The Forty Rules of Love

Between your fingers you hold a stone and throw it into flowing water. The effect might not be easy to see. There will be a small ripple where the stone breaks the surface and then a splash, muffled by the rush of the surrounding river. That’s all.

But the story didn’t end there.

In truth, there never was an end. Almost eight hundred years later, the spirits of Shams and Rumi are still alive today, whirling amid us somewhere.…

I am writing because the “timing” of my reading Sweet Blasphemy couldn’t have been more bizarre. Currently I am trying to persuade my elder daughter not to marry so young. The day before, I asked her boyfriend to call off their marriage plans. Now my daughter hates me and refuses to talk to me. I have a feeling you two would get along well, as you seem to have very similar views on love.

But this morning when she entered the kitchen, instead of brewing coffee, squeezing oranges, or toasting bread, the first thing Ella did was to sit at the kitchen table and turn on her laptop. She logged on to the Internet to see whether there was an e-mail from Aziz. To her delight, there was.

10. Open your heart to love!!!

But when Shams of Tabriz came to our house, and he and my husband locked themselves in the library for forty days, I felt an old resentment boil up inside me. A wound that I didn’t even know I had begun to bleed.

Shams of Tabriz bore more than a passing resemblance to Aziz Z. Zahara. He looked exactly the way Shams was described in the manuscript before he headed to Konya to meet Rumi. Ella wondered if Aziz had deliberately based his character’s looks on himself.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Shams kept saying. “Everybody will watch the same dance, but each will see it differently. So why worry? Some will like it, some won’t.”

Beyond wildest dreams, Aziz said, strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected. But not a single bone in Ella’s body was ready for the one strange thing that happened this week: Aziz Z. Zahara came to Boston to see her.

“I know you’re not a Sufi.” Aziz smiled. “And you don’t have to be one. Just be Rumi. That’s all I’m asking of you.”

Fast as lightning I threw my sword aside, pulled my dagger out of my belt, and dashed forward. The seven of us knocked the dervish to the ground, and in one swift move I stabbed him in the heart. A single hoarse cry came out of his mouth, his voice breaking at its peak. He didn’t stir again, nor did he breathe.

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.

“It’s Rule Number Forty,” she said slowly. “A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western.… Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple.

“Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire!

“The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”