By Karma Chamseddine
Introduction
Love in Fairy Tales has had a never ending impact on how love stories are presented now. While not classified as a Fairy Tale, a tragic, romantic legend that shares tropes and themes with them, Majnun and Layla, has also been retold over and over again. Fairy Tales initially were only told orally, beginning thousands of years ago in primarily Western civilization. Charles Perrault, the Brother’s Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen helped turn this solely oral tradition into stories that could be read as well. However, the story of Majnun and Layla dates back to the 7th century in Arabia and Persia. Often called the Romeo and Juliet of the Middle East (though it originally dates back much earlier) It is about real life figures, Qays Ibn Al-Mulawwah and Layla Bint Mahdi, and their tragic romance. Both were in love, but unable to be together due to tribal and parental restrictions. Layla’s father forced her to marry someone else. Majnun spent the rest of his life mourning and writing poems for her, and both eventually died – depending on the version, of a broken heart or other natural cause. Over time, the story was continuously retold by authors, musicians, and poets such as Nizami Ganjavi and Qassim Haddad. Potentially, by following common fairy tale tropes and devices, this story and many more current ones has withstood the test of time.
The Miracle Baby
Majnun is a miracle baby, born despite his father’s infertility. This trope is present in several fairy tales, such as Snow White, Rapunzel, The Frog Prince, and Sleeping Beauty. In Majnun and Layla, Majnun, or technically Qays, is described as having “the smile of a pomegranate, like a rose whose petals have opened overnight, like a diamond which transforms the darkness of the world into sheer light” (page 1). While not an actual miracle baby, Layla, when first introduced, is described as a “miracle of creation”, similarly equating her beauty to divineness.
Likewise, the descriptions equate Majnun to worldly pleasures, nature, and miracles. Comparing him to ripe fruit, flowers, and light, he is suggested to be pure and good. Similarly, in the Brothers Grimm version of Snow White, the queen who desires a child describes her dream child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame” (Tatar, page 95). By describing the child in colors that contradict and oppose each other, there is a sense of impossibility, or to-good-to-be-trueness, too pure, like Majnun, for the world she will be born into. As Majnun said in Ganjavi’s poems:
“What can I do? My fate is dark as pitch.
I have not reached this place through my own wish.
I am constrained, shackled by iron chains.
What use to struggle now? This is my fate.
I can’t myself unloose these bonds of mine,
Nor free my body of their heavy weight.” (Ganjavi, page 122)
Thus, Majnun, like Snow White, is doomed to a certain dreadful fate from the start. Comparing it to a dark pitch, it suggests a dreadful place with no way out. By describing himself in chains, it suggests the restriction between him and Layla is painful and tortuous for him. By claiming there is no point in struggling, he tragically gives up. While, in some versions, a happy afterlife in Paradise between the two is insinuated, this life is definitely ill fated for them.
Like many Fairy Tales, particularly Brothers Grimm versions or Hans Christian Andersen folk tales, there is a connotation of God’s blessing here. It was described that God granted Qays/Majnun’s father his wish. In this case, it is Allah, in the Qur’an, rather than the Bible. Such supernatural connotations are extremely prevalent in fairy tales, and relate to the otherworldly intangibility of true, passionate love.
Names and The Moon
Similarly to Fairy Tales, Majnun and Layla’s names, especially Majnun’s, carry significant meaning. In Cinderella, the name represents her constant entrapment in her house and by the fire place, where she became covered with cinders. Likewise, Snow White, Rumpelstiltkin, and Red Riding Hood are all names that are symbolic of such characters and their journeys. This makes them much more memorable.
Majnun’s actual, birth-given name is Qays. In Arabic, the name Qays means “steadfast” or “lover”. This foreshadows the main characterization of him during the story, which is a stubborn lover for Layla. He begins being called “Majnun”, meaning “madman” and “possessed” by a jinn/demon in Arabic, after everybody notices his infatuation with Layla, symbolizing his descent into the madness of falling in love (Clinton, page 21). The story is called Majnun and Layla, not Qays and Layla, as the name Majnun ends up embodying his character’s tragic future completely. It dooms the story from the beginning.
The name Layla means night in Arabic, and her hair is described as being as dark as the night. Aside from that, in literature, there are connotations between the night/the moon and divine femininity. The moon is often also used in love stories as a symbol of connection, fate, time, and separation. As seen in the art of Majnun and Layla above, the moon symbolizes their connectivity in spite of distance.
In many versions of Cinderella, her transformation/the spell breaks when the clock strikes midnight, emphasizing time and circumstances as obstacles to love. Also, in Beauty and the Beast and The Frog Prince, the prince transforms back into a human under a (sometimes full) moon, contrastingly portraying time as a privilege, as a good thing came to one who waited. In Romeo and Juliet, there is the iconic balcony love confession scene. Juliet says “O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” (Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, page 77)
This symbolic use of the moon in fairy tales is also quite common in more current love stories, such as The Notebook, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Twilight.
In book and TV series The Summer I Turned Pretty, the story of Belly and Conrad is similarly largely about timing, yearning, and separation (before they eventually come back together in this case). Like Majnun and Layla, their story is about first loves. When describing their relationship, Belly says that Conrad gave her the moon and the stars, equating their bond to something infinite and unchanging.
In The Notebook (both the novel and film), the moon plays a role in several romantic moments that display the everlasting nature of Noah and Allie’s love. Such as the dancing moment above, and their love confession by the lake.
Interdiction and Violation
What this project has explored is, what about forbidden romance, has been and is still so appealing to us to the point of the story lasting for centuries? Are these stories realistic? Are there things to learn from them even if they’re not? How do current love stories follow and diverge from them? Amongstthe most important reasons these stories withstood the test of time is that they follow the fairy tale functions of interdiction and violation. Forbidden love is a common trope in Fairy Tales such as The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast. The reason for this forbiddenness, depending on the tale, is social class/status, the body, curses, and family rivalries/parents. Potentially, it is common because it serves as an effective interdiction, one of Vladimir Propp’s functions, meaning something that is forbidden. Majnun and Layla’s relationship “is transiently chaotic which contains parts with sudden explosion which can be interpreted as a kind of madness ”(Jafari, page 620). This madness makes the violence of the interdiction painfully understandable for the audience. Likewise, in The Little Mermaid, her relationship with the prince is forbidden by the sea king and nature itself, and also by the fact that she is a mermaid and he is a human. While she perseveres despite this difficulty, the love is unrequited, and ends tragically.
The other Fairy Tales, however, have happy endings despite this forbiddenness. On the one hand, this may make them more enjoyable and rewarding. On the other hand, a tragic ending can be both more memorable and more realistic, as seen in how long tragic stories of love, such as The Little Mermaid, Majnun and Layla, Romeo and Juliet, and Orpheus and Eurydice have lasted. It also makes a stronger case against societal prejudices, teaching the audience a lesson, a cautionary tale of some sort. In Majnun and Layla, this lesson is not to let societal barriers stop two people from loving each other. Due to the effectiveness of the interdiction in the forbidden love trope, the violation (of the interdiction), another Propp function, is both rewarding and tense as well. If the tale ends tragically, then the violation is often even more consequential and effective, as the threat of it and stakes behind it feel real to the audience. These fairy tale tropes are what makes stories with tragic endings so much more impactful and memorable.
Works Cited:
Clinton, Jerome W. “A Comparison of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. 15–27. Web.
Ḥaddād, Qāsim. Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems. Trans. Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul and John Verlenden. First edition. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Print.
Jafari, Sajad, Julien C. Sprott, and Hashemi Golpayegani S Mohammad Reza. “Layla and Majnun: A Complex Love Story.” Nonlinear Dynamics 83.1-2 (2016): 615-22. ProQuest. Web. 30 Apr. 2024.
“Layla and Majnun by Nizami Ganjavi: Complete Story in English.” Heliotricity, 16 Nov. 2021, www.heliotricity.com/layla-and-majnun/.
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Romeo and Juliet, 1597. Oxford :published for the Malone Society by Oxford University Press, 2000.
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions). W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.Tavares, Elizabeth E. “Romeo & Juliet / Layla & Majnun.” Shakespeare Bulletin 2018: 340–345. Web.
