The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi
In this lyrical, exuberant tale, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick), incarnates Rumi's timeless message of love
Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara.
Ella is mesmerized by Zahara's tale of Shams of Tabriz's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mirrors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.
The Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, Shams, the whirling dervish—that together explore the enduring power of Rumi's work.
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Readers say *The Forty Rules of Love* by Elif Shafak beautifully intertwines past and present narratives to explore love, spirituality, and personal g...
Second book by Elif I’ve read. To be honest didn’t enjoy it quite the same as previous book, but, still a good book and very interesting reading about Sufis and different religions … lovely descriptions of the places in the book, the characters and a clever story line mixing the past and modern times.
Reading this book has been a peculiar experience for me. I can’t say that I loved it or even that I liked it, but I was consistently interested and curious throughout. I agreed with many of the rules presented in the book, especially since they are rules in name only and quite fluid in practice. Personally, I don’t have strong opinions about religion or God. I feel indifferent to the existence or non-existence of either. I believe that if we rely on a religious book or a sermon to persuade us to do the right thing—or to justify causing deliberate, unprovoked harm to others—we have effectively silenced our conscience and lost the ability to be decent human beings. This is the central message of the book, and I agree with it. I understood that the stories of the present and the past were meant to convey this point, but I felt they lacked depth and relied too heavily on familiar tropes.
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The Turkish British writer Elif Shafak's novel, The Forty Rules of Love, is about the effects of the Sufi teachings of Shams of Tabriz on two characters in the novel. One character is a fictional version of the historical figure Jalai al-Din Molavi Rumi, who is “normally called Mawlana by Iranians” (Axworthy 105). Rumi formed an “intense emotional relationship” with Shams of Tabriz, which shaped the rest of Rumi’s life (Axworthy 105). Rumi was an Islamic scholar who, through friendship with Shams of Tabriz, became an influential Sufi figure and mystic poet (Axworthy 105). The other character is a fictional unhappy wife and mother named Ella, a not practicing Jewish woman living in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 2008. Ella starts work as a literary agent. She gets assigned to read a novel manuscript about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz in 13th Century Anatolia when Rumi and his family lived in Konya. The novel is by the Sufi A.Z. Zahara, who lives in the Netherlands (Shafak 14). Ella and Zahara form an intense relationship throughout the novel. Sufism is a “mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God” (Schimmel 2024). Shams of Tabriz follows forty rules of love through which a person can know God (Shafak 30). These forty rules of love profoundly affect the character in this novel.
Works Cited:
Axworthy, Michael. 2008. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Perseus Books Group.
Schimmel, Annemarie. 2024. “Sufism.” Chicago, Illinois: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (Sufism | Definition, History, Beliefs, Significance, & Facts | Britannica).
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