Sufi Worldview of Jalal al-Din Rumi as Reflected in Modern Turkish Literature: the Case of Elif Shafak’s ‘Love’

Abstract

Jalal al-Din Rumi is one of the most controversial figures of medieval Sufi poetry. The system of his ideas, which originate from the legacy of earlier Sufi scholars, can be traced in many modern pop-cultural elements. The article examines Sufi motifs presented in Jalal al-Din Rumi’s writings as they appear in the novel Love (Aşk) written by the modern English writer of Turkish origin Elif Shafak. Turning to religious and philosophical motifs in modern literature is associated with the ambiguous popularity of Rumi in the Western media space. The purpose of this study is to identify the features of the domestication provided by Shafak as an example of cosmopolitan combination of Eastern mysticism and current socio-cultural problems. The article analyzes the novel with the aim of revealing intertextual characteristics in the text and also aims to establish the feasibility of their use. To this end, the article proposes an analysis of several provisions of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s worldview system, which he developed in his works in the context of the Arab-Muslim picture of the world and Sufi poetry: the concept of Love, dialectical understanding of the Unity of Existence, Sufi ethics, and tolerance of views. The transfer of elements of Sufi philosophy and ethics, present in the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi, into the novel serves as an ideological basis for the problems that arise in Shafak’s narrative. The analysis reveals formal and substantive correlations between Sufi narrative, especially the narrative found in Rumi’s Masnavi-ye-Ma’navi, and the novel Love by Shafak. The article concludes that the writer successfully attempted to transfer Sufi philosophy to modern realities through adding the idea that can be considered as a call for transcending inner barriers and following ideology of tolerance in order to overcome current social and individual crises.