They Call Love of Layla Majnun a Sickness and Immodesty

Who were Layla and Majnun?

Everyone knows them. A boy and a girl who loved each other with a pure and innocent heart. They did not harm anyone. It is one of the most beautiful love stories in human history, because it teaches us the meaning of sacrifice, i.e., to put the happiness of the one you love before your own happiness.

A Muslim preacher was telling a gathering:

'"Islam wants to kill Valentine’s Day. It wants to kill incidents like Layla and Majnun. Boys and girls falling in love with each other is a door to immodesty and indecency."

This sentiment is not fringe, but it is rooted in mainstream orthodox fatwas. For instance, the widely cited Salafi website IslamQA states: (link):

"Attachment to the opposite sex will not happen to a heart that is filled with love of Allah; it only affects a heart that is empty."
Shaykh Ibn Taymiyah said: "If the heart loves Allah alone, it will not even think of loving anyone else. When a heart falls in love, that is due to lack of love for Allah alone."
They also say love is a psychological sickness.

Now ask yourself honestly:

• Was the love of Layla and Majnun really immodest?

• Isn't love the most beautiful feeling of the universe a human can have?

• Isn't it natural for humans to fall in love?

Now see the contrast. 

1. Islam allows a 50 year old man to do Nikah with a 6 year old little girl. Nikah means Islamic marriage. A 6 year old cannot even give consent. She is robbed of her childhood. She never gets a chance to grow up and fall in love with a boy of her own age. But Islam calls it completely modest and Halal. 

2. A man can marry 4 women at the same time, only for lust, with no need or necessity. This is called completely modest and Halal by Islam. No one calls it a psychological sickness. 

3. A man can buy dozens of slave girls from slave markets. He can keep them for temporary sexual relations, just like Shia Mutah which is temporary marriage. He does this not for any need, but only for lust. Then when his lust is over, he can sell them in the market and buy more younger girls. This whole buying and selling of women for sex is called modest and Halal by Islam.

• We never hear a preacher tell a 50-year-old man to "focus only on his love for Allah" rather than marrying a child.

• We never hear that a man should forsake his desire for four wives and instead channel that energy solely into divine devotion.

• We never hear that Muslim men should have abstained from buying young girls for their lust and to preserve the purity of their love for Allah only.

That advice to "only love Allah" is only used when two young people fall in love.

If love is really a sickness, why is it only a sickness for Layla and Majnun, but not for the man who wants 4 wives and dozens of slave girls?

Love is the most natural, beautiful, and universal human emotion. To condemn it as a "sickness" while permitting exploitative historical practices is not a defense of modesty. It is a profound contradiction that demands to be questioned.

Dear Muslim brother and sister, think about it with an open heart.

Is love really indecency? Is love really a sickness?

Or is love the most human thing we have?

Is love between a boy and a girl natural or unnatural?

Islam says it is a religion of nature. But if it is a religion of nature, why does it call this most natural human feeling a sickness of the mind?

Was LOVE between Layla Majnun Immodest? Let love be the judge of Islam's truthfulness. 

P.S.

You might ask:

If orthodox clerics and conservative society strictly oppose romantic love, why is popular literature and poetry overflowing with stories like Layla and Majnun?

The answer lies in the gap between fiction and reality.

Society allows romantic love as an abstract ideal on paper, while strictly suppressing it in everyday life.

Religious families may admire the legend in poetry, but they aggressively forbid the same freedom when it comes to their own sons and daughters.

This contradiction exists because love is a fundamental human force that cannot be erased by decree. Clerics and traditional institutions understood that waging a complete war against human emotion would trigger open revolt against religious authority. To preserve the legal and social order, they tolerated romantic longing in books, so long as it never threatened real-world control over marriage and family structures.

P.S.S.: Poetry in Islamic Cultures (More about Separation than Union)

One striking feature of much classical Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Turkish literature is that the greatest love stories are rarely stories of successful union. They are stories of separation (hijr), longing, waiting, sacrifice, and impossible love.

Layla and Majnun never truly unite. Heer and Ranjha die before living together. Sohni and Mahiwal drown. Sassi dies searching for Punnu.

Why did separation become more sacred than union?

One possible explanation is the social reality of many traditional Muslim societies. When interaction between unmarried men and women was heavily restricted, literature became a place where forbidden or impossible love could be imagined and celebrated. The emotional intensity came not from living together, but from longing for someone who could not easily be reached.

This is a hypothesis, not a universal rule. Other cultures also produced tragic love stories. But the prominence of hijr over visal is a distinctive and recurring theme in much of the Persian-Islamic literary tradition.