Elif Shafak

Shafak's novel about the Sufi poet Rumi and his transformative friendship with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz argues that indifference — not hatred — is the true opposite of love. Hatred still engages; indifference withdraws entirely, becoming the most complete form of erasure. The novel interweaves a medieval Sufi narrative with a modern American woman's story, arguing that spiritual love transcends centuries and forms.

This celebrated line belongs to American poet Muriel Rukeyser, from her 1968 poetry collection. Rukeyser wrote it as part of an argument for narrative and imagination over scientific reductionism. While the quote circulates extensively under Shafak's name — partly because her novels argue for similar ideas about stories as the building blocks of reality — the original attribution is Rukeyser's. Shafak does argue throughout her work that stories are humanity's primary tool for making meaning.

Based on the historical relationship between Rumi and Shams — which transformed Rumi from a conventional scholar into a mystical poet — Shafak uses this story to argue that every profound love or friendship changes both parties irreversibly. The Sufi understanding of transformation (*suluk*) posits that genuine encounter always results in a new self; you cannot remain unchanged by true connection.

Shafak's novel, which earned her prosecution under Turkey's Article 301 (insulting Turkishness) for its treatment of the Armenian genocide, explores identity through characters who contain irreconcilable contradictions. A Turkish-American woman discovers her family's Armenian heritage. Shafak's thesis is that embracing contradiction — rather than resolving it into a clean national or personal identity — is the more honest and humane position.

Shafak's novel about a murdered sex worker in Istanbul — told from the perspective of her final minutes of consciousness — argues that East and West are not fundamentally opposed but differently positioned on the same human spectrum. The water metaphor rejects the "clash of civilizations" thesis: both cultures are made of the same human material, capable of mixing rather than only separating. Shafak has lived across Turkey, the UK, and the U.S., embodying this argument personally.