The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Discussion scheduled on 26th October 2021 at 08:00 PM @readakitaab at ClubHouse

The Forty Rules of Love is a novel written by Turkish author Elif Shafak. The book was published in March 2009. It is about Maulana Jalal-Ud-Din, known as Rumi and his companion Shams Tabrizi. This book explains how Shams transformed a scholar into a Sufi (mystic) through love. More than 750,000 copies of this book were sold in Turkey and France.

"A novel within a novel, The Forty Rules of Love tells two parallel stories (The technique of placing two-story together is called juxtaposition in literature) that mirror each other across two very different cultures and seven intervening centuries." It starts when a housewife, Ella, gets a book called Sweet Blasphemy for an appraisal. This book is about a thirteenth-century poet, Rumi and his spiritual teacher, Shams. The book presents Shams's Forty Love Rules at different intervals. The story presented in the novel is basically on "love and spirituality that explains what it means to follow your heart".