Layla Visiting Majnun in the Desert

In the tragic romance between Layla and Qays (later known as majnun—“mad” or “possessed”), the two met and fell in love as schoolchildren. Layla’s father rejected Qays’s marriage p...

This is a small illustrated copy of Hamdi’s Layla and Majnun. Hamdi (d. 1503) was an Ottoman poet who wrote his Layla and Majnun in Turkish in 1499 after the famous Persian work of...

In the 15th century, Shiraz became a prolific center for the production of illustrated manuscripts for Timurid and Turkman rulers, as well as patrons of less ample means. More than...

Seated on a carpet with a lattice and floral design is a female figure, identified as “Layla” through the Urdu inscription above her head. She wears an elaborate headdress, a long ...

The unmistakable image of Majnun—dreamy-eyed but skeletal—marks the vertical axis of this work. The figure is boxed in by 20 lines of Persian poetry. The rubric “Image of Majnun” ...

The story of the miraculous night journey of the Prophet Muhammad is based on passages from the Qur'an (17:1, 53:1–18, and 81:19–25), as well as later hadith that describe his trav...

The first illustration of this manuscript depicts the king who saw everything was the Divine: "He who appears in Layla's figure, He who looks on through Majnun's eyes."...

The manuscript opens with an illuminated sarlawh which consists of an original cartouche right above the text and a later addition on top of that. The original illuminated rectangu...