The eternity of love lies in death
It wasn’t just an obsession, stopping Longley infront of the novel “forty rules of love”.
It was one of those moments that my state of mind maybe ripe for a major intersecting decision …
The novel is an interchange (I have no idea what this word means) between two times, a current miserable married woman who falls in love with a writer through email exchange, and Rumi, the infamous Sufi poet and his “strange” love exchange of poems that have ben dedicated to his “male-friend” Shams.
Many things stopped me in the story of Rumi. I have always questioned the medieval times of Islamic literature and homosexual direct discourse. Being a Muslim who is officially homophobic by nature and birth, aroused my curiosity for years and made me explore that world in what seemed to be daring, when I n reality it wasn’t except just removing some dust of Arabic literature that has been there all the time and was and still is taught at our school systems.
I have in many ways overgrown, the homophobic sentiments since then, and I tend to leave it for what it is … at the end emotions are a strange setup of strings, that somehow souls intervene in it, and bodies in their sexes are nothing but a tool.
Homosexual relations are not my topic today though …
Rumi and his love to Shams. In an amazing switch I would say, Rumi’s love was so huge, was so enormous and true, he did manage to convey that love to that man for what it was, and not for whom it was addressed to. He made even those who resent the idea of male-to-male love, believe his love to that man as if it was the holy meeting of outreach inside the love of God.
But as in all stories of love……
The most powerful remains in that which death overshadowed…
Somehow if those romances continued inside a life, they would have definitely ended in anger and revenge. But somehow, death laid out sorrow and pain in the most beautiful eternal texture that immortalized love.