Shams reminded me so much of my father that I started imagining him in the story. For all his preaching about love and divinity, he sure was a confrontational and quarrelsome person, always inspiring opposition by stirring up conventional thought with his unusual opinions. You might even call him heartless, for marrying 15-year-old girl who loved him more than anything and refusing to return it. His 40 rules of love are spiritual ones, not romantic- an irony the author uses by having him reject any love associated with real relationships (other than Rumi, whom he strangely cannot detach from).
Ella faces a similar moral dilemma with love: that she has to abandon her children to find romance, with a man who also happens to be a Sufi. Only this Sufi lives in the modern age, and has no problem being in a romantic relationship with someone who left her kids.
In light of this, the reader might gather that Shams' 40 rules aren't exclusive, they are only meant to be guidelines. None of them address dealing with loss, unrequited love, grief, sacrifice, or the challenges of being in a relationship. That the rules are limited to being spiritual means the author can expose the faults of people who can't see beyond this worldview. I kept waiting for one of Sham's rules that would put to rest the shame of marrying that girl, but none came. Similarly, I waited for Ella to discover a rule that would bring her back to her family. That didn't happen either. It makes the reader wonder if the author intended for Shams to teach such a narrow scope of love. Ella was, after all, one of his disciples.
Either way, I found the rules to be very useful for finding peace. They are cleverly inserted into the story at all the right moments. I'll be reading this one again.
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