The Petrarchan love romance Majnun Layla was born in the desert of Najd (Saudi Arabia) and circulated across fourteen centuries in many tongues and media. Qays falls in love with Layla during their childhood and after reaching adulthood her father refuses any contact between them and hence his agony that ends up with his wandering in the wilderness obsessing about her and composing some of the most beautiful love poems in Arabic literature. It was first collected and written down during the 10th century by Ibn Qutaybah in his classic volume al-Shi’r wal -Shua’ra’ (the Poetry and the Poems), then circulated through major canonical literary works chief among them al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs). In this paper I will inspect the renowned Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi’s dramatic rendition of this story. The verse drama Majnun Layla which was published in 1931 came at a time when the discourse of tradition and modernity was at its apogee. This paper will explore how Shawqi’s dramatic text and the meta-text (i.e. the epilogue that followed the text in the early editions of the book) was meant to be a ready-made cultural script for resisting customs and old practices that forbade the union based on love. At the heart of this play are two main discourses of what is known in semiotics as the discursive utterance governed by practical and cognitive dimension (that of Layla) and the discursive utterance governed by passion (that of Qays). I will show how these discourses are in many ways a reflection of the resistance of the discourse of tradition to that of modernity and vice versa. But at the same time I will showcase examples from Shawqi’s script to illustrate instances of uncertainty and indecision about what to resist.