Majnun Layla's Roundabout Migrations through Comparative Literature and Post-colonial Interdisciplinarity

The love story of Majnun Layla, a legend that originated in the Middle East, has been translated and retold so often that it has become part of our global literary imagination. The story has been often received, compared, and studied in connection to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This is despite the fact that there are fundamental differences between the two masterpieces, not to mention that the reception of Majnun Layla has exceeded literary reception, extending to other media. The first part of the article presents new social, political, religious, and literary interpretations of Majnun Layla. The second part of the article discusses the legend’s migration from seventh-century Arabic culture to its operatic adaption in Azerbaijan in 1908 (the first opera to be staged in an Islamic context), its first cinematic adaptation in Malay language in 1933 in Bangladesh, its first scholarly treatment in comparative literature in Iran in 1938-1940, and finally its most recent cinematic representation in the 2011 American movie Habibi. The article notes the most important achievements and elements that have been added to the story during the legend's cross-cultural and multidisciplinary journeys. The article concludes by proposing that the multiple-horizontal-circle model of comparative literature and post-colonial studies is more adequate for understanding texts like Majnun Layla than the conventional binary-vertical-linear model for research in Arabic and Middle Eastern comparative literature and world literature.