The Forty Rules of Love- Book Review
“The Forty Rules Of Love” by “Elif Shafak” is really an amazing novel within a novel, It has two parallel stories of different centuries. One took place in the twenty-first century, and the second one is in the thirteen-century. It talks about love with God and Sufism. The best roles are played by Ella Rubinstein, Shams of Tabriz and Maulana Rumi.
40 years old Ella Robinson is an unhappy housewife with three children and unfaithful husband. She becomes changed when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent.
The first manuscript which she received from Aziz Zahara is the “Sweet Blasphemy” which is the novel about Shams of Tabriz and Maulana Rumi and the forty rules of love, love with God.
Shams is known as a Sufi he travels from Samarkand to Baghdad where he gets to know about Jalaluddin Rumi, a famous scholar of thirteen-century.
Shams travels to Konya where Rumi lives.
He meets with Rumi and Rumi becomes inspired by Shams and his rules of love, and Konya people start hating shams including Rumi’s family.
On the other hand, Ella falls in love with the writer of the “Sweet Blasphemy” Aziz Zahara through email they conversate and Ella becomes inspired with the words of Aziz Zahara. But Aziz Zahara is suffering from cancer disease and he passes away.
The Shams rules are really amazing and life-changing rules.
The first rule says” How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame it means there is too much fair and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion so are we”.
Another rule says “Patience does not mean to passively endure. Means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time needed for the crescent moon to become full”.
Shams all rules make you closer to the Almighty and compel you to think about God.
Another rule says “You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or Church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover”. The rules are superb and this one is amazing. We come to know that God is not bound only in a mosque or the place where we pray he is everywhere the true believer finds him in their hearts. God should be in the hearts not only in Synagogue.
The “Sweet Blasphemy” increased the curiosity to read further because of the rules of Shams of Tabriz, the life-changing rules about patients and our way of thinking about God.
I recommend every book lover to read this book because it’s life-changing. The books have the power to change the psyche, but read such books which bring positive changes and connect you with the God. The Shams of Tabriz forty rules are not only rules they have power to change their life. This book deserves reading.
i-WELL Academy