On Reading Elif Shafak’s “The Forty Rules of Love”

Richard Falk

2011/01/29

While my blogs on the Arizona shootings and on Jewish identity has sparked unexpectedly intense controversy, I have done my best to continue with normal work and activities. At times of stress poetry and philosophy have offered me consolation. Recently I finished reading Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love, which I found instructive about the Sufi worldview, the spiritual education of Rumi (the world’s greatest poet of love), and the abiding magnetism of this 13th century spiritual flourishing for those seeking a deeper experience of contemporary life. Shafak writes knowingly, and skillfully weaves a vivid tapestry of character and narrative, with seamless time shifts between that historical moment in Konya and the present. It almost doesn’t matter that the sub-plot is neither credible nor engaging: an American middle aged Jewish housewife, bored in a loveless marriage in the small college town of Northampton, becomes romantically entwined with a terminally ailing Scottish Sufi convert through email correspondence that takes off in an abrupt flight that crosses the cyber barrier with grace, but a bit too smoothly for my taste. What matters is the moral clarity and depth that Shafak brings to the Sufi tradition as it unfolded in Konya through this fascinating fictionalization of the interplay between Rumi and a wandering Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, who became the spiritual teacher of Rumi, and was murdered by representatives of the local established order who could not abide his virtue or his teaching. The parallels to the life of Jesus are too obvious to explicate, as are the differences.

This book led me to write the following poem that seeks to express my personal encounter with its thought and journey:

After Reading Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

You impose

this singular fish

it swims below my surfaces

it swims deep below surfaces

it crisscrosses my heart’s ocean

this singular fish can creep

can creep along slick walls

of deceit, of deception

I can only impose

laughter on subtle strangers

whose delight is frostbite

These who know nothing

nothing at all

of singular fish

and the forty rules of love

will swim away in panic

will ignore the hymnals

of forty hovering angels

in flight  below soft clouds

not high above your sea

the water thick with..yes

singular fish

I.24.2011

Richard Falk