Beaten Track contributor is Alexander McNabb, who has lived, worked and travelled extensively around the Middle East for over 25 years. Apart from being a very old man with a nasty book writing habit, he is a keen cook, radio host, blogger and commentator on digital communications and social media (which is what he does as a day job).  Alexander can be found at his blog http://www.fakeplasticsouks.blogspot.com or on Twitter at @alexandermcnabb.

I have a particular fascination for the little village of Shemlan at the moment. It nestles in the mountains high above Beirut, uphill from Aley and  Bchamoun, home to a few shops, a mildly famous restaurant and an orphanage.

Looking out over Beirut from Shemlan never fails to take my breath away. The city is spread out like a glimmering carpet below, the airport runways sitting by the infinite blue Mediterranean.

You can have lunch at Al Sakhra, the Cliffhouse restaurant. It's a fairly traditional Lebanese affair and you can sit by the window popping pistachios and drinking ice cold Al Maza beer as you look out over Beirut below, dishes appearing from the kitchen with satisfying regularity to populate the table. The restaurant itself is fairly large, a favourite meeting place for couples being 'discreet', but also a popular place at weekends. 

The orphanage in Shemlan is the reason for my fascination with the village and the countryside around it, for it was here that the British government-run MECAS, the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, was located until the civil war forced its closure in 1978. MECAS reported through the British Embassy in Beirut. It was here the infamous Kim Philby learned his Arabic and it was from here George Blake was taken to London to be arrested on his arrival, finally unmasked as a Russian double agent, in 1961. The Lebanese, unsurprisingly, refer to it as the British Spy School.

I’ve been visiting Shemlan a lot recently because I’m writing a book that’s partly set in the village during the early days of the Lebanese civil war, the last days of MECAS. Despite many people’s perceptions of Lebanon, that war is long gone now and Beirut has managed to stagger to its feet, dust itself down and once again become a vibrant, sexy and fascinating city filled with life, laughter, art and dazzling vivacity.

Yet the image of Beirut at war persists. One Lebanese blogger, Jad Aoun, likes to catch people using the lazy ‘looks like Beirut’ simile and sends them pictures of today’s city along with a ‘looks like Beirut’ certificate. He’s received a satisfying number of apologies.

(http://www.jadaoun.com/blog/)

It's something I have encountered in my writing life, an oddly jaundiced Western view of the Middle East in general and certainly of Beirut in particular. I have had agents rejecting the manuscript of my second serious novel, with the rather over-complicated working title of Beirut, based on the fact that people don't want to hear about war zones. (I am currently represented by Robin Wade of Wade and Doherty, who is shopping Beirut around various London publishers) The book's about an international hunt for two missing nuclear warheads and is set in Hamburg, Spain, London, Brussels, Malta, Albania, the Greek Islands and, last but by no means least, that most sexy of Mediterranean cities, Beirut.

I love Beirut. I always look forward to visits with anticipation and excitement. I don't live there, so I don't have to experience the city's everyday frustrations (and they are legion) - I can just drop in and fill myself up with wandering around the streets, enjoying Ottoman architecture and the vibrant street life. I wander around stealing locations for books or snapping vignettes, from the Armenian souks and twisting streets of Bourj Hammoud, cabling strewn crazily from rooftop to rooftop, to the upmarket shops of Verdun and Hamra. The architecture’s a mad mix, apartment blocks with balconies hung with dusty awnings, old Ottoman-era houses with Arabesque arches and new, smoked glass office blocks. Every now and then you’ll find a smattering of bullet marks or the shrapnel splash of a shell still visible in the concrete of older buildings.

The city sparkles and jostles, stretched out from the long corniche along the splendid Mediterranean up into the mountains, all presided over by the great white-capped bulk of Mount Sassine. At night it lights up, bars and restaurants serving a constant tide of laughing, happy people - Gemayzeh no longer quite the place to be it once was (and Munot before it), while Hamra is becoming busier again. It feels good to be there.

So I am always pained to get reactions to Beirut like 'This gritty and realistic novel is set in a war torn city' or 'We don't think the British public would be interested in a conflicted city like Beirut'. The first comment made my blood boil even more because the book is most certainly not based in a war torn city. It's based in a sexy, modern city that fizzles with life. (The fact that much of its infrastructure teeters just to the right side of disaster just adds frisson...) The comment just showed the reader had, at best, skimmed a few bits before spurning me like one would spurn a rabid dog. What made it worse was the reference, twenty years after the fact, to the place being war-torn. I should refer her to Jad, really, shouldn’t I?

Burning The Images

I didn’t have to do much research when I wrote Inescapable Presence, my first novel – an international suspense set in Russia and New York. My behind-the-Iron-Curtain upbringing gave me enough inspiration and command over the Novosibirsk settings of the late eighties, when food shortages created long lines in supermarkets, and the promised Communist utopia lost its credibility amongst its most fervent supporters.

The memories of Russian winters, as savage as they could be beautiful, were still so vivid in my mind, my fingers and toes were freezing when I wrote about snowstorms, blizzards, and icy paths leading through an old park. The American part wasn’t that hard either – by then I’ve lived in New York for ten years. Since my next two novels were set mostly in Brooklyn, my sources of inspiration lay outside my doors and windows. Sometimes I wandered around searching for a street corner that would look just right for my character to abandon a car. Sometimes I’d be out on a quest for the subway station that would only have one exit onto a dark street. Once I spent a few days trying to discover a good place to dump a body. Not that I ever had to dispose of a corpse, but the villain in my book needed to.

The settings for Death by Scheherezade’s Veil, a bellydancing murder mystery, which delves into Turkish culture and traditions, were inspired by Astoria, a Queens neighborhood across the East River from Manhattan, dubbed the United Nations of New York City for its diverse ethnic populace. A mix of Eastern European, Asian, Greek, Arabic, and everything in between, Astoria offered plenty of Middle Eastern settings, from mosque minarets to hookah bars, and from the Islamic fashion stores to bellydancing nightclubs.

When I wanted an easy trip to the Middle East, I walked a dozen blocks to an area unofficially called Little Egypt where Turkish coffee was strong and silty, baklavas were sweet and nutty, and the store signs were jotted in the cryptic weave. I had to remember to dress modestly and tie up my long unruly hair – out of respect for the locals. It was easy to depict Astoria. What I found harder to deliver, was the mindset and psyche of its inhabitants, which I was trying to explain while maintaining the delicate balance between the old-fashioned concepts of Islamic family and honor, which many people in our modern Western society would find hard to perceive.

Whenever I travel, especially to the Middle East, my favorite destination, it is the people that interest me the most. I want to know what they are thinking and why, what makes them happy or angry, and whether their smiles are genuine or simply polite. I want to know what they consider beautiful versus ugly, courteous versus rude, and right versus wrong. I want to know how different they are from the other cultures I know – or how similar. For me, being able to place my reader inside my character’s mind is vital. While a setting is something I always try to memorize in every detail, it’s people I ponder the most.

Interestingly enough, I’ve never been a picture-snapping tourist; some of my trips landed amazingly few photos. I find the results of my camerawork lacking depth so I prefer to create multi-dimensional images of my own. I would stand on an unpaved street and look around, taking in everything I can, and then close my eyes to burn the imagine in my memory: a mouthwatering aroma of shawarma cooked by a street vendor to the right, a donkey braying on the left, the taste of dust in my mouth, which permeates the air in dry deserty climates, a child climbing a tree and an old grandma sizing me up, trying to figure out whether I may cast an evil eye on her beloved grandchild.

When I am back in my house, curling up in my favorite chair with a cup of tea next to me, this is how I will restore the picture so I can write it: I will close my eyes again and summon the grandma, the boy, and the donkey from my memory – until I can taste the dust, smell the meat, and sense the old woman’s gaze, so palpable I can feel a light chill running down my back...