Review by Delphine Strauss

Published: May 24 2010

The friendship between Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Shams of Tabriz must rank among the most influential in history. The two men, followers of the mystical Sufi tradition, met in the Anatolian city of Konya in 1244 – a troubled time in a region where Christian crusaders and Muslim Mongols were tearing chunks out of the old empires.

Four years of intense spiritual companionship ended in 1248 with Shams’ unexplained disappearance. But the experience transformed Rumi, already a respected scholar, into a poet. By evoking the pain that humans suffer when separated from places and people they love, his masterpiece, the Masnavi, urges them to the Sufi goal of divine love and union with god. His teachings have survived: pilgrims still stream past his tomb in Konya; both dignitaries and tourists watch the ritual whirling dances of his Mevlevi dervishes, and his verses feature heavily on US school syllabuses.

Elif Shafak, one of Turkey’s best-known writers, hammers home the message that Rumi remains relevant today in her latest novel to hit English-language bookshelves.

Her protagonist in The Forty Rules of Love is Ella, a no-nonsense Massachusetts housewife dabbling as reader for a literary agency. Asked to review a novel relating the encounter of Shams and Rumi, she finds herself questioning her conventional life and marriage – and drawn into an impulsive e-mail exchange with the author, the suggestively named Aziz Zahara.

The premise is intriguing but the delivery disappoints. Ella is portrayed as an uptight everywoman, fussing over her children’s love lives and eating disorders, her husband’s infidelities, her anti-wrinkle cream and home cooking. Her very ordinariness – and unlikely conversion to Aziz’s follow-your-heart Sufi principles – make her more of a plot device than an engaging character.

Her mid-life crisis frames the story Shafak really wants to tell, under cover of Aziz’s novel: her version of how Shams impelled Rumi to transcend the prejudices of 13th-century Konya, before falling victim to jealous rivals and intolerance.

Many themes are familiar from earlier work, where characters break social conventions, probe ethnic divisions or show spiritual leanings. Shams befriends the leper, carries the drunkard home, offends the rich benefactor – and, mysteriously, drives his bride to an early grave.

But despite Shafak’s attachment to her subject, the narrative is oddly flat. It lacks the inventiveness of earlier novels such as The Bastard of Istanbul, a many-layered blend of streetlife and magic realism whose provocative treatment of Armenian genocide claims got her into legal trouble in Turkey, but raised her profile internationally.

In this book, she echoes the poetic techniques of the Masnavi by mixing narrative with assorted voices (her speakers include a “killer”, “zealot” and “harlot”) and sprinkling in exemplary fables and italicised moral reflections – the 40 rules of the title.

Yet there are jarring clichés. “Apparently Shams thinks scholars talk the talk and Sufis walk the walk,” the 13th-century zealot scoffs. Other annoyances such as Aziz and Shams analysing the colours of a person’s “aura”, seem to reduce Sufism to New Age triteness.

None of this stopped the book becoming a wild success when it appeared in Turkish in 2008 (rewritten by the multilingual Shafak from an English first draft). Rumi scholars complained of inaccuracies in her treatment of Sufism, but in Turkey the novel sold half a million copies in eight months.

Shafak has written her defence against charges of banality into the novel. As Ella completes an online test entitled “How to tell if your husband is cheating on you”, she muses: “Although she found the questions tacky, by now she knew that life itself could occasionally feel like one big cliché”.

Delphine Strauss is the FT’s Turkey correspondent

Financial Times