What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic by Ahmed Shahab

Author:Ahmed, Shahab [Ahmed, Shahab]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Let us turn to consider probably the most prolific example of living Islam by living fiction. While we moderns have little difficulty in conceiving, for example, of the historical person of Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792), the founder of the momentous “Wahhābī” movement of Najd, as a historically representative and influential Islamic prototypical figure, we find it considerably more difficult to conceive of the fictional protagonist of the most prolifically retold of love stories, Majnūn Laylā, as an exemplary and influential Islamic archetypal figure. While it may, at first blush, seem counter-intuitive to propose a fictional character as an Islamic archetype, this is exactly who and what Majnūn is. The “real” Majnūn was a poet who lived in the first century of Islam by the name of Qays from the tribe of Banū ʿĀmīr—and was thus also, like Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, from the Najd region of Arabia; these very different gentlemen are probably the two most influential Najdīs in history—who fell in love with a woman called Laylā. Laylā was unattainable, and so great was Qays’ love for her that he became possessed by his love, went mad, and spent his life traversing the desert in search of her caravan. On account of the obliteration of his being in his love for Laylā, Qays is known as Majnūn Laylā: “Laylā’s madman” or “the one possessed by Laylā” (the word Majnūn means, literally, “possessed by a jinn”; a jinn is a genie, one of the species of non-corporeal beings that, the Qur’ān tells us, inhabit the World of Unseen). In the intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “madhhab of love,” the figure of Majnūn was taken up by the practitioners of the madhhab and made the personification of the ethos of love. Majnūn was cast as the hero of the epic of his love for Laylā—an epic that was told and re-told in the poetry of the languages of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex (and became a major subject for miniature painting). There are probably about a hundred versions of the Majnūn Laylā epic—the most celebrated being those by the canonical Persian poets, Niẓāmī (d. 1188, whose seminal epic is regarded as having ushered in the epoch of the Majnūn archetype), by Amīr Khusraw (who dedicated his version of the tale to his beloved, Niẓām-ud-Dīn Awliyā), and by Jāmī; as well as by the greatest literary figure of Chaghatāy Turkish, ʿAlī Shiʿr Navā’ī (d. 1501, who was advisor to Jāmī’s patron, Sultan Ḥusayn Bayqarā, and who built the mausoleum of Farīd-ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār), and by the Azeri Turkish master-poet, Fużūlī (d. 1566)—as well as modern theater plays and movies in several languages.33 Majnūn—“the one possessed by passion”—is quite simply the archetypal lover of the history of societies of Muslims; he is effectively the Imām of the madhhab of love. He has been invoked, proverbialized, metaphorized and sublimated into the image-vocabulary of the various languages spoken by Muslims to the point where he can be invoked without any need to name him

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