The Forty Rules of Love

Following up on yesterday’s post on the Whirling Dervishes, I want to tell you about a lovely novel about the famed mystic poet who inspired the sect. In The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi Turkish author Elif Shafaka spins two intertwined tales. The first concerns Ella, a woman in Seattle who reads manuscripts for a literary agency. She is sent a book by a mysterious author named Aziz, a book that tells of the poet Rumi and his relationship with a wandering dervish known as Shams of Tabriz. As the novel progresses, the story of Ella and Aziz gradually fades into the background as the friendship between Rumi and Shams take center stage.

Fair warning: the contemporary love story of Ella and Aziz doesn’t work nearly as well as the tale of Rumi and Shams. But I found myself very taken by the book’s imaginative recreation of the Rumi story. What was it like for the learned and respected Rumi when the wild, charismatic, and rule-breaking Shams burst into his carefully controlled world?

Here’s one of my favorite lines in the book:  “Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”