The Forty Rules of Love

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Elif Shafak's 2009 novel The Forty Rules of Love tells its story twice at once. In the present day, a Massachusetts housewife named Ella takes a job reading manuscripts for a literary agency and is assigned a novel called Sweet Blasphemy, about the thirteenth century Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi and the wandering dervish who changed his life, Shams of Tabriz. Reading it changes Ella's own life in turn, and the two stories run side by side for the rest of the book.

The novel's real interest is what happens inside that embedded story. Rumi, when Shams arrives in his city, is already a respected and comfortable religious scholar, the kind of man whose learning is admired rather than questioned. Shams does not offer him more learning. He offers him rules, forty of them scattered through the narrative, organized loosely around the elements of Water, Air, Earth, Fire and Void, each one aimed less at doctrine than at how a person loves, forgives and lets go of certainty. Shafak frames this explicitly as a transformation rather than an education: Shams turns Rumi from a scholar into a Sufi mystic through love, not through further study.

A smaller structural detail carries the same idea. Every chapter of the Rumi and Shams narrative opens with the same Arabic letter, the one that begins Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, the invocation that opens the Quran, a device meant to echo a Sufi teaching that the letter itself contains the whole of creation in miniature. The device asks a reader to notice form as well as story, that the shape of the telling is doing some of the same work as the rules themselves.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Forty Rules of Love became one of the best known literary treatments of Rumi in the English speaking world, and its numbers are real: more than 750,000 copies sold across Turkey and France alone, a shortlisting for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a place on the BBC's 2019 list of the 100 most influential novels. In Turkey, where Elif Shafak published a Turkish version titled Ask in 2010, the book became a genuine bestseller and introduced a popular audience to a fictionalized Rumi and Shams outside any classroom or seminary.

Scholarly reception has been more careful than the sales figures suggest. In a 2020 study in the journal Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, the literary scholar Billy Gray examined the novel's account of the relationship between Rumi and Shams and argued that it reflects a specific modern current sometimes labelled Western Sufism, one built on universalist and perennialist assumptions that treat mystical experience as essentially the same across religious traditions. Gray's concern is not that the novel is dishonest but that, in shaping Rumi's teaching for an international and largely American readership, it simplifies and pulls the material away from its own historical and doctrinal context. He connects this to a broader pattern the scholar Amira El-Zein has called the Rumi phenomenon, the way Rumi's poetry circulates widely in the West with much of its specifically Islamic and Sufi framework quietly set aside.