ABSTRACT
In 2017, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak publicly acknowledged her bisexuality. While some reactions were positive, many were traditionalist, homophobic and misogynistic. This chapter investigates Shafak’s complex liminal identity as, in her own words, ‘woman, writer, exile, bisexual, agnostic, leftist, mystic, a non-Western in the West’, in dialogue with an analysis of The Forty Rules of Love (2010). The novel interweaves the thirteenth-century narrative of Sufi intimate companions Rumi and Shams (both married men) with a contemporary, transformative, heterosexual love story. The parallels between the two temporalities, and the presentation of the Rumi/Shams love story in the form of a novel-within-a-novel appropriately called Sweet Blasphemy, allow for the theoretical lens of bisexuality to be deployed. Both bisexuality and Sufism can be conceptualised as unorthodox, emancipatory, fluid and inherently oppositional to the institutionalised, rigid and binarist. This chapter examines the novel’s timely depiction of Sufism as anti-fundamentalist, spiritually fulfilling and accepting of varied forms of love. Similarly, bisexuality is revealed to be a fluid, anti-binarist sexuality, although it is not idealised in the novel, and social pressures are shown as problematic for ‘bisexual’ characters. The chapter argues that the novel successfully visualises a queer-friendly, mystical, emancipatory version of Islam that caters for the socially marginalised.
