A pivotal scene from Nizami’s romance of Layla and Majnun (composed in 1188) brings the madman Qays (Majnun) on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he knocks at the doors of the Ka'aba only to beseech God to strengthen his love for Layla. At the heart of the painting, an emaciated Majnun appears in green robes in the midst of this desperate moment. The composition cleverly combines visual planes of painting and text to offer a multi-perspectival view, which also transforms the page into an extension of the scene’s architecture. Crenellations line the top and bottom of the painting to give the impression of gazing into the shrine’s courtyard. The Ka'aba’s black structure is fore fronted from the rest of the scene, and extends upwards behind the text block to burst into the top margin of the folio. Meanwhile, the painting’s raised background allows the viewer to behold both the shocked reactions from the spectators in the courtyard and colonnades far behind the shrine. Directly above the door frame, an illuminated gold header on a ground of swirling vines relates that Majnun’s father brought him on this visit to the Ka'aba.

The young man, Qays, loses his mind over the separation from his beloved Layla, eventually earning the title, “Majnun Layla,” literally meaning “possessed-by-jinn/driven crazy for Layla.” This dramatic pilgrimage marks a narrative breaking point for Majnun’s connection to his family and society at large. Majnun’s father and kinsmen undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca in a vain bid to cure Majnun of his obsessive love. Once they arrive, his father advises Majnun to pray at the Ka’aba for God to relieve his madness, which is where this folio’s text picks up. In a scandalous and sacrilegious craze, Majnun cries out laughing before he begs at the Ka’aba’s door for his passion for Layla to grow. Upon returning to camp, his father says, “He has blessed Layla and cursed himself.” Word of Majnun’s display spreads across the populace to the caliph, sending the madman to retreat into the desert with only animals as his companions.

This folio belongs to the Persian telling of “Layla and Majnun” from Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet). However, the tale predates this renowned rendition, stretching back to the earliest Bedouin ‘Udhri poems of unrequited love from the late seventh to eighth centuries, which sparked numerous adaptations among Umayyad courtly writers. The romance also became intertwined with Sufi concepts of love, the annihilation of the ego/self, and madness, seen in the mystic poems of al-Sarraj (d. 988) among others. By the early sixteenth-century, numerous copies of Nizami’s Khamsa were illustrated by elite Persianate workshops, including those in Shiraz, Iran. The region’s commercial production of high-end manuscripts was bustling at the end of the fifteenth-century and continued through the late sixteenth century. This folio forms part of a group of loose leaves from the same Shirazi manuscript dated to 1517 by the scribe Muhammad Zarin-Qalam on the colophon (see: M.73.5.604). Produced in the early years of Safavid rule over the area, the folios highlight the luxurious production elements that would grow and develop in subsequent decades under the support of Turkman Zu’lqadir governors: skillful illumination, intricate depictions of architectural details and material worlds, framed within complex compositions that experimented with text and image relations.