From the protests of 1968 to the everyday expression of queer desire, love has the potential to be radical. While this radical dimension may be cross-cultural, most theorists work within a Eurocentric framework that universalizes a particular way of understanding love. Conversely, scholarship on love that stems from other traditions is localized as only relevant to those who identify with and/or specialize in that tradition. This project, Maddening Love: Islamic Thought and the Ethics of Desire in the Legend of Layla and Majnun, remedies this tendency. I examine the transformation of the most famous love-story of Islamic cultures from its seventh-century Arabic anecdotal beginnings to it becoming a Persian romantic epic, Neẓāmī’s (d. 1209) Layli and Majnun. I argue that Neẓāmī’s text presents love as an ethical commitment that leads to a vision of community not defined by biological kinship or the requirements of premodern citizenry. I deploy interdisciplinary methods including close reading of Arabic and Persian literary accounts, historicized analysis of discourses on ʿishq (a term often translated as érōs) in premodern Islam, and insights from queer theory and animal studies—two theoretical fields whose language for conceptualizing relationality speaks to my project’s focus on kinship. Chapter One reads excerpts from the Qurʾan and the biography of the prophet Muhammad as well as from medical discourse on ʿishq, demonstrating how the madman (majnūn, meaning mad or possessed by jinn) was a figure proximate to prophets in late antique Islamic contexts. These sources provide the backdrop for analyzing the emergence of Majnun as a literary figure in Ibn Qutayba’s (d. 889) Book of Poetry and Poets (Kitāb al-Shʿir wa al-shuʿarāʾ), Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s (d. 967) Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī), and the Dīwan Majnūn Laylā. Chapter Two transitions between Arabic and Persian literary accounts, analyzing how Majnun’s appeals to bondage in the first half of Layli and Majnun reimagine kinship through sacrificial logic. Chapter Three evaluates Majnun’s reimagining of kinship by analyzing how Majnun, after creating an alternative society amongst animals, speaks about ʿishq as an ontological substance that lies beyond all dualities. The text’s foregrounding of the animals’ function as protectors of Majnun, however, draws Majnun’s ontological perspective on unity into question, and suggests that the text’s conception of unity can be understood as something obtained through embodied relationships. Chapter Four extends the argument on embodied relationality by examining Layla’s role, arguing that as a lover Layla critiques Majnun’s perspective by articulating a model of mutual care. I conclude by arguing that Layli and Majnun suggests the ethical import of ʿishq in ways that differ from Islamic ethical texts (akhlāq) that conceive of the highest form of love as friendship between men of the polis, following an Aristotelian model. Instead, Layli and Majnun participates in the genre of adab (a term that weds ethics and aesthetics) as it asks the reader to join a group of potentially mad lovers, and the text serves as a space for thinking through the relationship between ethics and desire for its readers.