The Forty Rules of Love

by Elif Shafak

But there was a reason: love. They did not live in the same city. Not even on the same continent. The two of them were not only miles apart but also as different as day and night. Their lifestyles were so dissimilar that it seemed impossible for them to bear each other’s presence, never mind fall in love. But it happened. And it happened fast, so fast in fact that Ella had no time to realize what was happening and to be on guard, if one could ever be on guard against love. Love came to Ella as suddenly and brusquely as if a stone had been hurled from out of nowhere into the tranquil pond of her life.

May love be always with you and you always surrounded with love.

Little did she know that this was going to be not just any book, but the book that changed her life. In the time she was reading it, her life would be rewritten.

That was when I realized that although I loved my parents and craved their love, they were strangers to me.

I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.

As I went through all these experiences, I began to compile a list that wasn’t written down in any book, only inscribed in my soul.

The Path to the Truth is a labor of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide! Not your mind. Meet, challenge, and ultimately prevail over your nafs with your heart. Knowing your self will lead you to the knowledge of God.

Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of Love, living is a burden—as you have seen.

“Each and every reader comprehends the Holy Qur’an on a different level in tandem with the depth of his understanding. There are four levels of insight. The first level is the outer meaning and it is the one that the majority of the people are content with. Next is the Batını—the inner level. Third, there is the inner of the inner. And the fourth level is so deep it cannot be put into words and is therefore bound to remain indescribable.”

“Oh, Moses, what have you done? You scolded that poor shepherd and failed to realize how dear he was to Me. He might not be saying the right things in the right way, but he was sincere. His heart was pure and his intentions good. I was pleased with him. His words might have been blasphemy to your ears, but to Me they were sweet blasphemy.”

“So you see, don’t judge the way other people connect to God,” concluded Shams. “To each his own way and his own prayer. God does not take us at our word. He looks deep into our hearts. It is not the ceremonies or rituals that make a difference, but whether our hearts are sufficiently pure or not.”

One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission?

Some people make the mistake of confusing “submission” with “weakness,” whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.

May love find you when you least expect, where you least expect.

said one should keep the intellect satisfied and yet be careful not to spoil it. It was one of his rules. “Intellect and love are made of different materials,” he said. “Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy,’ whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures.”

he liked to provoke people to see what came out of them in moments of anger.

Values cherished by most human beings, such as security, comfort, and happiness, had hardly any meaning in his eyes.

Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence. In time I became concerned about his well-being. For deep inside I sensed that one

Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.

Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.

Patience does not mean to passively endure. It 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 is needed for the crescent moon to become full.

You were right about one thing. I constantly vacillate between two opposites: aggressive and passive. Either I meddle too much in the lives of loved ones or I feel helpless in the face of their actions. As for submission, I’ve never experienced the kind of peaceful surrender you wrote to me about. Honestly, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a Sufi. But I have to give you this: Amazingly, things between Jeannette and me turned out the way I wanted only after I stopped wanting and interfering.

I know I have done the right thing, and so have you, but my heart is heavy with sadness, and I already miss the most unusual and unruly dervish my lodge has ever welcomed. In the end we all belong to God, and to Him we shall return.

He feared no one and obeyed no one.

charm, dignity, and unruliness.

It was my tenth rule: East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.

As a Sufi, I had been trained to accept the thorn with the rose, the difficulties with the beauties of life. Hence followed another rule: The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.

“Your journey is already changing you,” said the master when I went to his room to say good-bye. “And it hasn’t even started yet.”

“Yes, I realized,” I said softly. “It is another one of the forty rules: The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without.”

There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power-driven, self-centered people with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.”

“You say you want to travel the path, but you don’t want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure—whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.”

Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think?

Being used to an itinerant life, I found it slightly unnerving to have to settle in a city, but I recalled another fundamental rule: Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?

I kept wondering, is the way I’ve lived my life the way I want to continue from now on? And then a fearful feeling came over me. What if both a yes and a no might generate equally disastrous consequences? So I found another answer: maybe!

There was an Ella-the-control-freak and an Ella-the-hopelessly-meek. She could never tell which one was about to emerge, or when.

made Ella feel that she was somehow breaking away from her staid and tranquil life. From a woman with lots of dull grays and browns on her life’s canvas, she was turning into a woman with a secret color—a bright, tantalizing red. And she loved it. Aziz was no man for small pleasantries. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were not really alive. (Ella wondered if this might put her on his list of inanimate objects.) Aziz didn’t write about the weather or the latest movie he had seen. He wrote about other things, deeper things, like life and death, and above all love. Ella was not used to expressing her feelings on such issues, especially to a stranger, but perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind.

It is not something we can add to our life without making major changes there.

Where she hesitated and worried before acting, he acted first and worried later, if he ever worried at all. He had an animated personality, too much idealism and passion for one body. He wore many hats and he wore them well.

In general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.”

“What a bizarre thing to say,” Ella wrote him back, “to a woman who has always put too much thought into the past and even more thought into the future but somehow never even touched the present moment.”

Bountiful is your life, full and complete. Or so you think, until someone comes along and makes you realize what you have been missing all this time. Like a mirror that reflects what is absent rather than present, he shows you the void in your soul—the void you have resisted seeing. That person can be a lover, a friend, or a spiritual master. Sometimes it can be a child to look after. What matters is to find the soul that will complete yours. All the prophets have given the same advice: Find the one who will be your mirror!

“You are right,” I conceded. “I have always lived a protected life. I don’t even know how ordinary people live.” Shams picked up a lump of soil, and as he crumbled it between his fingers, he added softly, “If we can embrace the universe as a whole, with all its differences and contradictions, everything will melt into One.”

“The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back—not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile,” he murmured. “This is what one of the forty rules reminds us.”

“I don’t quarrel with them, I quarrel with their inflated sense of themselves. That’s different.”

She was an impossible combination, full of revolutionary ideas, unbridled courage, and creativity, yet as fragile as a crystal flower. I promised myself to stay by her side and protect her not only from the outside world but also from herself. Did she ever love me as much as I loved her? I don’t think so. But I know she did love me in her own self-centered and self-destructive way.

“I cannot tell you what destiny is. All I can tell you is what it isn’t. In fact, there is another rule regarding this question. Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. “The music of the universe is all-pervading and it is composed on forty different levels. “Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.”

I had always admired Rumi’s personality and known that his compassion, endless and extraordinary, was what I lacked in life. But today my admiration for him had grown by leaps and bounds. This world was full of people obsessed with wealth, recognition, or power. The more signs of success they earned, the more they seemed to be in need of them. Greedy and covetous, they rendered worldly possessions their qibla, always looking in that direction, unaware of becoming the servants of the things they hungered after. That was a common pattern. It happened all the time. But it was rare, as rare as rubies, for a man who had already made his way up, a man who had plenty of gold, fame, and authority, to renounce his position all of a sudden one day and endanger his reputation for an inner journey, one that nobody could tell where or how it would end. Rumi was that rare ruby.

I can’t rid my mind of her. She reminds me of jewelry boxes with secret compartments. You think you own her, but unless you have the keys, she remains locked up and unreachable even when you hold her in your arms.

I need to do this right away because if I delay in mailing my letter, I am afraid I will never be able to do it. First you meet someone—someone who is completely different from everyone around you. Someone who sees everything in a different light and forces you to shift, change your angle of vision, observe everything anew, within and without. You think you can keep a safe distance from him. You think you can navigate your way through this beautiful storm until you realize, much too suddenly, you are thrust out into the open and in fact you control nothing. I cannot tell when exactly I became captivated by your words. All I know is, our correspondence has been changing me. Right from the start. Chances are I will regret saying this. But having spent my whole life regretting the things I failed to do, I see no harm in doing something regrettable for a change.

And that brings me back to reality. And the reality is that I don’t know what to do with you.