He even sends Rumi to a tavern, to prove that strict adherence to Sharia is its own kind of idolatry. Shafak’s Shams of Tabriz, who sees sectarian divisions, and even rigid religious rules, as inimical to God, is profoundly faithful, but his faith has nothing in common with contemporary Islamism. “Early Indian Sufism proclaimed that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Hindus all were striving toward the same goal and that the outward observances that kept them apart were false,” Wendy Doniger observed in her recent history of Hinduism. A mystical, esoteric strain in Islam, more concerned with the individual’s ecstatic union with God than with strict adherence to Sharia law, Sufism is a tolerant creed. Shafak is a longtime student of Sufism, and her new novel seems, in part, an effort to imagine an Islamic past that is consonant with contemporary values: a worthy project. Her life is changed forever in ways that are simultaneously predictable and unconvincing.Įlla’s story alternates with chapters from Zahara’s novel, which is in turn a spiritual love story between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, the wandering dervish who is said to have introduced Rumi to mysticism. Intrigued, she strikes up an epistolary romance with its nomadic author, a Sufi convert named A. Drowning in middle-class ennui-her life seems to revolve around trips to farmers markets and Whole Foods-Ella finds a part-time job reading manuscripts for a literary agency, where she is given a novel called Sweet Blasphemy, about Rumi, the Sufi poet. The overarching narrative concerns Ella Rubinstein, a forty-year-old Massachusetts mother of three, unhappily married (in one of the book’s many clichés) to a dentist. Like many of Shafak’s novels, The Forty Rules of Love tells intertwined stories separated by centuries. The fact that the novel has become a bestseller in Turkey is a hopeful sign that the empathy created by fiction can transcend nationalist and religious hatreds. Now, she has written a novel about an American Jewish housewife who finds love with a bohemian Sufi mystic.
Her audacious surrealist novel The Gaze, from 2000, explored the anguish engendered by constant, unkind physical scrutiny, and managed the seemingly impossible feat of turning academic feminist theory into often haunting fiction. Her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, which appeared in 2006, inquired into the taboo subject of Turkey’s Armenian genocide and as a result she was charged with “insulting Turkishness,” a crime that carries jail time.
Its author, Elif Shafak, is an inspiration: As Turkey’s bestselling female writer, she is a brave champion of cosmopolitanism, a sophisticated feminist, and an ambitious novelist who infuses her magical-realist fiction with big, important ideas. The Forty Rules of Love is a terribly frustrating novel, because almost everything about it is wonderful except for the work itself.
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