The Forty Rules of Love

Ella Rubinstein, forty and unhappily married in Northampton, takes a job as a manuscript reader for a literary agency and is assigned Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a mysterious author named Aziz Zahara about the historical friendship between the Sufi mystic Shams of Tabriz and the scholar-poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Shafak splits the book cleanly between Ella's contemporary correspondence with Aziz, which develops from professional notes into something closer to devotion, and long stretches of Sweet Blasphemy itself, so that a reader of The Forty Rules of Love is, structurally, doing exactly what Ella is doing: reading a book about spiritual transformation and slowly discovering it is happening to them too.

The thirteenth-century half of the novel tracks Shams's arrival in Konya and his effect on Rumi, at that point a respected but conventional religious scholar, whom Shams draws out of legalistic piety and into the ecstatic, boundary-breaking mysticism that would eventually produce the Masnavi and the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi. Shafak stages that transformation as dangerous rather than purely inspiring: Rumi's devoted students, and especially his son Aladdin, experience Shams's closeness to their teacher as an intrusion, one edged with a jealousy the novel never resolves into simple explanation, whether it is theological offense, wounded pride, or something closer to romantic possessiveness.

Shafak threads forty numbered rules of love through Shams's sections, aphorisms on surrender, presence, and the dissolving of the self that read, deliberately, like instructions Ella could apply directly to her own stalled marriage, and the novel's central wager is that this kind of wisdom survives translation across eight centuries largely unchanged: what unsettles Rumi's Konya is recognizably the same thing unsettling Ella's Northampton, a life organized entirely around safety rather than presence.

Shafak leaves deliberately open a question historians of Rumi and Shams have argued over for centuries: whether their bond was purely spiritual, a teacher-disciple relationship of the kind Sufi tradition has many records of, or carried an erotic charge that later, more conservative retellings scrubbed out of the record. Sweet Blasphemy lets both readings coexist without forcing a verdict, treating the ambiguity itself as true to a friendship intense enough to scandalize Rumi's own household and devoted enough to survive Shams's death in Rumi's poetry for the rest of his life, which is closer, Shafak implies, to how such love has actually always resisted tidy categories.