A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 2010, 366 p, including 2 p Glossary.

Here we have two novels in one. Or actually, it is more like a short story (actually perhaps a short novella) containing a novel within it. That novel has each chapter begin with a word which starts with the letter B as does The Forty Rules of Love as a whole.

The framing device is set in 2008 where Ella Rubinstein is a Jewish housewife in Pennsylvania, married to a philandering husband and, with her children more or less grown, beginning to wonder if she is wasting her life, but not really considering the nature of the experience of love. She has just secured a job reading manuscripts submitted to a publisher, the first of which is a novel titled Sweet Blasphemy written by an Aziz Z Zahara. When the oldest of her three children, Jeanette, suddenly announces she and her boyfriend Scott want to get married it precipitates a crisis in Ella’s life. The meat of The Forty Rules of Love, though, is in that submitted manuscript, which is the tale of the effect exerted on the life of the thirteenth century preacher Rumi by the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz. So taken by Sweet Blasphemy is Ella that she emails its author (without letting him know she is reading it for the publisher.) Through the ensuing correspondence she and Aziz fall for each other.

Sweet Blasphemy is told with a variety of viewpoint characters, each of whose voices Shafak renders superbly: the Killer, Shams, Rumi, The Novice, the Master, the Zealot, Suleiman the Drunk, Desert Rose the Harlot, Hasan the Beggar, Aladdin (not the pantomime character,) Kerra – Rumi’s Christian wife, who sees little difference between Christians and Muslims as people – Kimya (who falls in love with Shams,) Baybars the Warrior, Sultan Walad and Husam the Student, all adding up to a convincing picture of life in thirteenth century Anatolia.

In his encounters with others Shams shows himself fond of illuminating his philosophy with either a parable or else one of his Forty Rules of Love. (Whether there are forty of Shams’s rules given to us in the book I didn’t bother to count.)

His preference for the loving aspects of religious teaching does not enamour him to adherents of a more fundamental bent.

For Shams, “It’s easy to love a perfect God. ….. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” Moreover, “Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.” He is also wise. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together.”

Of religious zealots he says, “Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes it is no wonder they see a plethora of things to be afraid of,” they pick and choose only those verses of their holy book which conform to their inclinations and so ignore its totality.

In a passage that speaks to the similarities between fundamental Muslims and Calvinists he says, “By and large, the narrow minded say that dancing is sacrilege.” But when you think about it that attitude could be taken to be blasphemy. “They think God gave us music … then forbade us to listen to it.”

It is possible this thought may allude to the background of ‘Aziz Z Zahara’. It turns out he was born as one Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie! His own story is not without misfortune, though.

Love, along with sex and death, is of course one the three main preoccupations of the novel as a form. With Shams, Shafak’s focus on it here is more on the religious ideal but it is counterpoised with Ella’s relationship with ‘Aziz’. But Shams himself is incapable of extending his general love for humans with the more intense feelings a married man ought to have for his wife. Kimya reflects on her love for him that “Little did I know that I was making the most common mistake women have made throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.”

In his own way too, Shams is a fundamentalist.

Is there slight imbalance here, though? Would the novel succeed as well without the framing device? Possibly.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful, complex and compassionate book. As an author Shafak is certainly the real deal.

Pedant’s corner:- “on my doorsill” (usually it’s a doorstep,) strived (strove,) caravanseries (caravanserais,) “portabella mushrooms” (Portobello mushrooms,) bookstore (in an email from “Aziz”. As a Scot, he would surely say ‘bookshop’,) “like a broken faucet” (ditto; ‘like a broken tap’, but then, the book is written in USian,) “off of” (I know it’s USian but it annoys me. Just ‘off’, please,) “no other” (none other.)