THE ‘RUMI PHENOMENON’ BETWEEN ORIENTALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM The Case of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

Abstract

Since 1994 the American literary market has been taken by storm by what may be called the ‘Rumi phenomenon’: the posthumous literary success of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet and mystic, Muhammad Jalal ad-Din Balkhi, known to the Anglophone world as Rumi. Rumi has become the best-selling poet in the United States and a series of epigones fictionalising the poet’s biography and expanding on the impact of his poetry on American culture have been generated. This article focuses on Elif Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, as one of the best known and most remarkable contributions to the Rumi phenomenon. In her domestication of the figure of Rumi for an American audience, the Turkish author not only succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of Rumi’s work perpetrated by the American initiators of the Rumi phenomenon, but also employs Orientalist strategies in the ways in which she positions the East as being instrumental to the West. Shafak’s advocacy of a cosmopolitan, global society, where national affiliations become obsolete, clashes with her open adherence to the needs and aesthetics of the American literary market. Such a difficult coexistence results in a problematic notion of cosmopolitanism, which appears inextricably bound to the logics of empire. Yet, in spite of the problematic cosmopolitanism it portrays, the novel succeeds in creating a form of transatlantic cultural kinship between Turkey and the United States.

Keywords:

• Elif Shafak
• Rumi
• The Forty Rules of Love
• Turkish literature
• Anglophone literature
• Orientalism
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

1. Permission to cite this translation of the poem was granted by its translator, Shariar Shariari.

2. Endorsing the intrinsic hierarchy of the world literary arena by confirming London and New York as its capitals appears as a weakness of Casanova’s book itself. According to Cleary, Casanova provides an extensive analysis of European and American literary phenomena but fails to explore, for instance, the complex universes of Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Ottoman literature (Cleary, 2006: 209–10).