For me, this book does not even pass as a bad adaptation of a real story since it is so far away from reality. This comes off as a great marketing strategy to me, as talking about a lesser-known Sufi would not sell as many copies as talking about Rumi did, given his stature, fame and influence in the Sufi sect and beyond it. Elif Shafaq chose to pick one of the most prominent figures of Sufism and weaved a story around them that has no factual basis. Then, this book is a gross misrepresentation of Sufism and Islam and we shall now deal with the вЂhow and whyвЂ™ part. Albeit, she has weaved an inaccurate story of how these rules were distributed amongst people by either Shams or by other characters. A vulgar attempt of a writer trying to portray extramarital affairs as the вЂdiscovery of true love (whatever they think that is) while being committed to another person.вЂ™ Nevertheless, the forty rules that Elif Shafak mentioned in the book are actually the rules penned by Shams Tabrizi himself. She also used her version of ShamsвЂ™ and RumiвЂ™s connection to validate the aspect of infidelity that the characters of her book get involved in. What she failed to do, however, was to establish her imagination as a different entity than the actual story of Shams and Rumi. In the book, Shafak has taken the liberty to pick a story from Islamic history, however, what she has done is to bend it to suit her narrative. Instead, Shafaq has given us a wholesome package. Albeit, this is not the only problematic part of this problematic book. Just like one cannot bend mathematical formulas to create his/her own version and develop his/her own answers, similarly, one cannot bend factual events into fragments of his/her imagination to tell a story he/she thinks is better than the real one. But when a book, or any art form for that matter, sets its roots within the history of religion, culture and community, the least that the creator should do is to be considerate of the facts and to abide by them. I do not say that the expression of ideas and thoughts in the form of a book should cease. Now, it is important to understand why I claim this book to be a вЂmisrepresentationвЂ™ of Islamic history and concepts. Zahara titled Sweet Blasphemy (an attempt to romanticize blasphemy), and chapters of this book constitute a majority of вЂThe Forty Rules of Love.вЂ™ Shafaq also calls Zahara, a Jewish Sufi, which is very similar to the concept of a two-sided triangle, since they both do not and can not exist. It is for one of these reviews that she comes across a book written by a writer named Aziz. For validating her existence beyond being a wife and a mother to three, she is associated with literary organisations and magazines, writing book reviews occasionally. Ella is white, forty, Jewish and lives off her husbandвЂ™s money. The book begins by introducing the character of Ella to the readers. These people claim to like Islam by reading such books because when they read the authentic Islamic discourse and literature, they find it appalling that it does not bow down to their notions of modernity and sticks to its roots firmly. The Forty Rules of Love is a prime example of how the history of Islam and its concepts are used to create narratives that appease the readers who claim to like Islam based on all the misinformative and unauthentic discourse that they come across. However, that is a very clever thing to do on the part of Shafaq, probably because she was aware of all the backlash she would face for all the incorrect rendition she provided. On the 2nd page of the book, you read that it is a work of fiction. She tries to give her book a touch of spirituality by narrating her version of whatever she thought to be the history of the famous 13th-century Sufi poet Maulana Jalaluddin Mohammad Rumi and his companion Shams Tabrizi, who too was a poet. But the book she wrote, titled The Forty Rules of Love is not just another novel on a love story that you buy from a bookstore rack. Elif Shafak, a novelist of Turko-British origins sets off to write a novel about love.

Discourse of shams tabrizi