The Forty Rules of Love (11 page)

The Novice

BAGHDAD, SEPTEMBER 30, 1243

Behind Shams of Tabriz, I rode my stolen horse. Hard as I tried to keep a safe distance between us, it soon proved impossible to trail him without making myself apparent. When Shams stopped at a bazaar in Baghdad to refresh himself and buy a few things for the road, I decided to make myself known and threw myself in front of his horse.

“Ginger-haired ignoramus, what are you doing there lying on the ground?” Shams exclaimed from his horse, looking half amused, half surprised.

I knelt, clasped my hands, and craned my neck, as I had seen beggars do, and implored, “I want to come with you. Please let me join you.”

“Do you have any idea where I am going?”

I paused. That question had never occurred to me. “No, but it makes no difference. I want to become your disciple. You are my role model.”

“I always travel alone and want no disciples or students, thank you! And I am certainly no role model for anyone, much less for you,” Shams said. “So just go on your way. But if you are still going to look for a master in the future, please keep in mind a golden rule:
There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power-driven, self-centered people with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not direct your attention to himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self. True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.
”

“Please give me a chance,” I implored. “All the famous travelers had someone to assist them on the road, like an apprentice or something.”

Shams scratched his chin pensively, as if acknowledging the truth in my words. “Do you have the strength to bear my company?” he inquired.

I jumped to my feet, nodding with all my heart: “I certainly do. And my strength comes from within.”

“Very well, then. Here is your first task: I want you to go to the nearest tavern and get yourself a pitcher of wine. You will drink it here in the bazaar.”

Now, I was used to scrubbing the floors with my robes, polishing pots and pans till they sparkled like the fine Venetian glass I had seen in the hands of an artisan who had escaped from Constantinople long ago when the Crusaders had sacked the city. I could chop a hundred onions in one sitting or peel and mince cloves of garlic, all in the name of spiritual development. But drinking wine in the midst of a crowded bazaar to that end was beyond my ken. I looked at him in horror.

“I cannot do that. If my father learns, he’ll break my legs. He sent me to the dervish lodge so that I could become a better Muslim, not a heathen. What will my family and friends think of me?”

I felt the burning glare of Shams on me and shivered under the pressure, just like the day I had spied on him behind closed doors.

“You see, you cannot be my disciple,” he pronounced with conviction. “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.”

I realized that my chance to accompany him was slipping away and rushed in to defend myself. “How was I to know you were not asking that question on purpose? Wine is strictly forbidden by Islam. I thought you were testing me.”

“But that would be playing God. It is not up to us to judge and measure each other’s devoutness,” Shams answered.

I looked around in despair, not knowing what to make of his words, my mind pounded like dumpling dough.

Shams went on: “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.”

Patting his horse, Shams concluded with an air of finality, “I think you ought to stay in Baghdad with your family. Find an honest tradesman and become his apprentice. I have a feeling you might make a good merchant someday. But don’t be a greedy one! Now, with your permission, I need to get going.”

With that, he saluted me one last time, kicked his horse, and galloped away, the world sliding under its thundering hoofs. I hopped onto my horse and chased him toward the outskirts of Baghdad, but the distance between us got greater and greater until he was no more than a dark spot in the distance. Even long after that spot had disappeared on the horizon, I could feel the weight of Shams’s stare on me.

Ella

NORTHAMPTON, MAY 24, 2008

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Being a big believer of this saying, every morning, weekdays and weekends alike, Ella made her way to the kitchen. A good breakfast, she thought, set the tone for the rest of the day. She had read in women’s magazines that families who regularly had a proper breakfast together were more cohesive and harmonious than those in which each member rushed out the door half hungry. And though she firmly believed in this research, she had yet to experience the joyful breakfast the magazines wrote about. Her breakfast experience was a collision of galaxies where every member of her family marched to a different drummer. Everyone wanted to eat a different thing at breakfast, which was entirely against Ella’s notion of eating together. How could there be unity at a table when one nibbled toasted bread and jam (Jeannette) while another chomped honey-puffed cereal (Avi) and a third waited patiently to be served scrambled eggs (David) and a fourth refused to eat anything at all (Orly)? All the same, breakfast was important. Every morning she prepared it, determined that no child of hers would begin the day munching on candy or some other junk food.

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.

Dear Ella,

I was so happy to learn that things have improved between you and your daughter. As for me, I left the village of Momostenango yesterday at the crack of dawn. Strange, I stayed here only a few days, and yet when the time came to bid farewell, I felt sad, almost grieved. Would I ever see this tiny village in Guatemala again? I didn’t think so.

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 we choose 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?

While in Momostenango, I meditated and tried to visualize your aura. Before long, three colors came to me: warm yellow, timid orange, and reserved metallic purple. I had a feeling these were your colors. I thought they were beautiful both separately and together.

My final stop in Guatemala is Chajul—a small town with adobe houses and children with eyes wise beyond their years. In each house, women of all ages weave magnificent tapestries. I asked a granny to choose a tapestry and said it was for a lady living in Northampton. After giving it some thought, she pulled a tapestry from a huge pile behind her. I swear to God, there were more than fifty tapestries of every possible color in that pile. Yet the one she chose for you was composed of only three tones: yellow, orange, and purple. I thought you might like to know about this coincidence, if there is such a thing in God’s universe.

Does it ever occur to you that our exchange might not be a result of coincidence?

Warm regards,

Aziz

P.S. If you want, I can send you your tapestry via mail, or I can wait till the day we meet for coffee and bring it myself.

Ella closed her eyes and tried to imagine how the colors of her aura surrounded her face. Interestingly, the image of herself that popped up in her mind was not her grown-up self but her as a child, around seven years of age.

Many things came flooding back to her, memories that she thought she had long left behind. The sight of her mother standing still with a pistachio green apron around her waist and a measuring cup in her hand, her face an ashen mask of pain; dangling paper hearts on the walls, bright and sparkly; and the body of her father hanging from the ceiling as if he wanted to blend with the Christmas decorations and give the house a festive look. She remembered how she had spent her teenage years holding her mother responsible for the suicide of her father. As a young girl, Ella had promised herself that when she got married, she would always make her husband happy and not fail in her marriage, like her mother. In her endeavor to make her marriage as different from her mother’s as possible, she had not married a Christian man, preferring to marry inside her faith.

It was only a few years earlier that Ella had stopped hating her aging mother, and though the two of them had been on good terms lately, the truth was, deep inside she still felt ill at ease when she remembered the past.

“Mom! … Earth to Mom! Earth to Mom!”

Ella heard a ripple of giggles and whispers behind her shoulder. When she turned around, she saw four pairs of eyes watching her with amusement. Orly, Avi, Jeannette, and David had for once all come to breakfast at the same time and were now standing side by side inspecting her as if she were an exotic creature. From the way they looked, it seemed they had been standing there for a while, trying to get her attention.

“Good morning, you all.” Ella smiled.

“How come you didn’t hear us?” Orly asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

“You seemed so absorbed in that screen,” David said without looking at her.

Ella’s gaze followed her husband’s, and there on the open screen in front of her, she saw Aziz Z. Zahara’s e-mail shining dimly. In a flash she closed her laptop, without waiting for it to shut down.

“I’ve got a lot of reading to do for the literary agency,” Ella said, rolling her eyes. “I was working on my report.”

“No you were not! You were reading your e-mails,” Avi said, his face serious, matter-of-fact.

What was it in teenage boys that made them so eager to detect everyone’s flaws and lies? Ella wondered. But, to her relief, the others didn’t seem interested in the subject. In fact, they were all looking somewhere else now, focused on the kitchen counter.

It was Orly who turned to Ella, voicing the question for them all. “Mom, how come you haven’t made us any breakfast this morning?”

Now Ella turned to the counter and saw what they had seen. There was no coffee brewing, no scrambled eggs on the stove, no toast with blueberry sauce. She nodded repeatedly as if agreeing with an inner voice that spoke an undeniable truth.

Right, she thought, how come she had forgotten the breakfast?

PART TWO

Water

THE THINGS THAT ARE FLUID, CHANGING, AND UNPREDICTABLE

Rumi

KONYA, OCTOBER 15, 1244

Bright and plump, the gorgeous full moon resembled a massive pearl hanging in the sky. I got up from the bed and looked out the window into the courtyard, awash in moonlight. Even seeing such beauty, however, did not soothe the pounding of my heart or the trembling of my hands.

“Effendi, you look pale. Did you have the same dream again?” whispered my wife. “Shall I bring you a glass of water?”

I told her not to worry and to go back to sleep. There was nothing she could do. Our dreams were part of our destiny, and they would run their course as God willed it. Besides, there must be a reason, I thought, that every night for the last forty days I had been having the same dream.

The beginning of the dream differed slightly each time. Or perhaps it was always the same but I entered it from a different gate each evening. On this occasion I saw myself reading the Qur’an in a carpeted room that felt familiar but was like no place I had been before. Right across from me sat a dervish, tall, thin, and erect, with a veil on his face. He was holding a candelabrum with five glowing candles providing me with light so that I could read.

After a while I lifted my head to show the dervish the verse I was reading, and only then did I realize, to my awe, that what I thought was a candelabrum was in fact the man’s right hand. He had been holding out his hand to me, with each one of his fingers aflame.

In panic I looked around for water, but there was none in sight. I took off my cloak and threw it on the dervish to extinguish the flames. But when I lifted the cloak, he had vanished, leaving only a burning candle behind.

From this point onward, it was always the same dream. I started to look for him in the house, searching every nook and cranny. Next I ran into the courtyard, where the roses had blossomed in a sea of bright yellow. I called out left and right, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

“Come back, beloved. Where are you?”

Finally, as if led by an ominous intuition, I approached the well and peered down at the dark waters churning below. At first I couldn’t see anything, but in a little while the moon showered me in its glittering light and the courtyard acquired a rare luminosity. Only then did I notice a pair of black eyes staring up at me with unprecedented sorrow from the bottom of the well.

“They killed him!” somebody shouted. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps this was what my own voice would sound like in a state of infinite agony.

And I screamed and screamed until my wife held me tight, drew me to her bosom, and asked softly, “Effendi, did you have the same dream again?”

After Kerra went back to sleep, I slipped into the courtyard. In that moment I had the impression that the dream was still with me, vivid and frightening. In the stillness of the night, the sight of the well sent a shiver down my spine, but I couldn’t help sitting next to it, listening to the night breeze rustle gently through the trees.

At times like these, I feel a sudden wave of sadness take hold of me, though I can never tell why. My life is complete and fulfilled, in that I have been blessed with the three things I hold most dear: knowledge, virtue, and the capability to help others find God.

At age thirty-eight, I have been given by God more than I could ever have asked for. I have been trained as a preacher and a jurist and initiated into The Science of Divine Intuition—the knowledge given to prophets, saints, and scholars in varying degrees. Guided by my late father, educated by the best teachers of our time, I have worked hard to deepen my awareness with the belief that this was the duty God had assigned me.

My old master Seyyid Burhaneddin used to say I was one of God’s beloved, since I was given the honorable task of delivering His message to His people and helping them differentiate right from wrong.

For many years I have been teaching at the madrassa, discussing theology with other sharia scholars, instructing my disciples, studying law and
hadiths
,
giving sermons every Friday at the biggest mosque in town. I have long lost track of the number of students I have tutored. It is flattering to hear people praise my preaching skills and tell me how my words changed their lives at a time when they most needed guidance.

I am blessed with a loving family, good friends, and loyal disciples. Never in my life have I suffered destitution or scarcity, although the loss of my first wife was devastating. I thought I would never get married again, but I did, and thanks to Kerra I have experienced love and joy. Both of my sons are grown, although it never ceases to amaze me to see how different from each other they turned out to be. They are like two seeds that, though planted side by side in the same soil and nourished with the same sun and water, have blossomed into completely different plants. I am proud of them, just as I am proud of our adopted daughter, who has unique talents. 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.