ABSTRACT
One way to shed light on the great popularity of Majnun Layla during the ‘Abbasid-era in Baghdad especially is to set forth an approximate genre analogy with modern twentieth-century American culture: the film subgenre of the American “Western.” Indeed, the entirety of ‘Abbasid-era Arabic and Persian language love literatures, including the meta-discourse on love, are heavily informed by ideas, concepts and motifs from a kind of synthesis of Greek, Hellenistic, Platonic, Jewish, and Perso-Sassanian intellectual and cultural legacies. The historical convergence of timelines between the popularization of this particular romance, Majnun Layla and the ‘Abbasid-era translation projects of Greek knowledge to Arabic has gone unexamined by critics. Evidently, the Abbasid elite, urban interrogations of the multiple categories of ethnicity, culture, identity, religion and language within the cosmopolitan capital of Baghdad were performed in and through assessments and reassessments of women and men, gender relations, and sexuality.
