Majnun

When the tradition of book illustration in the Turkish-Islamic World is considered, it is seen that some literary works stand out more. Among these, Khamseh of Nizami Ganjavi, who guided many poets after him as the founder of the Khamseh genre, takes the first place. The fact that the work was loved so much at the time it was written, constantly copied and reproduced, and that its illustrated copies were prepared in almost all palaces from the earliest centuries when the tradition of book illustration began, adds a special importance to this work.
The main subject of this research is the miniatures of the story “Majnun Taken By His Father To The Ka'bah” from Layla and Majnun Masnavi, which is the third masnavi of the Khamsa, written in Persian in less than four months at the request of Shirvanshah Celâlüddevle Ahsitân in 584 (1188). The production of illustrated manuscripts bears the traces of the period in which they were prepared, the patrons who placed the order and the painters who prepared it. In iconographic studies, it is important to reveal the conditions under which the work was prepared and for what purpose in order to establish intercultural connections. In this context, miniature examples within the scope of the study reveal how the same story was constructed by painters in different centers.
The production of illustrated manuscripts under the auspices of important art patrons such as Shahruh, Baysungur, Mohammed Cuki, his wife Ismet al-Dunya, Shah Ismail, Shah Tahmasp, Ebülgazi Bahadir Khan shows how much Khamseh of Nizamî is loved through all over the Islamic geography. The pictures associated with this story in the illustrated manuscripts in important museums and libraries such as Berlin Staatliche Museen, Dublin Chester Beatty Library, Istanbul Topkapi Palace Museum Library, St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum, London British Museum, London Royal Asiatic Society have been identified, and studied chronologically.
In this study, the earliest examples available have been limited to the ones that date from 1420 to the 17th century. Depicted in Shiraz, Herat, Tabriz, Kazvin, Bukhara styles in the court ateliers and manuscript production centres in Timurids, Safavids, Turkmens, Uzbeks, these paintings give information about how iconography has evolved. The fact that this topic is commonly depicted as a theme highlighting the healing aspect of Islam's holiest place of visitation indicates that beliefs influence the choice of stories. Apart from Khamsa of Nizami, the use of the same subject as a pattern, with some changes in composition, in works such as Falnâmeh, Majalis al-‘Ushshaq, is also of great importance in terms of determining the continuity of the traditional miniature painting.

"The Tale of Salāmān and Absāl presented as a translation from Greek, attributed in the text’s opening lines to Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq is saturated with references from a wide-ranging variety of sources with an array of religious, cultural and textual orientations; these, as well as its generic affiliations, ideological leanings, location on the spiritual-metaphysical spectrum and Vorlagen have been studied by many. In this paper, I focus on the wording and literary forms of the text, some of which have been glossed over in the rendition of Henry Corbin, by which this text is often known. My point of departure is a collocation which draws on motifs and phraseology from popular sources, the canons of poetry and poetry in prose (including belles lettres elements in the Qur’ān), as well as terminology in medical literature in Arabic and Greek traditions. Through an analysis of phrasing drawing on philological methods of Blachère, Von Grunebaum, Arazi and others, a contextualization of this Tale (which is not covered in research on “profane love theory” e.g. by Lois Giffen) may lead to a reading of this Hermetic text within a repertoire of “romantic” commonplaces and innovations of expression. 

Keywords: Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, Salāmān and Absāl, muḍṭariban maǧnūnan, popular literature, Greek, displaced erotic wording
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a hebrew version of an article in festschrift volume in honour of yehuda liebes. "love struck" (مضطرباً مجنوناً) -- traditions of popular love literature and other literary and textual traditions in the qissat salaman wa-absal attributed to hunayn b. ishaq.

With his bizarre speech, purported miracles, and antinomian behavior, the majnun, or “mad saint of Islam,” has proved an enigma to Islamic medicine and Western positivist traditions. 
Variously understood by Galenic physicians as a madman suffering an organic illness (Dols), by anthropologists as one possessed by spirits (Crapanzano), and by scholars of Sufism as a radical ascetic (Karamustafa), the majnun has been treated as a mental patient, a prisoner, a fraud, or a religious penitent, but never a healer. 
    In this essay, we consider the majnun as a public healer, one who brings healing to human beings and to society through the restoration of God’s law.  Saints heal by actualizing the human body as the meeting-place of divinity and materiality, an isthmus (barzakh) between the “oceans of God and the cosmos.”  Using the nineteenth-century hagiographical compendium of Moroccan scholar Muhammad ibn Ja’far al-Kattani, interviews in Fez (2000), and the corporeal phenomenology of Sufi Muhya ad-Din ibn ‘Arabi, we recover the majnun as healer.  Both French and Islamic positivists rejected the majnun; for French sociologues and doctors, the majnun was a primitive “homme-fétiche” who absorbed the tribe’s maladies into his own body through a magical ritual of transference; for Moroccan Islamic nationalists, he was an anti-modern embarrassment.
Forthcoming in Henk de Smaele, Tineke Osselaer, and Kaat Wils-Verhaegen (eds.), Sign or Symptom?  Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Medicine and Religion