Published in 2009, this is a novel by Elif Shafak (who also wrote The Bastard of Istanbul, which I talk about here and here, as I was at that point still misguidedly filing "shadow journey" posts in my Purple Tern blog...).

I bought the Italian version, because I thought the book had originally been written in Turkish (I can't yet read novels in Turkish, and prefer to read translations in languages other than English unless there's something exceptional about the English rendition). The Turkish version is entitled Love, and the English version The Forty Rules of Love (as the author felt that the English word "love" does not have the same tone as its Turkish equivalent). For reasons I don't know for sure, but presumably have to do with differentiation from previously existing publications, the Italian version of the title is The Forty Doors (although the text itself regularly refers to "the forty rules").

I actually wasn't quite right about the original language. The genesis of the text is much more complex. Shafak, a consummate nomad who "enjoys commuting between languages", explains: "I wrote the novel in English first. Then it was translated into Turkish by an excellent translator. Then I took the translation and I rewrote it. When the Turkish version was ripe and ready, I went back to the English version and rewrote it with a new spirit. In a way I have built two parallel books in the same span of time. It is a bit insane, I have to admit. It is a crazy amount of work. I do this because language is my passion."

Whether this process worked is another question. In the opinion of Michelle Goldberg, the English style is "inert" and strewn with "stock phrases"; and "whatever spirit was in her prose seems to have been extinguished in the back and forth" between languages. Having had a quick look at the English version, I can see what she means. My Italian version, on the other hand, seemed to flow very nicely, and was easy to read -- or maybe I'm just undiscerning in Italian...


The Mevlevi Lodge Museum, Lefkosa, North Cyprus, 2017. A lodge for Mevlevi Dervishes has stood in this area since 1593

I was drawn to the book as a result of reading Haleh Liza Gafori's new translation of some of the poems of Jalal ad-Din Rumi.

Shafak presents us with two parallel, interleaved stories. Firstly, there's a manuscript (its title is translated in Italian as "Sweet Heresy", which to my mind works much better than the English version, "Sweet Blasphemy"). It relates the extraordinary spiritual and intellectual partnership that arose between Rumi, a well-respected and charismatic theologian with thousands of disciples, and Shams-i-Tabriz, "a wandering dervish who was unconventional in his behaviour and heretical in his convictions". Starting in Konya in 1244, this was the friendship that turned Rumi into "a committed mystic, passionate poet, singer of love-songs, and practitioner of the ecstatic dance of the whirling dervish," and Shams, by 1248, into a corpse... (that is Shams's fate according to this account, at any rate -- there are others).

Secondly, there's a narrative, set in the years 2008-09, that connects the writer of the Shams-Rumi manuscript, the peripatetic Aziz Z. Zahara, with Ella Rubinstein, a bored, listless, unfulfilled housewife and mother living in Northampton, Massachusetts, who just happens to have taken on a job as a reader for a literary agency, and just happens to have been given Zahara's manuscript to evaluate, and just happens, of course, to have her life changed by it.

Dana Hourany sums up the counterpoint quite nicely: "While Shams goes out to relieve Muslim scholar Rumi from the shackles of his restrictive social training, Zahara sets out to free Ella from the confines of her mundane life."



Like Goldberg, I came to the novel ready to be impressed. Shafak, Turkey's best-selling woman writer, and a longstanding student of Sufism, is inspirational in the way she champions tolerance, feminism, cosmopolitanism, and non-nationalist history. The attempt to "imagine an Islamic past that is consonant with contemporary values" is indeed a laudable project. Like Goldberg, too, however, I came away with mixed feelings.

There's certainly plenty to like.

Given that we know from the beginning that Shams ends up dead, Shafak constructs the story very skilfully, steadily building a sense of foreboding and doom, as conflicting opinions start to eddy around the controversial figure of the dervish, and rival factions start to form. I'd have been conflicted, I think... The Shams who is presented here is compassionate (except, arguably, towards his poor wife), wise, unflinchingly honest... He's the friend of the outcast, always tolerant of other faiths, and ready to stand up against bigotry and hypocrisy. Yet was it really necessary to pick so many quarrels? Wouldn't a little compromise, a little "niceness", have been helpful? I'm sure that shows how very flaky I am... Major religious figures don't generally set out to be "nice", after all.

Shams is the figure who glows in this book. Rumi is always in his shadow, slowly transforming under his influence.

I also learned more about the times they lived in. The 13th century was an exceptionally turbulent period, affected by bloody crusades, the depredations of the Mongols, and numerous elements of geopolitical change. In the words of the fictional author Aziz: "In many ways the 21st century is not that different from the 13th. Both will be remembered in history as times of unprecedented religious and cultural clashes and misunderstandings and for the widespread sense of insecurity and fear of the different. In times like these, the need for love is stronger than ever."



And Shafak's novel is a great introduction to Sufism -- or actually, as I would argue, to a much broader wisdom tradition.

Sample quotations, any of which could be endorsed by mystics of other religions:

-- "God is not somewhere up in the sky. God is inside us, inside each of us. That is why he will never abandon us. How could you abandon yourself?"
-- "The way we see God is the immediate reflection of the way we see ourselves."
-- "Do not try to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. Don't worry if your life seems to be turning upside down. How can you know if the side you are used to is better than what you are being presented with?"
-- "Faith is only a word if it does not put love at the centre."
-- "Hell is here and now. So is heaven. Stop worrying about hell and dreaming of paradise, because both are present in this very instant. Every time we fall in love, we rise to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or oppose someone, we fall headlong into the flames of hell... Why worry so much about later, about an imaginary future, when the present moment is the only time in which we can truly and completely have the experience either of the presence or the absence of God in our lives?"
---"Love is the cause. Love is the end. And when you love God so much, when you love each of his creatures because of him, and thanks to him, then the other extraneous categories melt like snow in the sun. From that moment onwards you can't be 'I' any longer. You are nothing but a zero so huge that it covers your whole being."
-- "The past is an interpretation, the future an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line that proceeds from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply the absence of time. If you want to experience eternal illumination, free your mind from the past and the future, and stay within the present moment... The present moment is all that exists, and all that will ever exist."
-- "If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be as solid as a rock, your heart will need to be as soft as a feather. Illnesses, accidents, losses, or fears: in one way or another, we all have to face adversity, which teaches us to be less selfish, less inclined to judge others, and more compassionate and generous. Still, some of us learn the lesson and manage to become milder, while others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only way to get closer to the Truth is to expand your heart so that it will embrace all humanity and still have room for more Love."

This doesn't go down well with everyone. Zirrar, for example, accuses Shafak of peddling a "Sufism-lite", with "no clear God, no Prophets, no hell, no strict doctrine". I don't think that's entirely fair, given that Sufism has always been very open to other traditions, and part of the point of the novel is to encourage people to question orthodox teaching. (The reviewer, also, I think, misinterprets and misrepresents some parts of Shafak's text.)

Even Goldberg, however, finds that "Shams seems suspiciously modern, like a Quran-reading yoga teacher". But I'm constantly surprised by how timeless much of this wisdom is (if rendered in comprehensible language). People refer to a "philosophia perennis" precisely because this stuff is always valid...



There are several elements, however, that made this a less good book than it could have been.

Relevant and meaningful though Shams's "rules" are, they do tend to pop out as though from a slot machine. Every incident, encounter, or topic of conversation seems to culminate in an exposition of "one of the rules".

A more serious criticism is that I didn't warm to Ella. At all. She just seemed so hopelessly insipid that I found myself completely unable to muster either sympathy for her situation, or ability to believe in her eventual life-change.

And Aziz... He is so cookie-cutter that it is as though he has been deliberately set up to be a target of sarcasm. And yet I'm sure this was not Shafak's intention...

Examples:

This is the bio he attaches to his manuscript: "A.Z. Zahara, when he's not travelling the world, lives in Amsterdam with his books, his cats, and his tortoises." I feel sorry for the cats and tortoises, because we're very definitely given the impression that this man is always "journeying to the remotest places on earth".

After losing his wife in a terrible tragedy, and going off the rails in all the usual ways, Aziz became a Sufi in 1977 (it's at that point that he adopts this name). From then on, we're told, he had continuously travelled the world, "photographer by profession, dervish at heart".

His travel-fetish is the most prominent thing we're told about him: "From his blog Ella had discovered that Aziz was ... an avid globetrotter, for whom venturing into the remotest corners of the earth was as simple and instinctive as taking a walk in a nearby park. Profoundly nomadic by nature, he had been everywhere, and was equally happy in Siberia, Shanghai, Kolkata, or Casablanca." When he is told he has only a short time to live, he responds by travelling some more: "There were still places that he wanted to visit, and the first thing he did was to think up a way to see them all."

Obviously, not a mystic with too much concern about his carbon footprint...

There's more than a whiff of white saviour about him too. When he writes to Ella, he refers in all seriousness to encountering "children with eyes too sad for their years". And this passage just made me wince: "Your email found me on the point of leaving Amsterdam to go to Malawi. I've been asked to go and photograph people in a village where Aids is going crazy, and most of the children are orphans..." We're also told that while he hadn’t married again, "he had become the foster father of two orphans in eastern Europe". I'm guessing the kids saw about as much of him as the cats and tortoises...



Now, it is eminently clear that others are not as critical as I am. Hourany observes that the book has sold millions of copies across the world, and been translated into 37 languages. Which is quite a vote of confidence by anyone's standards. The book, she tells us, has had a significant impact on the Middle East and North Africa region's Sufi literature scene, with one researcher noting a subsequent increase in Sufi publications. The book became a best-seller in Turkey, and Shafak testifies to receiving "amazing positive feedback from readers".

Illustrating the very personal response it evokes, this Italian reviewer writes: "After reading Elif Shafak's book, you can't help but wonder if you really spent your life well... It's a novel that does not leave you indifferent: you can accept Ella's lesson, or you can reject it, but in any case, like the protagonist, perhaps we too will no longer be the same as we were before."

I'm glad it's making people think, and I'm glad I read it. But ultimately I concur with Goldberg again: "The Forty Rules of Love is a terribly frustrating novel, because almost everything about it is wonderful except for the work itself... This book is more evidence that good politics and good intentions do not necessarily make good literature."