The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

My original intent was to read The Bastard of Istanbul, which has been on my list for some time, but our library system doesn’t have an audiobook version. It did, however, suggest that maybe I could listen to this book by the same author. 

 

Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist - the bestselling novelist in Turkey in fact - and has won a number of awards over the years. She also has the distinction of running afoul of the political authorities in Turkey over her books about the Amenian Genocide, which Turkey denies took place. She ended up fleeing to Britain, where she has lived since. So, that’s a pretty good resume. 

 

This book is one of those she wrote in English - she also writes in Turkish, and books in both languages have been widely translated. 

 

With that in mind, I really wanted to love this book, and indeed enjoyed parts of it quite a bit. Other parts were just not my cup of tea, unfortunately. 

 

Let me explain a bit more about that. There are essentially two novels in this book; two plots that take place at completely different times. The first is a framing story: Middle aged Ella Rubenstein, unhappily married to a philandering Massachusetts dentist, takes on a job as reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is a novel, Sweet Blasphemy, by a man named Aziz Zahara, although it turns out he was a Scot before converting to Sufi Islam. That book, which forms the second plot, is historical fiction about the poet Rumi and his inspiration and brief companion, Shams of Tabriz. Shafak takes what little we know about Shams and Rumi (mostly from Rumi’s writings, but a bit of historical evidence) and turns it into full tale of their relationship and interaction with others in Konya, Turkey, where Rumi resided. Ella begins to correspond with Aziz, eventually falls in love with him, and leaves her loveless marriage. 

 

So, the whole “middle aged woman is unfulfilled and decides to leave her boring husband and take up with someone more exciting and mysterious” is literally my least favorite storyline. (And yes, I am still bitter that our library system has over 30 copies of Eat Pray Love and yet fails to carry so many far better recent books.) There are a few reasons I feel this way. Most obviously (if not the most rationally), I identify with boring, reliable husbands. I also have my insecurities, and one of those is not being loved and wanted. So, nothing like these stories with the message “a woman can only find herself by shedding her husband” to stoke those unpleasant feelings. I also see this play out a lot in my family law cases. The kids grow up, and the wife feels she has to leave and go find herself….often in the arms of another, more glamorous man. While the boring husband supports her, of course. 

 

But man, does this sell. A lot of women eat this up. Obviously, we guys have our own silly fantasies - hello there, Dirk Pitt! - so this is a pot and kettle situation. I do wonder, though, how many women end up acting on this fantasy. I think Ella’s story would have been better had she found that having a job for the first time enabled her to make better decisions. Yeah, she should have left her husband. But jumping into the bed of another man, eh, not so much.

 

Suffice it to say that I definitely found this thread of the narrative to be pretty tedious. 

 

On the other hand, the book within the book was actually really good. Shafak tells the story from the points of view of a whole variety of characters. Shams gets the largest portion, but Rumi, his wife, his two sons, his adopted daughter, the town drunk, the local Imam, a prostitute, a thuggish security guard, an assassin - all these get a chance to tell part of the story. These narratives flow into one another in a chronological order, with each character moving the story forward a bit before the focus shifts around again, and circles back to another character, and on and on. This was excellent writing. 

 

Also fascinating in this narrative was the ongoing discussion of religion. Naturally, the religion in the book is Islam, but it so closely mirrors the universal argument between rule-based fundamentalism and the more mystical and social justice based version of the faith. So many of the exact arguments and points made in this book (mostly by Shams) were instantly recognizable to me as the same religious and cultural wars that are wracking Christianity in our country right now. Is religion a set of rules to be enforced, a culture to be maintained, a quest for political power? Do we shame the prostitute and the drunkard, or do we see the Divine in them? Is doctrine the most important thing? Or is love and kindness? Is wisdom about “getting things right” or about being always learning and growing? 

 

Shams is, in this book, what we Christians would describe as a “Christ figure.” Not that Christ was either the first or the last of his sort, either in real life or in literature. He is a universal to be found in every culture. Make of that what you will. In any case, Shams comes to town, and does all the “Christ” things: hangs out with the drunks and prostitutes, infuriates the religious and political leaders, elevates women and speaks to them as equals, goes after every sacred cow, and ends up murdered for his trouble. (The question of whether the real life Shams was murdered, or just moved on from Rumi to Damascus is debated. Shafak uses the Sufi traditions for this story.) In every encounter, Shams expounds his ideas through stories and questions. He focuses on the heart, and on humility, not certainty and rule-following. It is fascinating to read something like this that feels both exotic - it is set in a very different world than ours, and in place of the familiar quotations from the Bible, we get ones from the Koran - and so very familiar because literally all the arguments, the core issues, are the same as the ones that bedevil us now. 

 

I kind of wonder if this book would have been better as a straight-up historical novel. But I also acknowledge that Shafak probably needed the framing story to sell the book, both to a publisher and to her core readers. “Here is a book about a 13th Century Persian/Turkish poet and his spiritual teacher, which pushes back against fundamentalism” isn’t quite as marketable as “Here is a story about a middle aged woman who finds love as the result of learning about Rumi and Sufism.” That’s the reality of bookselling. I was willing to put up with the framing to get to the good stuff in the middle. 

 

I should mention the scene which forms the narrative climax in the books: Shams organizes a dance of the whirling dervishes - a form of art and religious ecstasy which originated in Konya around the time of Rumi. The “apotheosis of the dance” as Wagner described the finale of Beethoven’s seventh symphony. Shafak writes this scene beautifully, with the description of its spiritual meaning worked in so subtly as to be at one with the movement of the narrative. And the way Shams flings back the money from the ruler at the end is pretty badass - and explains how the religious leaders decide to murder Shams. 

 

The Forty Rules of Love derives its title from the supposed forty rules of Shams, which Rumi wrote in his work about Shams. These are doled out throughout the book, with the last one coming as the closing sentence. 

 

What Shams ultimately stands for is the idea of dangerous love. He shatters Rumi’s self-conception, forcing him to abandon his ego and the comfortable life he has lived. For Rumi, this leads him eventually to become a poet - controversial enough in his time, and beloved for centuries afterward. For everyone else in the book, they face that choice. Do they choose love, although love will cost them their security and comfort? Or do they cling to the security of rules and roles and hierarchies and tradition and thus lose their shot at a deeper ecstasy? And, the choice that religion - indeed all of us, religious or otherwise - faces is the same as it has always been. Here is how the author puts it:

 

“It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” 

 

What all those rules and doctrines and other trappings of fundamentalism do is protect us from having to actually love other people. This Shams points out over and over throughout the book, which is why I think it resonated with me. 

 

It took me a while to warm to the book, but now that I am finished with it, I liked the historical part very much, the rest of it not particularly, but overall, enough to go ahead and read some of Shafak’s other books. 

 

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If you want to read my thoughts on Rumi, here is my post on what I have read by him.