Scholars such as Julie Meisami and Dick Davis classify Niẓāmī’s (d. 1209) mas̱navīs as medieval romances and thereby categorize them alongside the works of European authors such as Béroul or Boccacio. While the broad category of romance is useful for comparative projects, it risks overlooking the role of the mas̱navī form as the dominant vehicle of narrative poetics in the medieval Persianate literary landscape. In this paper, I demonstrate how Niẓāmī’s Laylī o Majnūn negotiated mystical and courtly forms of desire through use of the mas̱navī form, and what overall effect this negotiation had on the definition of desire itself. Instead of separating the sacred (mystical) from the profane (courtly) along the lines of a modern, Western perspective, I show how Majnun’s speech throughout the text represents a convergence of these two registers by placing select passages into conversation with mystical theories of desire as well as contemporaneous erotic poetics. After demonstrating how Majnun’s speech negotiates these registers, I shift to analyzing Layla’s reported speech as the main cite that critiques Majnun’s dominant discourse. Layla’s critiques throughout the work underscore the ways in which the mystical and the erotic construe desire as masculine, as well as show how their convergence leads to the impossibility of a feminine desiring subject. I analyze in depth Layla’s letters from the work that cite the gendered norms that constrict her expression of desire as well as that offer a more socially informed perspective on ‘ishq (variously translated as eros, radical love, or mystical longing). In other words, by reading Layla’s position in the work as a lover and not just as a beloved, I argue that her perspective offers an alternative view of ‘ishq as inextricably entangled with active engagement in the world. Such a perspective raises questions not just around the gendered politics of love poetics at the time, but also around the way in which the Niẓāmī’s mas̱navī experimented with literary form so as to offer a different kind of dialogic space for considering and navigating various registers of the complex human question of what it means to love.