by Elif Shafak
“It took God only six days to create the entire universe,” said Avi, beaming, but cold stares from everyone at the table forced him back into silence.
Sensing the escalating tension, David, his eyes fixed on his elder daughter, his brow furrowed in thought, interjected, “Honey, what your mom is trying to say is that dating is one thing, marrying is quite another.”
“But, Dad, did you think we would date forever?” Jeannette asked.
Drawing in a deep breath, Ella said, “To be perfectly blunt, we were expecting you to find someone better. You’re too young to get involved in any serious relationship.”
“You know what I’m thinking, Mom?” Jeannette said in a voice so flat as to be unrecognizable. “I’m thinking you’re projecting your own fears onto me. But just because you married so young and had a baby when you were my age, that doesn’t mean I’m going to make the same mistake.”
Ella blushed crimson as if slapped in the face. From deep within she remembered the difficult pregnancy that had resulted in Jeannette’s premature birth. As a baby and then as a toddler, her daughter had drained all of her energy, which was why she had waited six years before getting pregnant again.
“Sweetheart, we were happy for you when you started dating Scott,” David said cautiously, trying a different strategy. “He’s a nice guy. But who knows what you’ll be thinking after graduation? Things might be very different then.”
Jeannette gave a small nod that conveyed little more than feigned acquiescence. Then she said, “Is this because Scott isn’t Jewish?”
David rolled his eyes in disbelief. He had always taken pride in being an open-minded and cultured father, avoiding negative remarks about race, religion, or gender in the house.
Jeannette, however, seemed relentless. Turning to her mother, she asked, “Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’d still be making the same objections if Scott were a young Jewish man named Aaron?”
Jeannette’s voice needled with bitterness and sarcasm, and Ella feared there was more of that welling up inside her daughter.
“Sweetheart, I’ll be completely honest with you, even if you might not like it. I know how wonderful it is to be young and in love. Believe me, I do. But to get married to someone from a different background is a big gamble. And as your parents we want to make sure you’re doing the right thing.”
“And how do you know your right thing is the right thing for me?”
The question threw Ella off a little. She sighed and massaged her forehead, as if on the verge of a migraine.
“I love him, Mom. Does that mean anything to you? Do you remember that word from somewhere? He makes my heart beat faster. I can’t live without him.”
Ella heard herself chuckle. It was not her intention to make fun of her daughter’s feelings, not at all, but that was probably what her laughing to herself sounded like. For reasons unknown to her, she felt extremely nervous. She’d had fights with Jeannette before, hundreds of them, but today it felt as though she were quarreling with something else, something bigger.
“Mom, haven’t you ever been in love?” Jeannette retorted, a hint of contempt creeping into her tone.
“Oh, give me a break! Stop daydreaming and get real, will you? You’re being so … ” Ella’s eyes darted toward the window, hunting for a dramatic word, until finally she came up with “ … romantic!”
“What’s wrong with being romantic?” Jeannette asked, sounding offended.
Really, what was wrong with being romantic? Ella wondered. Since when was she so annoyed by romanticism? Unable to answer the questions tugging at the edges of her mind, she continued all the same. “Come on, honey. Which century are you living in? Just get it in your head, women don’t marry the men they fall in love with. When push comes to shove, they choose the guy who’ll be a good father and a reliable husband. Love is only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away.”
When she finished talking, Ella turned to her husband. David had clasped his hands in front of him, slowly as if through water, and was looking at her like he’d never seen her before.
“I know why you’re doing this,” Jeannette said. “You’re jealous of my happiness and my youth. You want to make an unhappy housewife out of me. You want me to be you, Mom.”
Ella felt a strange, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she had a giant rock sitting there. Was she an unhappy housewife? A middle-aged mom trapped in a failing marriage? Was this how her children saw her? And her husband, too? What about friends and neighbors? Suddenly she had the feeling that everyone around her secretly pitied her, and the suspicion was so painful that she gasped.
“You should apologize to your mom,” David said, turning to Jeannette with a frown on his face.
“It’s all right. I don’t expect an apology,” Ella said dejectedly.
Jeannette gave her mother a mock leer. And just like that, she pushed back her chair, threw her napkin aside, and walked out of the kitchen. After a minute Orly and Avi silently followed suit, either in an unusual act of solidarity with their elder sister or because they’d gotten bored of all this adult talk. Aunt Esther left next, mumbling some poor excuse while chewing fiercely on her last antacid tablet.
David and Ella remained at the table, an intense awkwardness hanging in the air between them. It pained Ella to have to face this void, which, as they both knew, had nothing to do with Jeannette or any of their children.
David grabbed the fork he had put aside and inspected it for a while. “So should I conclude that you didn’t marry the man you loved?”
“Oh, please, that’s not what I meant.”
“What is it you meant, then?” David said, still talking to the fork. “I thought you were in love with me when we got married.”
“I was in love with you,” Ella said, but couldn’t help adding, “back then.”
“So when did you stop loving me?” David asked, deadpan.
Ella looked at her husband in astonishment, like someone who had never seen her reflection before and who now held a mirror to her face. Had she stopped loving him? It was a question she had never asked herself before. She wanted to respond but lacked not so much the will as the words. Deep inside she knew it was the two of them they should be concerned about, not their children. But instead they were doing what they both were best at: letting the days go by, the routine take over, and time run its course of inevitable torpor.
She started to cry, unable to hold back this continuing sadness that had, without her knowledge, become a part of who she was. David turned his anguished face away. They both knew he hated to see her cry just as much as she hated to cry in front of him. Fortunately, the phone rang just then, saving them.
David picked it up. “Hello … yes, she’s here. Hold on, please.”
Ella pulled herself together and spoke up, doing her best to sound in good spirits. “Yes, this is Ella.”
“Hi, this is Michelle. Sorry to bother you over the weekend,” chirped a young woman’s voice. “It’s just that yesterday Steve wanted me to check in with you, and I simply forgot. Did you have a chance to start working on the manuscript?”
“Oh.” Ella sighed, only now remembering the task awaiting her.
Her first assignment at the literary agency was to read a novel by an unknown European author. She was then expected to write an extensive report on it.
“Tell him not to worry. I’ve already started reading,” Ella lied. Ambitious and headstrong, Michelle was the kind of person she didn’t want to upset on her first assignment.
“Oh, good! How is it?”
Ella paused, puzzled as to what to say. She didn’t know anything about the manuscript, except that it was a historical novel centered on the life of the famous mystic poet Rumi, who she learned was called “the Shakespeare of the Islamic world.”
“Oh, it’s very … mystical.” Ella chuckled, hoping to cover with a joke.
But Michelle was all business. “Right,” she said flatly. “Li
sten, I think you need to get on this. It might take longer than you expect to write a report on a novel like that.… ”
There was a distant muttering on the phone as Michelle’s voice trailed off. Ella imagined her juggling several tasks simultaneously—checking e-mails, reading a review on one of her authors, taking a bite from her tuna-salad sandwich, and polishing her fingernails—all while talking on the phone.
“Are you still there?” Michelle asked a minute later.
“Yes, I am.”
“Good. Listen, it’s crazy in here. I need to go. Just keep in mind the deadline is in three weeks.”
“I know,” Ella said abruptly, trying to sound more determined. “I’ll make the deadline.”
The truth was, Ella wasn’t sure she wanted to evaluate this manuscript at all. In the beginning she’d been so eager and confident. It had felt thrilling to be the first one to read an unpublished novel by an unknown author and to play however small a role in his fate. But now she wasn’t sure if she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century.
Michelle must have detected her hesitation. “Is there a problem?” she asked. When no answer came, she grew insistent. “Listen, you can confide in me.”
After a bit of silence, Ella decided to tell her the truth.
“It’s just that I’m not sure I’m in the right state of mind these days to concentrate on a historical novel. I mean, I’m interested in Rumi and all that, but still, the subject is alien to me. Perhaps you could give me another novel—you know, something I could more easily relate to.”
“That’s such a skewed approach,” said Michelle. “You think you can work better with books you know something about? Not at all! Just because you live in this state, you can’t expect to edit only novels that take place in Massachusetts, right?”
“That’s not what I meant …” Ella said, and immediately realized she had uttered the same sentence too many times this afternoon. She glanced at her husband to see if he, too, had noticed this, but David’s expression was hard to decipher.
“Most of the time, we have to read books that have nothing to do with our lives. That’s part of our job. Just this week I finished working on a book by an Iranian woman who used to operate a brothel in Tehran and had to flee the country. Should I have told her to send the manuscript to an Iranian agency instead?”
“No, of course not,” Ella mumbled, feeling silly and guilty.
“Isn’t connecting people to distant lands and cultures one of the strengths of good literature?”
“Sure it is. Listen, forget what I said. You’ll have a report on your desk before the deadline,” Ella conceded, hating Michelle for treating her as if she were the dullest person alive and hating herself for allowing this to happen.
“Wonderful, that’s the spirit,” Michelle concluded in her singsong voice. “Don’t get me wrong, but I think you should bear in mind that there are dozens of people out there who would love to have your job. And most of them are almost half your age. That’ll keep you motivated.”
When Ella hung up the phone, she found David watching her, his face solemn and reserved. He seemed to be waiting for them to pick up where they’d left off. But she didn’t feel like mulling over their daughter’s future anymore, if that was what they’d been worrying about in the first place.
Later in the day, she was alone on the porch sitting in her favorite rocking chair, looking at the orangey-red Northampton sunset. The sky felt so close and open that you could almost touch it. Her brain had gone quiet, as if tired of all the noise swirling inside. This month’s credit-card payments, Orly’s bad eating habits, Avi’s poor grades, Aunt Esther and her sad cakes, her dog Spirit’s decaying health, Jeannette’s marriage plans, her husband’s secret flings, the absence of love in her life … One by one, she locked them all in small mental boxes.
In that frame of mind, Ella took the manuscript out of its package and bounced it in her hand, as if weighing it. The title of the novel was written on the cover in indigo ink: Sweet Blasphemy.
Ella had been told that nobody knew much about the author—a certain A. Z. Zahara, who lived in Holland. His manuscript had been shipped to the literary agency from Amsterdam with a postcard inside the envelope. On the front of the postcard was a picture of tulip fields in dazzling pinks, yellows, and purples, and on the back a note written in delicate handwriting:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Greetings from Amsterdam. The story I herewith send you takes place in thirteenth-century Konya in Asia Minor. But I sincerely believe that it cuts across countries, cultures, and centuries.
I hope you will have the time to read SWEET BLASPHEMY, a historical, mystical novel on the remarkable bond between Rumi, the best poet and most revered spiritual leader in the history of Islam, and Shams of Tabriz, an unknown, unconventional dervish full of scandals and surprises.
May love be always with you and you always surrounded with love.
A. Z. Zahara
Ella sensed that the postcard had piqued the literary agent’s curiosity. But Steve was not a man who had time to read the work of an amateur writer. So he’d handed the package to his assistant, Michelle, who had passed it on to her new assistant. This is how Sweet Blasphemy ended up in Ella’s hands.
Little did she know that this was going to be not just any book, but the book that changed her life. In the time she was reading it, her life would be rewritten.
Ella turned the first page. There was a note about the writer.
A. Z. Zahara lives in Amsterdam with his books, cats, and turtles when he is not traveling around the world. Sweet Blasphemy is his first novel and most probably his last. He has no intention of becoming a novelist and has written this book purely out of admiration and love for the great philosopher, mystic, and poet Rumi and his beloved sun, Shams of Tabriz.
Her eyes moved down the page to the next line. And there Ella read something that rang strangely familiar:
For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away.
Her jaw dropped as she realized this was the contradiction of the exact sentence she had spoken to her daughter in the kitchen earlier in the day. She stood still for a moment, shivering with the thought that some mysterious force in the universe, or else this writer, whoever he might be, was spying on her. Perhaps he had written this book knowing beforehand what kind of person was going to read it first. This writer had her in mind as his reader. For some reason unbeknownst to her, Ella found the idea both disturbing and exciting.
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.
A sudden wind blew in her direction, cool and strong, scattering the leaves on the porch. The beauty of the sunset drifted toward the western horizon, and the air felt dull, joyless.
Because love is the very essence and purpose of life. As Rumi reminds us, it hits everybody, including those who shun love—even those who use the word “romantic” as a sign of disapproval.
Ella was as bowled over as if she had read there, “Love hits everybody, even a middle-aged housewife in Northampton named Ella Rubinstein.”
Her gut instinct told her to put the manuscript aside, go into the house, give Michelle a call, and tell her there was no way she could write a report on this novel. Instead she took a deep breath, turned the page, and started to read.
Sweet
Blasphemy
A Novel
A. Z. ZAHARA
Sufi mystics say the secret of the Qur’an lies in the verse Al-Fatiha,
And the secret of Al-Fatiha lies in Bismillahirrahmanirrahim
And the quintessence of Bismillah is the letter ba,
And there is a dot below that letter.…
The dot underneath the B embodies the entire universe.…
The Mathnawi starts with B,
Just like all the chapters in this novel.…
Foreword
Beset with religious clashes, political disputes, and endless power struggles, the thirteenth century was a turbulent period in Anatolia. In the West, the Crusaders, on their way to Jerusalem, occupied and sacked Constantinople, leading to the partition of the Byzantine Empire. In the East, highly disciplined Mongol armies swiftly expanded under the military genius of Genghis Khan. In between, different Turkish tribes fought among themselves while the Byzantines tried to recover their lost land, wealth, and power. It was a time of unprecedented chaos when Christians fought Christians, Christians fought Muslims, and Muslims fought Muslims. Everywhere one turned, there was hostility and anguish and an intense fear of what might happen next.
In the midst of this chaos lived a distinguished Islamic scholar, known as Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Nicknamed Mawlana—“Our Master”—by many, he had thousands of disciples and admirers from all over the region and beyond, and was regarded as a beacon to all Muslims.
In 1244, Rumi met Shams—a wandering dervish with unconventional ways and heretical proclamations. Their encounter altered both their lives. At the same time, it marked the beginning of a solid, unique friendship that Sufis in the centuries to follow likened to the union of two oceans. By meeting this exceptional companion, Rumi was transformed from a mainstream cleric to a committed mystic, passionate poet, advocate of love, and originator of the ecstatic dance of the whirling dervishes, daring to break free of all conventional rules. In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds. Instead of an outer-oriented jihad—defined as “the war against infidels” and carried out by many in those days just as in the present—Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one’s ego, nafs.
