A beautiful, modern take on the Rumi and Shams love story by Elif Shafak. Two storylines – a modern one and an ancient one run in parallel.
Some quotes from the book:
In many ways the twenty-first century is not that different from the thirteenth century. Both will be recorded in history as times of unprecedented religious clashes, cultural misunderstandings, and a general sense of insecurity and fear of the Other. At times like these, the need for love is greater than ever.
“I’m not looking for something different. I’m looking for God,” I said. “My quest is a quest for God.” “Then you are looking for Him in the wrong place,” he retorted, his voice suddenly thickened. “God has left this place! We don’t know when He will be back.”
It was always like this. When you spoke the truth, they hated you. The more you talked about love, the more they hated you.
Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.
Let us choose one another as companions! Let us sit at each other’s feet!
No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It’s like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it.
When asked his name, he introduced himself as Shams of Tabriz and said he was a wandering dervish searching for God high and low. “And were you able to find Him?” I inquired. A shadow crossed his face as the dervish nodded and said, “Indeed, He was with me all along.” The judge interjected with a smirk he didn’t bother to hide, “I never understand why you dervishes make life so complicated. If God was with you all along, why did you rummage around this whole time in search of Him?” Shams of Tabriz bowed his head pensively and remained silent for a moment. When he looked up again, his face was calm, his voice measured. “Because although it is a fact that He cannot be found by seeking, only those who seek can find Him.”
“The sharia is like a candle,” said Shams of Tabriz. “It provides us with much valuable light. But let us not forget that a candle helps us to go from one place to another in the dark. If we forget where we are headed and instead concentrate on the candle, what good is it?”
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue, or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.
Opening up someone’s heart to spiritual light is no small task for a human being. You’re stealing God’s thunder.
“Intellect and love are made of different materials,” he said. “Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy,’ whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures.”
Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.
Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
Painfully delicate and surprisingly strong, silk resembles love.
Before he left, he said his part in this story resembled the silkworm. He and Rumi would retreat into a cocoon of Divine Love, only to come out when the time was ripe and the precious silk woven. But eventually, for the silk to survive, the silkworm had to die.
East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.
“Your journey is already changing you,” said the master when I went to his room to say good-bye. “And it hasn’t even started yet.”
The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without.”
True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.
“You are too timid for me. You care too much about what other people think. But you know what? Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you’ll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try.”
“You say you want to travel the path, but you don’t want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure—whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.”
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether wevchoose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think?
I am a happy, satisfied man both in my private life and in the community. Why, then, do I feel this void inside me, growing deeper and wider with each passing day? It gnaws at my soul like a disease and accompanies me wherever I go, as quiet as a mouse and just as ravenous.
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come“
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.” Despite their seemingly endless differences, all of these people gave off a similar air of incompleteness, of the works in progress that they were, each an unfinished masterwork.
It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.
It never ceased to amaze me how dramatically people changed when they joined a mob.
If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.”
“How can you blame others for disrespecting you when you think of yourself as unworthy of respect?”
“Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.”
Every individual is self-sufficient in his search for the divine. There is a rule regarding this: We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and unique. No two people are alike. No two hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore, disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is tantamount to disrespecting God’s holy scheme.”
Doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching.”
It always made me both immensely sad and elated to listen to a town sleep, wondering what sorts of stories werebeing lived behind closed doors, what sorts of stories I could have lived had I chosen another path. But I hadn’t made any choice. If anything, the path had chosen me.
A wandering dervish arrived in a town where the natives didn’t trust strangers. “Go away!” they shouted at him. “No one knows you here!” The dervish calmly responded, “Yes, but I know myself, and believe me, it would have been much worse if it were the other way round.”
While pretty flowers are instantly plucked, few people pay attention to plants with thorns and prickles. But the truth is, great medicines are often made from these. Isn’t it the same with the garden of love? How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.
“You see, God’s love is an endless ocean, and human beings strive to get as much water as they can out of it. But at the end of the day, how much water we each get depends on the size of our cups. Some people have barrels, some buckets, while some others have only got bowls.”
“I am a Sufi, the child of the present moment.”
Love is the reason. Love is the goal.
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!
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.” And you, for some reason unbeknownst to your mind but obvious to your heart, instead of raising objections or getting cross with him, gladly comply. This is what Shams has done to me. Our friendship has taught me so much. But more than that, he has taught me to unlearn everything I knew.
Is there a way to grasp what love means without becoming a lover first? Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.
The verse is not about women and men but about womanhood and manhood. And each and every one of us, including you and me, has both femininity and masculinity in us, in varying degrees and shades. Only when we learn to embrace both can we attain harmonious Oneness.”
“The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back—not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time.
There are friendships in this world that seem incomprehensible to ordinary people but are in fact conduits to deeper wisdom and insight.
RuleNumber Thirty-two: Nothing should stand between yourself and God. Not imams, priests, rabbis, or any other custodians of moral or religious leadership. Not spiritual masters, not even your faith. Believe in your values and your rules, but never lord them over others. If you keep breaking other people’s hearts, whatever religious duty you perform is no good.
This world was full of people obsessed with wealth, recognition, or power. The more signs of success they earned, the more they seemed to be in need of them. Greedy and covetous, they rendered worldly possessions their qibla, always looking in that direction, unaware of becoming the servants of the things they hungered after. That was a common pattern. It happened all the time. But it was rare, as rare as rubies, for a man who had already made his way up, a man who had plenty of gold, fame, and authority, to renounce his position all of a sudden one day and endanger his reputation for an inner journey, one that nobody could tell where or how it
would end. Rumi was that rare ruby.
“Rumi says we don’t need to hunt for love outside ourselves. All we need to do is to eliminate the barriers inside that keep us away from love.”
“One who thinks he has all the answers is the most ignorant,”
Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.
Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.
“I wish we had met earlier,” Ella heard herself say. “There is no such thing as early or late in life,” Aziz said. “Everything happens at the right time.”
Ever since then he had traveled the world as a photographer by profession, a wandering dervish at heart.
All I can give you is the present moment. That is all I have. But the truth is, no one has more than that. It is just that we like to pretend we do.”
“It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?’ “Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”
Prose or poetry, the words come to me in flocks and then leave just as suddenly, like migrating birds. I am only the bed of water where they stop and rest on their way to warmer lands.
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.
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. For every Sufi who dies, another is born somewhere.