 Dr. Leylianva to deliver her second poem tonight with a more specific title of the quest of Majnun the tribulation of a lover. Thank you very much. So I yesterday I talked about the about thirst and the quest for water and the word talab as as being one of the words that I have translated as desire in English. Today we're going to talk about another word and that word is which is very again a very difficult word to translate even though very naturally we translated love but I must tell you before I start this lecture that each time I will say love I will not mean just love in English I will mean as sometimes we should maybe not translate we should just put as because as is much more than love it's a desiring love it's it's a passionate love it's something that that comes upon you and never let you go as comes from a root an Arabic root that means that also has given the word to Ashaka which is the plan that goes up the roofs you know and up the walls and just keeps on the keeps on the wall and never lets its victim or go. So really and in the love treatises in Arabic this word is almost never used before it became very fashionable in Persian poetry. Ash really in the Arabic treatises is considered as a terrible thing to happen to someone that happens to someone and it's really passionate love and then the Persian poets decided that this was the word they wanted to use to talk about that particular feeling of love desire passion that is actually impossible to quench in a way so that's it that I wanted just to warn you that today we're going to talk about Ash and the hero of Ash in Persian and also Arabic literature actually is Majnun of whom I'm going to talk tonight and Majnun of course is the name under which that hero of love became famous but in the beginning as we shall see he was not called that way Majnun nobody today in the Middle East or anywhere else is called Majnun many women are called Leili or Leila the Arabic origin original is Leila but nobody is called Majnun of course because Majnun means literary possessed by the Jins and you understand why Majnun is the Arshek par excellence you know the the lover and the lover the absolute the quintessence with the quintessence of love lovers is of course someone who is possessed by the Jins the demons and I must also add before we get into the stories and the poems themselves I must also add that the word Jinn is used many times in the Quran particularly when condemning the poets because the poets are also Majnun they are possessed by the Jins and Majnun in the story from the beginning in the legend of Majnun from is from the beginning a poet so Majnun means possessed by the Jins in two meanings first possessed by love passionate love and second or I don't know which one is first which one is second it means both possessed by love and possessed by the the the demon of poetry love and poetry have something in common they are demoniac but then we'll see that it's a fantastic demon that everybody should develop in its in himself or herself the romance of Leili Majnun is the romance of desire in every sense of in every sense of the word desire as passion desire never satisfied in the visible world as I've just said it this is not only true of Nezami's or Jami's works that have the same title so I will have to just to tell all the time to tell you Leili Majnun by Nezami Leili Majnun by Jami because they bear the same title the two long poems written by those two authors but also so this is not only true of Nezami and Jami's poems but also of its source of inspiration itself the Arabian tale of old and of the stories innumerable versions in Arabic, Persian, Turkish Urdu, Bengali, Hindi even Georgian etc etc I think there is no language in the Islamic world and beyond because Georgian are not Georgia is not an Islamic is not part of the Islamic land there is no really no language anyway of this in this culture that has not in some way or another produced a poem or poems related to Majnun. The Majnun Leila legend which is the primary Arabic legend written in Arabic goes back to the first century of the Islamic era seventh eighth century and the original name of Majnun was in this tradition Qais ebne Mola Wah from the Banu Amir tribe he loved a woman tells the story called Leila and he loved her madly and because he was a poet he expressed his love for Leila in lyric poems in which the beloved's beauty is celebrated in a multiplicity of images that became the unsurpassable model of all lyric poetry ever after. The story was told in the form of a legend by Abul Faraj al-Esfahani of course he's called Esfahani but he wrote in Arabic which was quite common in those days so he was a Persian but he wrote in Arabic a very important book called Ketab al-Arani in which you have all the legends of all the first poets and lovers of the Arabic tradition. Ketab al-Arani means the book of lyric songs and he wrote that in the 10th century. This book was probably the main source of Nizami when he composed his version in the so in the 12th century and also of Jami who composed his own version in the 15th century even though the latter that is Jami was I think much more inspired by Nizami than by the Arabic version. Jami actually recognizes his debt to Nizami and also to Amir Khosrow Dehlavi who also composed his own version of Leila Majnun and in the so he recognizes his debt in the introduction to his Masnavi and by choosing the same meter than Nizami namely Hajj Asem Wasad Das just to say that we know what the meter is. What Jami's version as a mystic comment actually we what Jami adds to the version by Nizami is very precious to us because we can read Jami's version as a mystic commentary of Nizami. Indeed if Nizami already spiritualizes the theme which is apparently not so much spiritual in Arabic poetry the story and the and the the story as he tells it remains rather enigmatic as to the to what Nizami meant by a writing it and as you know there is a great controversy as to know if Nizami was a mystical poet or not and as I told you yesterday I think this is not the question. When you are a poet you're necessarily mystical in the Persian culture and if you're a mystic you're necessarily a poet. This doesn't mean that you're a religious writer when I say mystic I don't mean religious I mean someone who has who has the urge to deal with the invisible that's the only thing I need the only thing I mean by the word mystic. So if Nizami already spiritualizes and I will show how the theme in fact Jami is the one who will really give a close commentary as a spiritual master he will give a commentary of the story of Layla Majon as being the model of mystical love and how the soul should seek for its spiritual or divine beloved in this world in this world that is compared to a desert and we'll see why. As I tried to show yesterday we will see that there is a continuity between profane themes and mystical themes in when this theme of Majon is expressed through Persian poetry. So what is briefly summarized the story of Majon. As I told you Majon was so he was a poet in a tribe in an Arab tribe and he fell in love with Layla while taking care of the camels that's in the original tale he's taking care they are taking together to care of the camels and he falls in love with her but he loses Layla so in the Arabic version that she's called Layla because he expresses his love for her and describes her beauty in poems without concealing her name. You had the right to compose lyric love poetry in which you describe the beauty of your beloved but you never had to pronounce her name. Doing that was a crime of honor was considered a crime of honor among the Arabs. It was like unveiling the woman it was like raping her in public and it is so strong that by so doing he loses the possibility to be united to Layla forever. This is called in Arabic the crime of Tashbib so and it's really considered a very very serious crime that and even it's so much a crime that Layla's father would be allowed to kill him for that as I told you it's like raping her and here comes this idea that naming her is the problem giving her name in a poem means making her alive exactly in the way I talked about yesterday poetry makes things more real than reality that's why it's a crime to do that to talk about her beauty and so in sorry later after some tribulations when Majnun gains the right to marry Layla because he has waged war against her tribe and he has been victorious in this war Layla's father tells to one of Majnun's friends I would prefer to kill my daughter give her to dogs to be eaten rather than to give her to someone who unveiled her beauty in poetry this is just to tell you how strong that question of poetry is and was for the Arabs already and of course this idea was assimilated by Nizami in lyric poetry in Persian or Arabic the mere allusion to the names of Majnun or Layla as I said immediately evokes radical and maddening desire in short among all the numerous hero lovers of Islamic literature Majnun has become the archetype of the lover and lately the archetype of the beloved in a passage of Salaman and Absal Jami relates the following scene it's not in his Layla Majnun but it's an evocation of Layla Majnun in Salaman Absal he says in Persian did Majnun Raa yeki saharan avard darmiane badye ben sheste bekhard karde safhe righo angostan qalam mizanat badum mizanat baashke khunin in raqam gofte Majnun sheyda qi istin menevisi name bahre ki istin gofte eshqe yad-e-layli mikunam khater khudra tasalli mikunam excuse me gofte mashqe yad-e-layli mikunam khater khudra tasalli mikunam chon mo yassar niist man raqam e'u eshq bazi mikunam ban naam e'u a man crossing the desert so Majnun seated alone in the middle of that barren land and as if his fingers were a qalam on the sand he wrote words with his hand the man said hark my poor madman what is that are you writing a letter but for whom whatever pain you take in writing this the winds and storms will erase it soon Majnun answered I tell the beauty of Laili I solace my own soul by so doing I write her name in the first and last place I write a letter of love and constancy of her I have nothing in my hands but her name from it my humbleness a cry acquired great fame not having drunk even a draught from her cup now I make love to her name and I think the whole story of Laili Majnun reproduces that making love to the name of Laili and we will have many many little stories and anecdotes in which Majnun either writes her name or tells her name or just says Laili Laili Laili Laili because he cannot do anything else than just repeating her name so it's very important the fact that their names are mingled and that he is in the end he just becomes the poet of Laili that's why by the way in Arabic he's called we always say Majnun Laila it means the one who is mad of love with Laila it's a compound in Persian Nezami preferred to put the name of Laili first and to transform Laila into Laili which is an Persianized version of Laila and to put her name first and say Laili or Majnun because as we know Nezami considers that women has have to be at the center of all his or his romances his poetic romances indeed any desire is an unquenched thirst the result of absence and or frustration so I could not drink from the cup of Laili so I make love to her name what Majnun does in his desert by writing the name of Laili by composing poem after poem on her beauty by gazing at the musk deer and ravens that remind him of her or by breathing the perfume of the beloved is to fill the gap of absence and distance to transmute emptiness into fusion of essences Nezami introduces the theme of hollowness at various levels of his work the poem deals with an ever-growing rarefaction of rarefaction of space time human relationships so as to better serve the violence of desire but also to penetrate into the very essence of things and to a higher reality indeed Nezami has conceived his work as a reflection of the trajectory of desiring love a movement towards nothingness that is the condition of the advent of perfect love it is important to note that Nezami has commissioned it was commissioned to write his Laili or Majnun by a local prince in the beginning he had no he was not inspired by the story it was just you know the command of the king of the Prince of Shirvan and actually in the introductory in the prologue of the of his lady imagine he complains of the difficulty of to compose a poem dealing with such a brief plot that takes place in a desert he insists on the fact that it's a desert with no occasion he says to describe royal feasts and beautiful gardens and you know that the natural setting of Persian poetry is the garden and he says it very precisely there how can I write a poem if I have no garden to describe how how is it possible but then it was the command of the prince so he had to do it and he he says for example deheleze fesane chon bovat tangi gerdat sohan az gerdat sohan az shodamadan lang meydane sohan farah baya ta tab a savari nemayat and this in English story when the field of the tail is narrow then the speech that should come becomes lame although the story is a famous one it allows no description of verdant bliss so you know taught tab a savari nemayat is also you know it's a very special way of putting things that means he if you want to go on horse running on your horse in the field of poetry well you need to have some space and that space is the possibility to describe gardens but the horse reminds us of course of the steed of evoked by rudaki in the first poem that I commented upon yesterday he goes on his army on complaining that the story as well as the setting of the story are so dry he uses the words dry desert you know water less etc that they have actually never inspired any poet before him and actually there was no Masnavi that is long-versified romance about this story before he also evokes the nudity of the story the better to glorify of course his own poetic powers by in him a tangi of masafat on Josh re son amaz litafat kass khandan obe hasrat isha Rizad goharin a soft barra khanan de ash khanan de ash agar khanan de ash garfi sordebashat ashek shavadar namordebashat me gov tamo del jabab me dad kharid amo chashmi ab me dad dahli kese aql darj kardam darzi vareu b'khadj kardam whatever the narrowness of the field I shall raise it to such delicate beauty that when read to the king it will spread perfect pearls pearls at his feet even depressed any reader of it will fall in love and he if he's not a dead man I spoke and the heart answered I dug and the source provided water the pearls I obtained from reason I use them for its ornamentation in short although the theme did not immediately inspire him and though he was only obedient to the prince apparently he decided to turn a painful story set in the barren lands of Arabia into a source literary a source he says cheshmeh of inspiration the decisive theme of the romance is love but love considered as unquench desire and paralleled to the process of inspiration it is something that you don't have and you have to go for it in the desert the metaphor the metaphor of water standing here for inspiration is often used by the mover by all the actors in the romance as the metaphor of love the lovers themselves are often compared to plants and Leili speaks of magic nun as her he is her guiding her in the darkness of the water of life he is of which you have here a representation means literally literally the the green one the greenish one and it is a legendary profit that has not been named in the Quran but by the then the the stories of the prophets have given have given him a name and this prophet is said to have guided and initiated Moses and also he is the guardian of the water of life for example we find in the mouth of Leili Leili says to imagine all you the source of chaser in darkness you must of the morning candle and a few lines later verdant is your hand and you wear the robe of Chaser be in accordance with me like the water of Chaser and this is a very important thing because Chaser is in the Zolamat in the obscurity and everybody is looking for this water of life this all behayat and he's the guardian of it and he's the one who can judge if you can drink if you ever can find him in the obscurity of Zola Zolamat he's the one who judges if he can give you that water and make you verdant again make you green again I will not insist on this today but in comparative literature it's very interesting to compare this theme in Persian literature to the theme of that we call in medieval European poetry the theme of reverdine re re re re green I don't have to say it in English but the reverdine is a style in the medieval poems and it's it has all to do with this because in the reverdine you have the the cycle of spring coming back but the cycle of spring coming back is all always connected to love to the experience of love that becomes the water which makes the world green again when spring comes but this is something else but it would be quite interesting to study that I just tell it to say that that water of life the idea that desire love and water are connected metaphorically is not specific to this to Nezami or to Persian poetry but of course it's it's something that is rather universal imagine so you see that here in this image that he is standing on a fish like in an ocean precisely because he's an aquatic character he's the one who who reigns over the waters of life and at the same time he holds a globe in his hands because it is an allusion to the Persian belief that the world is a globe that is on on the horns of a of a Taurus and that Taurus is standing on a fish and very often when you say in Persian poets say as mahi tamah from fish to moon it means the whole world because it's considered that the whole word is standing actually on a fish and this means that in a way he is is expanded into into cosmic dimensions and it explains to us that when Leili says to Majnun you are my case or Majnun says to Leili you are my case because there is a reciprocity in this love it means that not only that you are the one who guides me in the obscurity of this world but also the one who embodies the whole cosmic powers that make the world turn and be return and return to spring every year I will not insist on this but it's a theme in itself actually because Hezra is also the guide the spiritual guide we can see in that image that's that the search for love and the search for inspiration appear as an initiation to a higher wisdom to a specific kind of knowledge that can in turn be transmitted through the words of poetry any reader says nezami any reader of it will fall in love as I quoted before let us remark in passing that desiring love is evoked without object as a pure state of being in itself a sign of the living soul in the reader of nezami's poetry he says everybody who is in love he doesn't say in love with what he says just you have to be in the state of being in love as we as Rumi hinted to that we talked about it yesterday jami as for him in the prologue of his chapter called dharma in the issue saadeghan was said the ocean gun so the chap it means concerning the the love of the sincere ones and this is sincerity of the lovers he says chonso asal ze ish gdam sadd ish qatashi shouk dar kalam sadd when the dawn of asal whispered love put the fire of desire in the column the column of God of course with which he writes the universe creates you the universe but also the column of the poet column is both the column of God and the column of the poet which makes of both of them creators of course and actually this this parallel between poetry and the column of God which also wrote the Quran in the pre-eternity the asal the time of pre-eternity is no wonder in under the column of jami because jami is the person is the one who gave the expression or on in Persian when he tried to define the mass navi of Rumi so you know he's he parallels the function of the poet with the function of a prophet and he was he was a very good Muslim he had no problem with that I just say in case just in case so and the same jami says about the circumstances of the composition of the romance romance he says let's have his words read in Persian but which one Sarmayi Marhameez ishqast Balqadami Adami ishqast. So he considers that you cannot you are not a human being if you're deprived of love and if you want to know what love the the intimacy of love is you need to experience love and then you will become a real human being so don't say anything except speak about when you speak about love and don't hear anything neither any word that is not about love is not worth saying it so be silent if you are not if you have nothing else to say then if you have something if you want to say something else than love it's better to be silent and he says that as a poet to say that actually if you if you want to compose poetry you absolutely need to speak about love the two are completely connected and he adds that he wrote before Leilio Majnun the story of Joseph Zolecha Joseph and Zolecha and he says this was a source of grace again he uses the word Cheshme it was a source of grace but my thirst was not quenched so the poet is also someone who's thirsty he's thirsty of his own words explaining what love is but my thirst was not quenched so I and I wanted more so I turned to the story of Leilio Majnun and this is the ultimate story of course in the following so another parallel between Majnun's situation and that of the narrator concerns the background the narrator I would say the narrators Jami and Nezami concerns the background that provides such importance to the image of water Nezami insists on the fact that the story in itself is so to speak barren as we said and that he needed to dig in order to find water in it as I quoted it before this is really interesting to explain the process of inspiration as to Majnun it is necessarily in the desert that he can dig his own heart and achieve both perfect love and perfect poetry the pearl is the pearl image strengthens this idea because pearls belong to the imagery of water in the treatises of gemology in the medieval period it is said of the pearls that they are a sublime transmutation of a drop of water into a jewel so door which is the metaphor of for poetry is very often is is considered in the medieval times as a quintessence of water Nezami has adopted actually the main elements of the legend and particularly the desert elements recalling its great moments although with some personal choices and developments which I will not quote but I will not develop today all of the all of these differences but some of them are important to hint at for example the displacement from the pastoral setting of the Arab tale you know they were keeping the camels together has been transformed by Nezami into a Maktab where Majnun experiences Majnun and Leili experience love at first sight and again it's very important that it's reciprocal he falls in love with her she falls in love with him and you have a description of Leili's beauty and of Majnun's beauty which is by the way not not so important in the Arab tale in in Nezami from the beginning it's reciprocal and it happens in the Maktab so if there are any historians of the 12th century I would be quite interested if they could tell me what that means does it mean that in Nezami's time girls and boys went to school together to learn Arabic and to learn to read the Quran he doesn't say that it is something so extraordinary he puts it as if it was something quite normal but this is just a question I asked to historians because I have never found the answer to this question anyway Nezami needed Leili Majnun to meet in the Maktab because he needed to show that their experience of love is also an experience of a higher knowledge than that which you achieve or you you can collect in books and that is why he uses a series of anaphores that are quite interesting to to to read in detail he says in Persian so they are in the school they have fallen in love and that's how he describes the difference between these two and their friends who are in the Maktab with them excuse me their friends were there to learn and study while they would learn the tale of tenderness their friends built a language made of words while they were writing with words beyond words their friends celebrated the greatness of language while they spoke the language of love and the heart their friends studied sciences out of books while they breathe only the air of love their friends learned to count evermore while they only recounted their love and in this image one of the very very of the numerous images that represent this scene in actually all the Hamzeh of Nezami has been very often illustrated and in when you look into the manuscripts of Lady Omajno and the illustrated manuscripts you have systematically the illustration of the scene because the readers or the illustrators considered that this scene was really very important that's what it means and what do you see in this scene I just show you one of those miniatures yeah I could have shown many others is that you can see me at the center almost under the Mehrab you can see Leili in front of her you have Majnun and as you may notice they're not looking into their books the others are looking somewhere else they're looking into her books they're looking to each other etc. they don't look where they should look and what is the direction in which they should look is the direction of the Mehrab maybe you have noticed that Leili is under the Mehrab and what is the Mehrab in a mosque it is the architectural detail that shows the direction of the Kaaba of the Mecca and shows the direction for the for the ritual prayer so when you when you want to to pray to God you have to to know the direction to which you must pray and the Mehrab shows you the direction and Nezami notes when describing the beauty of Leili she was the Mehrab for the prayer of the idol worshipers she was the lamp of the house and the candle of the garden and this illustration is a is a commentary through images of this particular verse and it's particularly important because it shows that Leili is actually a lamp exactly as God is considered Nour-u-Samawat-e-Waraas in the Quran the God God is said to be the light of heaven and earth and he is the lamp of the universe and when he says Leili was the lamp Leili was the Mehrab he means that she is literally a theophany that is a light of God incarnated in a in a human being here in a woman and many times you have the beloved represented in a Mehrab as a sovereign and incarnation of light and indeed usually the Mehrab is decorated with that verse by that Quranic verse Allah Nour-u-Samawat-e-Waraas God is the light of the earth and the sky so it is this detail shows us that Nezami is telling us more than just love story just an ordinary love story the fact that he uses the word Mehrab to say to define Leili means that already Nezami was spiritualizing the theme Jami also compares very often the beauty of Leili to with religious terms in religious terms or particularly in terms that remind us of the Kaaba itself not only what is she the Mehrab but her dark hair is compared to the dark the black curtain that is around the Kaaba and the whole body becomes the Kaaba around which Majnun does his circumambulations so this is very very odd under the alam of such a theologian as Jami but he was he had no problem in doing this in his poem for example Jami says when he saw when Majnun saw from afar the black color the black color of the curtains of the veils of Mecca his eyes were dazzled by the splendor Jamal of the Kaaba he remembered the beauty Jamal of Leili and the burning of desire made him made him shout made him shout when a poet shouts usually that means that he is producing some very noisy poetry and in a way Majnun's poetry is very noisy in the sense that it's very violent even the Arabic poems attributed to that Majnun are very have something very violent about them but it's important to see that when he sees the curtain it reminds him of Leili and in other places when he sees Leili it reminds him of the curtain of the Kaaba so you know they're closely connected in the same way as she is the Mehrab that is she shows to the direction of Mecca her person shows to shows the direction of unicity she's an idol that is a sign of the religion of unicity which is against idol idolatry idolatry but they have to Majnun cannot Majnun that is every human soul cannot understand what unicity is cannot have access to the Jalal the splendor of God without the the mediation of Jamal beauty so that is how transcendence and immanence work together in this poetry all the Jami does not deviate from the original story story told by the Kitab al-Agani that is he doesn't speak about the Maqtab or anything like that from reading both works we get the feeling that the story per se does not is not so much important as what the descriptions of the variations of love tell us about the experience of love that both stories have a rhapsodic structure and that is why they're rather loose as far as structure is concerned giving the impression of successive lyric moments that you know that follow in a way the structure of the desert itself as you know you know the desert is not a town so you you just have nothing to hold to you have nothing to show you the direction so you have to go through that desert even poetically by not having a you know a story that is built as Nezami can build them you know we know the mastery of Nezami when he wants to build a story he can do it it's not because he couldn't do it that he didn't do it it's because he felt that his imagery his structure of the story had to follow the this no man's land that the desert is in a way so they designed both of them their mass navies as great lyrics that follow the structure of the desert the reader wanders in the love story sometimes relaxed by the evocation of the garden because he does that of course me Nezami cannot refrain from describing gardens although these are always you know describe description of gardens in the desert you know Oasis or seeing thing like that with palm trees for example you know you don't have cypresses but you have palm trees instead so sometimes we're relaxed by the evocation of a garden sometimes roused to emotional climax by the poetic evocation of love although there are a few warlike episodes as I told you before who may argue that the poem basically only contains three types of action falling in love burning with desire and dying you understand why Nezami found it very difficult to make a to make poetry out of that and this does not only concern the main characters in various degrees it's also true of Majnun's parents and of Ebni Salam the person oh sorry I forgot to show you that beloved in in her mirror this is very very beautiful miniature I'll tell you I come to that later so this is also true of Majnun's parents and of Ebni Salam Leili's husband because Leili is married by force to another man so that the father can make sure that she will never be able to marry Majnun the best way to to impeach a woman to marry a man is to marry her to another man that's called the forced marriage so in various degrees Majnun's parents who are in love with their son his aunt his uncle Ebni Salam and many other characters in the in the story are represent also one aspect of love but these are these lovers act very little or not at all their main characteristic is that they long for someone for someone or something they cannot possess Majnun's parents want him to return to reason to life to them and they die in their frustrated desire Ebni Salam literally literally both poet tells us dries up dries up and he dies because Leili refuses any sexual intercourse with him she even slaps him when he tries to approach initiated to supreme love and sublime poetry but incapable of rising to Majnun's degree in the path of love the other lovers return to the civilized world taking with them Majnun's words and in the end because they cannot they don't know what to do with this these words because as Nezami puts it in the beginning of the story they are already dead to love they think they love but their desire is not right so they are already dead so they listen to the words of Majnun but it makes absolutely no effect on them and they dry up and they die Leili herself mostly does nothing nothing but cry hidden in her tent she also prays and sometimes send letters but that's all and she explains her inaction by the fact that she is a woman actually a social reading of this poem has let some experts to consider that Leili is the model of the Muslim woman who can do nothing and who is so weak but you I think you're by this time by by now you have understood that I totally disagree with that because she is of course a the of a theophany so she's not going to do anything else than just be a theophany but strangely enough Majnun himself doesn't act either to obtain Leili and that reminds us of the character in the end of the Masna Masnavi that I referred to yesterday the one who doesn't act had it all and when he wages war afterwards he regrets to have done this he says I shouldn't have done this because it's it's not through action that you obtain what you have to obtain so in a way he's a passive character Mola we would say car hell it is his father who asked for for the hand of Leili without result and who takes him to Mecca to cure him from his love it is his friend no foul that wages war against the tribe of Leili to obtain her chopped chapter of the chapter he increasingly dis disincarnates and the desert becomes a symbol of his absence from himself and he's completely disconnected with the human world from the beginning both Jami and Nezami tell us that his flesh and blood are made of love why because Nezami invents a story very interesting story that is not in the in the Arabic version he says that actually the parents of Majnun could not have a child were childless and they prayed to God for years to give them a son in the end God gave them that son who had all the perfections he was so handsome and he was a poet and he was so and so and so and everybody loved him particularly his wet nurse his wet nurse who Nezami says milked him with the milk of love so his his even his bodily constitution is made of love and Jami doesn't say doesn't adopt this version by Nezami but he says nevertheless anyone whose clay is made of love like Majnun and who bears that word on the tablet of his destiny cannot erase it from his heart even if he spends his life washing the tablet and actually there is a very famous episode in which Majnun's father is taking to Mecca to ask God to cure him against again we have this idea that love is an illness of which one has to be cured of course one has to be cured if one is a normal human being that wants to live in this law in this world we will see that of course Majnun is no ordinary human being who wants to live in this world so when his father takes him to Mecca this is the illustration of it when he sees again the curtain of the black veil of the Kaaba it reminds him of Leili and instead of asking God to cure him that is what he says they tell me this is very famous Aishk beqaya ti re sanam kumaan ad agar cemanna manam. Kas ceshme aishk deh mara nur in sor me makon ze ceshme mandur. Gar cezhe shara be'aishk mastam. Aashik tar azin konam ke hastam. Goyand ke khuz e'aishk waakon. Leili talabi ze del rahakon. Yareb to mara be'ruh leili har lahsebede ziyade meili. Even those who don't know Persian have noticed that he constantly repeats leili, leili, leili talabi. He makes compounds with this name and to translate it briefly. So when he sees the Kaaba, he takes the ring that is on the curtain and he asks, he makes this prayer to God. They tell me to cut myself from love, but this is not what is done in an intimate relation. My nourishment is love, nothing else. If love in me died, how would I not die? My whole nature was cultivated by love. I wish not my destiny without love. The heart that is void of love for sure, the torrent of pain will take it away. O God, I beseech you by the divinity of your divinity, by the perfection of your royalty. Make me achieve such excess in love that I pass away, let remain love. Give me light, this is to be noted, give me light from the source of love, again that name, that word, cheshme, source of love. And of course in cheshme you have chashme, I, that's why after he says, do not keep this call, this call, you say that in English, this call from my eyes, because call is supposed to give light to your eyes, you know. And of course there is always a play with oxymorons here. You have all the time black and darkness and light. The call is black, but it gives light to your eyes. The kaaba, the curtain of the kaaba is, the veil of the kaaba is black, but it provides the light of love in Majnum's heart. So you have always that play between darkness and light, between day and night, which is actually something that is suggested even by the names, or by the name, by the name at least, by the name of Leili, because her name Leili means the nightly one, the one who is related to the night. And of course Majnum doesn't mean the daylight one, but actually we always represent Majnum in his desert burned by the sun. So it's very important to understand that they are echoing each other as being one solar character and the other a nightly character in a way. So you see here an image of Majnum. He's very often represented a little tanned. Well, this is the idea of the miniaturist of someone who is tanned by the sun. But he's not, his hair is not cut. I mean, his hair is just disheveled and he's, well, he's not totally naked, but almost. And he's always in the desert. But of course, the miniaturists are like Nezami, even when they're paying to desert, they need to put some vegetation in it, although it is in the desert theme here. And he's surrounded, of course, by wild animals, which is also another topic that is connected to Majnum. And Nezami tells us that in the desert, he's in connection with the animals because he has dominated his own self, the animals inside him. That is why he can live with animals without being scared at all. And the animals will not attack him because of that. So after this event in the Kaaba, when Majnum says, oh Lord, make me every instant feel even more desire of Leili's face, they tell me to stop Leili Talabi, which is a compound invented by Nezami. Precisely you have in Leili Talabi the word Talab that we evoked yesterday. And you have Leili Talabi means the desiring of Leili. Though they tell me to stop this desiring of Leili, but I cannot do that because it's in my essence to be that. And he adds, oh Lord, make me every instant feel even more desire for her face. He doesn't say for her, he says for her face. And we all know that again, everything passes away except his face. This is also a Quranic verse. And what is important is the face. And the beauty of the beloved is always expressed in words that describe the beauty of the face. And the face itself becomes a source of light. After that event, of course, you can imagine that Majnum's father realizes that his son is beyond any cure and that he will, well, he's definitely mad and nothing can be done for him. That Nezami says that. He says, well, he was desperate. He knew that nothing was to be done. At this point, we know that, of course, when you become a Majnum, nothing indeed is to be done. So maybe I'll show you some other deserts images. I forgot to do it after. This one is less tan, but it's really the same imagery with the rocks, the typical rocks of Persian miniatures in which if you look closely, you can see that there are demons in the rocks which remind us of the demonic character of madness. Because Majnum means mad. So someone who is mad is considered possessed by the demons. So in this desert, what does Majnum do? Actually, he, the only thing he does is to compose poems. Sometimes he saves certain animals from a hunter, for example, particularly Ghazal, Ghazale. So deers, you say deers for Ghazal, Ghazale. Or who, or Ghazale, because they remind him of Leili. And it's Nezami and Jami both in a way make a reversal of the function of metaphor. Usually you say Leili was beautiful like a deer, she was like, her hair was like a raven, or like the night, et cetera. So you do metaphors or comparisons to tell the beauty of the beloved in terms of cosmic beauty or of animals or things like that. Strangely enough, what Nezami and Jami do is that they show us Majnum holding deers into his arms, speaking to the raven, speaking to the night, as if they became the presence, the really flesh and blood presence of the beloved in his desert. And as if the images we use to describe the beauty actually became real, as if it was not the beloved that was compared to those things, but those things that are the signs of the beloved. So they really change things. It's a way of telling us that poetry does that, makes it real, makes what we consider maybe like just an image, makes it become real. And the other thing that he does in his desert, except making love to the metaphors of Leili, is to pronounce her name. For example, Nezami says, apart from the name of Leili, he would listen to no word. If someone talked to him of something else, he did not listen or answer. Well, I don't know exactly who someone might be in the desert, but that's how he puts it. Or in Jami, he says, and this is a beautiful passage. Jami says about this Leili Gui. He speaks even of Leili Gui, saying Leili all the time. He says, So again, you hear it, even if you don't know Persian, you can hear that there is a kind of obsessive repetition of the word, of the name. Here, I would like to insist on the fact that, of course, he says Leili, Leili, Leili, Leili, and then he adds, sorry, the translation is, Leili is the form and my heart is the gem. Leili is the grain and I am the earth. Leili is the soul, John, and I'm the body for her. She is the parrot. The parrot is the thee metaphor of poetry. Of the poet, the parrot in Persian literature. She's the parrot and my heart, and she's the parrot of my, sorry, she's the parrot and my heart, where she stands. As long as the soul is within the body, there will be me and Leili, Leili, and me. I have looked everywhere in the world. I have seen all its inhabitants, but all that which had, all that which had a weakness, I saw that it could be replaced, except for Leili, a la Leili, whom nothing can replace. This again is very strange under the pen of a theologian, of someone who was a spiritual master and also a very respected theologian because it sounds like la ilaha illallah. You have these sonorities of Leili, a la Leili that reminds us of that formula in Arabic that means there is no God but God. So when he says, I have seen that everything had weakness, a la Leili, it means that everything was part of multiplicity and the weaknesses of multiplicity, a la Leili, which becomes again a form of the divinity. And this is expressed only through the sonorities. That's what I want to explain tonight, is that the poet, just by using Leili, a la Leili, he creates a kind of e-harm, a kind of allusion to the religious formulation of unicity, la ilaha illallah, Leili, Leili, a la Leili. You know, it's, well, somehow heretical, but that's how it is. So I will just maybe jump this because I want to not to miss the essential point. At a certain point, when Majnun encounters Leili, he tells her that it is not, although he always repeats the name of Leili, although he wants to really focus on her and on nothing else. At a certain point, when he encounters Leili in real, in flesh and blood, he tells her that in the end of the day, that it is not her that he loves. He's really mad, isn't he? But he loves the love of her. And this is, of course, this saves the story of Ella Leili and Leili being a form of the divine, et cetera, from precisely from the crime of idolatry. Here, he says, so firm is my longing for you, what need do I have of the form of you? So she becomes a transcendent thing, you know, kind of immaterial being. To have you in my love is crime of association. Either love is my man or you. When your love shows its face, absence best becomes your face. It is noteworthy that the concept of Majnun not being in love with Leili in the end, but with the idea of the idea of love, or even with love itself, simply with love itself, has been part of the legend as attested by another Arab author, Ebne Tulum. He says, Majnun's beloved came one day to see him. She found him crying, Leila, Leila, Leila. And on his feverish bosom, he threw snow that melted immediately. I don't know where the snow came from in the desert, but Grace, she said, it is me. Grace, she said, it is me, Leila. Then looking at her, he said, go away. I am all busy with your, with the love of you. You are in the way. In Jami's version, this episode becomes a surrealistic allegory. Really beautiful, we should make an animation of it. It's the episode in which Majnun becomes a tree. At some point, he encounters Leili when she's on her way for a journey, and she asks him to wait for her until he returns. She returns from her journey. So Majnun stays immobile, exactly on the spot where she's told him to stay, and he starts growing roots, and he becomes a tree, and the birds make their nests and lay eggs, shining like pearls in his entangled black hair. Just imagine, nobody has never illustrated this, and it's a pity. And Jami says, he sat like a tree from his feet or from his roots. He sat like a tree from his feet or from his roots. And after, so, he becomes a tree, and you have all those fantastic birds coming out of the, flying from his head or from his branches, I don't know how to say it. And then Leili comes back, and she says, oh, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, you are a bird, oh, you who has adopted the religion of fidelity, she cried, look at me, the one for whom you have faithfully waited here. He answered, who are you, and whence are you coming from? Why do you come to me in vain? She said, I am your soul's desire, the wish of your heart and the power of your mind, that is, I am Leili who has made you drunk, Leili from whom you're waiting here. She also repeats her own name, trying to remind him of his love. He said, go away, for the love of you today has burnt me with a world-burning fire. It has taken away from my eyes the dust of form. It has taken away from my eyes the dust of form. I will no more be prey to forms. My love has driven me on the ocean of blood. There is no more lover or beloved left. And this is of course a very important theme in all the literature that is connected to what we call the religion of love in Sufism or in spiritual Islam in general. The idea that lover and beloved are concepts for the beginning of the path in the end of the path lover and beloved should disappear and only love remains having absorbed all personality, all forms, all in a way, all desire. But that is of course the end of the journey. So Majnun's love for Leili is avowedly not a desire of possession. Not a desire of Leili as a woman of flesh and blood. It is a quest of love for love's sake, the desire to experiment that longing that ish as a radical emotion that burns and destroys any other feeling, emotion or attachment. This kind of love requires the negation of all other things. That is why the only possible setting for Majnun's wandering life is indeed the barren desert of Najd from away from all human beings. The central role of images as incarnations is perceptible in Nezami's own poetic technique. In the same way as Leili is the living image of love that triggers Majnun's madness and takes him to beyond Leili. So in the same way as Leili is the living image of love that triggers Majnun's madness, the musk near the night, the moon become the living images of Leili, feeling so to speak, the gap of her absence. And in turn that is exactly the role assigned to similes and metaphors both in Majnun's poetry and in Nezami and Jami's works. The progress of Majnun is definitely a progress towards nothingness to which his ascetic attitude and appearance, here he's really ascetic because it's an Indian miniature, to which his ascetic attitude and appearance contribute in a visual manner. That's why the theme has been so often illustrated. The fact that he doesn't eat or sleep anymore is a sign of the process of annihilation. Time and again we are reminded that for Majnun, Esch is an initiation to self annihilation which brings actually a great paradox because it's self annihilation in which poetry still remains. And poetry, as Rumi says, is always a sign of being. And it was also problematic for Rumi himself to tell his experience of nothingness in words that were sign of being hasty. So there is this paradox at the heart of these love poems that they invite us to make an experience of not non-being anymore, but by so doing they use words that belong to the world of being. And this paradox cannot of course be solved in fact, except if you stop, if you stop making, composing poetry, which they never do because they cannot refrain from that. So I will skip that and come to the end and to my conclusion because it's half past eight now and I will not talk about the pearl that Leili is. I just arrived to the end. Just a few words about the image of the pearl that I referred to previously and that is so important in the poetry of Nezami, Jami, but all the others, even Hafez, very often alludes to the fact that his poetry is a necklace of pearls that he has done and what the poet says is a production of pearls coming from his mouth, et cetera. But in Nezami, what is added to the idea that the pearl is the metaphor of poetry is that Leili is also connected to a pearl and she's said to be an unpierced pearl. Not only because she's a gem, but also because she remains a virgin till the end. And Nezami, not Nezami, in all the Persian poetic tradition, you say of poetry that it's well pierced pearl. So it shows us that Leili is the pearl and the poetry is what she becomes after having become an image or an object for the poet. So she is that pearl that will be pierced by the power of the words that Nezami, Jami, Hafez, or anybody else uses and this again connects the desire of union with the desire of saying about that desire, so poetry and the experience of love. It's a little complicated to put it right, but I hope I make myself clear. Leili, as I said, is indeed hidden and Nezami says she's a hidden pearl. So she's not hidden because she's a poor Muslim woman who cannot go anywhere, but she's hidden as a woman, of course, belonging to an Arab tribe. She's veiled, she's secluded, she's lonely in her tent, but most of all, she's unattainable because she's hidden from the worldly eyes like a pearl in a shell. And Nezami says that explicitly when he says, Chonbaz shodan suykhane shod darsadafan dore yegane when they went back home, Leili and her family, that unique pearl returned into her shell because you cannot unveil the pearl without some precautions. You cannot show the pearl to anybody. That is why poetry has a very dangerous status in a way because it unveils the pearl that should remain hidden. Through the complimentary of images of tent veil and pearl, both Leili and poetry are presented as uniting in their beauty darkness and light because she's hidden, but she's also, pearl is both water and light. Night and day, mystery and knowledge, desire and initiation, the pearl of love and knowledge that supreme knowledge that is the knowledge of the reality of being. So that supreme pearl of love and knowledge is echoed by the shining face of the beloved and is hidden somewhere in the long dark hair of the beloved metaphor of the night of desire. Leili is indeed a hidden treasure, ganja. And you know, the whole work of Nezami is called panj ganja, the five treasures. So Leili is the ganja within one of the ganja, a treasure within the whole, the ensemble that is the panj ganja. She's the hidden ganja protected as the tradition goes by either a snake or a dragon. Leili, the torch among the lovelies, was a pain to herself, but a treasure for the others. On this treasure, a snake was coiled up like a protective bull walk. She lived in her sorrow like a ruby in the heart of stone, although a priceless pearl she was, like the moon she was in the mouth of a dragon. I will not have time to comment upon this, but it would be quite interesting to see that how this image came from China and what are the implications of the image of the dragon or the snake because it's not always separable. And again, the treasure she is metaphorically relates to Majnuun's poetry and knowledge, also represented as a hidden treasure. Nézamie says, Majnuun knew the knowledge hidden, having solved the riddles of heaven with beautiful words like golden coins, with verses and poems like bright pearls. Everyone knows that never could a heedless madman scatter such pearls. Majnuun may be mad, but he's supremely wise in his practice of poetry. Thus, in the same way as Leili embodies the archetype of beauty, Majnuun's poems embody a higher knowledge found only in the experience of love. This embodiment takes the form of metaphors that are par excellence, poetic riddles, because they have to remain veiled in a way. So poetry both unveils and veils, unveils and veils all the time. The dynamic of desire stands in the successive evocations of the beloved's beauty as tokens of another reality. The poetic evocations inflame the imagination, filling it with metaphors of the beloved and initiating thus to the nature of love, much more convincingly that the flesh and blood presence of the beloved, which can never be so dynamic, in absence only desire can be triggered again. Through the burning desire of the ideal beloved, Majnuun has been able to empty himself from himself and thus make room for the other. He has traveled through the desert to himself and reached the ocean of love where Leili's pearl was hidden. The ultimate function of poetry is to initiate the reader to the realities of love, to reflect the beauty of the beloved in the mirror of the heart and thus to dive into the ocean of desire and drink from the fountain of inspiration the water of eternal life. Thank you.