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2.26k reviews for:
قواعد العشق الأربعون: The Forty Rules of Love
جلال الدين الرومي, Elif Shafak, خالد الجبيلي
3.87 AVERAGE
2.26k reviews for:
قواعد العشق الأربعون: The Forty Rules of Love
جلال الدين الرومي, Elif Shafak, خالد الجبيلي
3.87 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I wasn’t captivated by the characters and found it definitely to pay attention to the plot because of it
challenging
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Found the beginning quite corny, boring and predictable (Ella’s boring, sad crumbling life & marriage). I probably would have stopped reading or skimmed the rest if I didn’t already love the author.
Overall I didn’t much care for Ella & her storyline, and preferred the excerpts from the Sweet Blasphemy manuscript talking about Sufism (and Rumi and Sham’s relationship), even though some of the character plotlines felt underdeveloped and frustrating.
Excerpts :
This, in a nutshell, is their notion of afterlife. So great is their obsession with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future that will justify who they are today they forget about God! Don't they know one of the forty rules?
Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell. This is what Rule Number Twenty-five is about.
Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his conscience that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments in life when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is. Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future, when this very moment is the only time we can truly and fully experience both the presence and the absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and nonnegotiable.
Love is the reason. Love is the goal.
And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of His creations because of Him and chanks to Him, superfuous divisions melt into thin air. From that point on, there can be no "I' anymore. All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.
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! For me that mirror is Shams of Tabriz. Until he came and forced me to look deep into the crannies of my soul, I had not faced the fundamental truth about myself: that though successful and prosperous outside, I was lonely and unfulfilled inside. It's as if for years on end you compile a personal dictionary. In it you give your definition of every concept that matters to you, such as "truth," « happiness," or "beauty." At every major turning point in life, you refer to this dictionary, hardly ever feeling the need to question its premises. Then one day a stranger comes and snatches your precious dictionary and throws it away. "All your definitions need to be redefined," he says. "It's time for you to unlearn everything you know."
When you love someone this much, you expect everyone around you to feel the same way, sharing your joy and euphoria. And when that doesn't happen, you feel surprised, then offended and betrayed. I How could I possibly make my family and friends see what I see? How could I describe the indescribable? Shams is my Sea of Mercy and Grace. He is my Sun of Truth and Faith. I call him the King of Kings of Spirit. He is my fountain of life and my tall cypress tree, majestic and evergreen. His companionship is like the fourth reading of the Quran a journey that can only be experienced from within but never grasped from the outside. Unfortunately, most people make their evaluations based on images and hearsay. To them Shams is an eccentric dervish. They think he behaves bizarrely and speaks blasphemy, that he is utterly unpredictable and unreliable. To me, however, he is the epitome of Love that moves the whole universe, at times retreating into the background and holding every piece together, at times exploding in bursts. An encounter of this kind happens once in a lifetime. Once in thirty-eight years.
By and large, the narrow-minded say that dancing is sacrilege. They think God gave us music not only the music we make with our voices and instruments but the music underlying all forms of life, and then He forbade our listening to it. Don't they see that all nature is singing? Everything in this universe moves with a rhythm-the pumping of the heart, the flaps of a bird's wings, the wind on a stormy night, a blacksmith working iron, or the sounds an unborn baby is surrounded with inside the womb... Everything partakes, passionately and spontaneously, in one magnificent melody. The dance of the whirling dervishes is a link in that perpetual chain. Just as a drop of seawater carries within it the entire ocean, our dance both reflects and shrouds the secrets of the cosmos.
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans. Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the day Shams and I met in front of the Inn of Sugar Vendors. Every year on the last day of October, I retreat into a solitude that grows in eight day by day. I spend forty days in chilla, thinking of the forty rules. nember and review each of them, but there in the far reaches of my ad there is only Shams of Tabriz, glittering.
You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything? Deep in the slow whirling of sorrow and longing, I am with Shams every day, every minute. My chest is a cave where Shams is resting. Just as a mountain keeps an echo inside itself, I hold the voice of Shams within.
Of the scholar and preacher I once was, not even the smallest speck remains. Love has taken away all of my practices and habits. Instead it has filled me with poetry. And though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words.
Yesterday's victors became today's losers. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of God.
Little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there's no place to arrive at. The universe is turning, constantly and relentlessly, and so are the earth and the moon, but it is nothing other than a secret embedded within us human beings that makes it all move. With that knowledge we dervishes will dance our way through love and heartbreak even if no one understands what we are doing. We will dance in the middle of a brawl or a major war, all the same. We will dance in our hurt and grief, with joy and elation, alone and together, as slow and fast as the flow of water. We will dance in our blood. There is a perfect harmony and subtle balance in all that is and was in the universe. The dots change constantly and replace one another, but the circle remains intact. Rule Number Thirty-nine: While the parts change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing ever really changes.
Overall I didn’t much care for Ella & her storyline, and preferred the excerpts from the Sweet Blasphemy manuscript talking about Sufism (and Rumi and Sham’s relationship), even though some of the character plotlines felt underdeveloped and frustrating.
Excerpts :
This, in a nutshell, is their notion of afterlife. So great is their obsession with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future that will justify who they are today they forget about God! Don't they know one of the forty rules?
Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell. This is what Rule Number Twenty-five is about.
Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his conscience that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments in life when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is. Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future, when this very moment is the only time we can truly and fully experience both the presence and the absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and nonnegotiable.
Love is the reason. Love is the goal.
And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of His creations because of Him and chanks to Him, superfuous divisions melt into thin air. From that point on, there can be no "I' anymore. All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.
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! For me that mirror is Shams of Tabriz. Until he came and forced me to look deep into the crannies of my soul, I had not faced the fundamental truth about myself: that though successful and prosperous outside, I was lonely and unfulfilled inside. It's as if for years on end you compile a personal dictionary. In it you give your definition of every concept that matters to you, such as "truth," « happiness," or "beauty." At every major turning point in life, you refer to this dictionary, hardly ever feeling the need to question its premises. Then one day a stranger comes and snatches your precious dictionary and throws it away. "All your definitions need to be redefined," he says. "It's time for you to unlearn everything you know."
When you love someone this much, you expect everyone around you to feel the same way, sharing your joy and euphoria. And when that doesn't happen, you feel surprised, then offended and betrayed. I How could I possibly make my family and friends see what I see? How could I describe the indescribable? Shams is my Sea of Mercy and Grace. He is my Sun of Truth and Faith. I call him the King of Kings of Spirit. He is my fountain of life and my tall cypress tree, majestic and evergreen. His companionship is like the fourth reading of the Quran a journey that can only be experienced from within but never grasped from the outside. Unfortunately, most people make their evaluations based on images and hearsay. To them Shams is an eccentric dervish. They think he behaves bizarrely and speaks blasphemy, that he is utterly unpredictable and unreliable. To me, however, he is the epitome of Love that moves the whole universe, at times retreating into the background and holding every piece together, at times exploding in bursts. An encounter of this kind happens once in a lifetime. Once in thirty-eight years.
By and large, the narrow-minded say that dancing is sacrilege. They think God gave us music not only the music we make with our voices and instruments but the music underlying all forms of life, and then He forbade our listening to it. Don't they see that all nature is singing? Everything in this universe moves with a rhythm-the pumping of the heart, the flaps of a bird's wings, the wind on a stormy night, a blacksmith working iron, or the sounds an unborn baby is surrounded with inside the womb... Everything partakes, passionately and spontaneously, in one magnificent melody. The dance of the whirling dervishes is a link in that perpetual chain. Just as a drop of seawater carries within it the entire ocean, our dance both reflects and shrouds the secrets of the cosmos.
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans. Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the day Shams and I met in front of the Inn of Sugar Vendors. Every year on the last day of October, I retreat into a solitude that grows in eight day by day. I spend forty days in chilla, thinking of the forty rules. nember and review each of them, but there in the far reaches of my ad there is only Shams of Tabriz, glittering.
You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything? Deep in the slow whirling of sorrow and longing, I am with Shams every day, every minute. My chest is a cave where Shams is resting. Just as a mountain keeps an echo inside itself, I hold the voice of Shams within.
Of the scholar and preacher I once was, not even the smallest speck remains. Love has taken away all of my practices and habits. Instead it has filled me with poetry. And though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words.
Yesterday's victors became today's losers. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of God.
Little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there's no place to arrive at. The universe is turning, constantly and relentlessly, and so are the earth and the moon, but it is nothing other than a secret embedded within us human beings that makes it all move. With that knowledge we dervishes will dance our way through love and heartbreak even if no one understands what we are doing. We will dance in the middle of a brawl or a major war, all the same. We will dance in our hurt and grief, with joy and elation, alone and together, as slow and fast as the flow of water. We will dance in our blood. There is a perfect harmony and subtle balance in all that is and was in the universe. The dots change constantly and replace one another, but the circle remains intact. Rule Number Thirty-nine: While the parts change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing ever really changes.
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Elif Shafak weaves together two compelling stories: the spiritual journey of the 13th-century poet Rumi and the life of a contemporary housewife, Ella Rubinstein. In Rumi's tale, he develops a deep connection with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, whose unique teachings challenge societal expectations and help Rumi explore his spiritual essence. This profound relationship inspires Rumi to pen timeless poetry that delves into the themes of love and the divine.
Simultaneously, Ella, feeling trapped in a lackluster marriage, undergoes a transformation as she immerses herself in Rumi's poetry and Shams' "forty rules of love." These principles highlight love as a powerful catalyst for change, encouraging individuals to pursue deeper connections with themselves and those around them. As Ella embraces these insights, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery, reigniting her zest for life.
Shafak's novel showcases the multifaceted nature of love—be it romantic, spiritual, or platonic—while underscoring the significance of following one's heart. With its poetic language and well-developed characters, "The Forty Rules of Love" enchants readers, prompting them to contemplate their own perceptions of love and spirituality. Ultimately, the book conveys that love, in all its intricacies, is essential for personal and spiritual growth.
Simultaneously, Ella, feeling trapped in a lackluster marriage, undergoes a transformation as she immerses herself in Rumi's poetry and Shams' "forty rules of love." These principles highlight love as a powerful catalyst for change, encouraging individuals to pursue deeper connections with themselves and those around them. As Ella embraces these insights, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery, reigniting her zest for life.
Shafak's novel showcases the multifaceted nature of love—be it romantic, spiritual, or platonic—while underscoring the significance of following one's heart. With its poetic language and well-developed characters, "The Forty Rules of Love" enchants readers, prompting them to contemplate their own perceptions of love and spirituality. Ultimately, the book conveys that love, in all its intricacies, is essential for personal and spiritual growth.