"The Forty Rules of Love" by Elif Shafak

The Forty Rules of Love is written by Elif Shafak, a French born Turkish writer. Elif Shafak is one of the most acknowledged and bravest of the authors and feminist in Turkey. The Forty Rules of Love is one of her best sellers. The novel consists of two parallel narratives. The contemporary one is about an unhappily married Jewish housewife named Ella living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ella works for a literary agency and currently she is given a book named "Sweet Blasphemy" by Aziz Zahara. The sweet blasphemy is the second narrative of this novel. Sweet blasphemy is actually about a wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, who is a mystic Sufi and he sees the vision of his death and he know that he should find a companion to whom he can deliver his knowledge to. For that Shams travels from Samarkand to Baghdad where he gets to know about Jalaluddin Rumi, a famous scholar of that time by a Sufi. Shams travels to Konya where Rumi lives and the story unwraps itself as to how they become friends, how drastically Rumi starts to change and how people start to hate Shams including Rumi's family . On the other hand Ella becomes acquainted with the writer of sweet blasphemy Aziz Zahara over the email after she becomes highly affected by the sweet blasphemy. Over the course of emails with Aziz Zahara she finds out she is ready to give up her life, her children, her husband for the guy on the other end of the email.

The style of the novel is a narrative one and although the sweet blasphemy Is really captivating the narrative of Ella somehow adds some weakness to the novel. The writer nailed it in narrating the sweet blasphemy the way it was shown from many perspectives sometimes from the perspective of shams, sometimes a beggar, sometimes zealot or Rumi or prostitute or even the family of Rumi. That really shows the picture of what was actually happening, the love of Rumi for Shams and the hatred of the townspeople and Rumi's family towards Shams. But the narrative of Ella lacks the multiple perspectives. It is just from the perspective of Ella, if it was from the point of view of Aziz or her children then the reader would have understood Ella's story more clearly.

I really liked the novel and most of it is because of Shams of Tabriz, from his rules of love to his strong personality to his love and belief on god everything was mesmerizing. As an agnostic, reading about Shams really awakened the urge to find the GOD in the most unlikely places. The forty rules of love which is narrated by shams from time to time really maybe just for a while changed my perspective on life and on relations and obviously on GOD. On the other hand it intensified my hatred towards the hypocrite religious people who don't have anything to do with God or the love we bear in our hearts. And as for being a fan of Rumi's poetry it was really good to know how he became just a good poet and knowing the person who was behind it 'SHAMS OF TABRIZ' .
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Bored housewife Ella feels stalled despite her gracious suburban life in Northampton, New England. Her teenage children are growing away from her; her husband is distant and unfaithful. Ella's new job as reader for a publisher introduces her to Sufism through a manuscript she is sent to read, and has life-changing consequences.

"Sweet Blasphemy", the novel she is sent to appraise, tells the story of a 13th-century wandering Persian Sufi Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and his inspirational relationship with Rumi, the greatest poet of the Sufi canon. Rumi, a respected Koranic scholar, was transformed through his love for Shams and was inspired to write the Masnavi, a key Sufi tract which weaves Koranic analysis with poetry, parables of the everyday, the mythic and miraculous. It was to beget Mevlevi Sufism, practised through poetry, music and dance.

The Forty Rules of Love takes Sufism into blockbuster territory. It interweaves Ella's quest to find love with Shams's and Rumi's quest for beatitude through friendship, as told by a range of characters including Rumi's wife and sons: one of whom was to assassinate Shams, the other to carry on his father's work. The narrative is racy, told in first-person fragments, letters, emails and braided through with Shams's theosophy as told through his 40 rules of love. Elif Shafak expounds a populist rather than a scholarly Sufism, providing a vigourous and easily assimilable introduction to Sufi thought.

Bold bestseller this may be, but there is attention to detail. Each chapter begins with the letter "b". For Sufi mystics the secret of the Koran lies in the verse Al-Fatiha, the essence of which is contained in the word bismilahirahmanirahim (in the name of Allah, the Benevolent and Merciful), with the quintessence of the word in the dot below the first Arabic letter, a dot that embodies the universe. Shams espouses multiple readings of the Koran, and Shafak slips in two diametrically opposed contemporary translations of the Al-Nisa, the Koranic verse which M H Shakir interprets as justification for male subjugation of women - while Ahmed Ali translates as a verse extolling respect for women.

Both the observant head-scarfed daughters of AKP, the Islamic party in government in Turkey, and the secular offspring of past Kemalist regimes, are ardent fans of Shafak's novel. Her engaging vision of a gentle non-judgmental Sufi path to Islam that rejects religious fundamentalism and is accessible to all, from medieval drunks and whores to 21st-century Scottish drifters and American housewives, has made the novel a Turkish bestseller.

Challenging truisms of the fundamentalist Islamic orient and the consumerist Judeo-Christian occident, the novel proposes Sufism as a quest for spirituality which can fill the void at the heart of both. Shafak is a mercurial and often controversial writer, but should she choose to continue in this spiritual vein, I have no doubt she will challenge Paulo Coelho's dominance. With its timely, thought-provoking, feel-good message, The Forty Rules of Love deserves to be a global publishing phenomenon.