قواعد العشق الأربعون: رواية عن جلال الدين الرومي

Sigh, where do I start?
I had to read this book for a reading competition happening next week and you bet I am going to be butchering this.
Elif Shafak is trying to sell off Sufism as the new age enlightenment while barely skimming the surface of what it means to be a Sufi. It is like listening to John Lennon's Imagine for the first time and claiming to be a hippie and buying floral skirts and long necklaces with the peace sign. Her knowledge of the American society is based off Desperate Housewives, a very shallow understanding of how it works. Her desperation to convey a parallelism between the 21st and the 13th century falls extremely short and the theme she based her whole novel on was poorly executed and even barely PRESENT. The whole book is based off the relationship between Rumi and Shames while it takes her 48% of the actual book to even get them to meet , and then when she does that she barely even tells us what is going on between them, gives almost no information about that or about Sufism except the cliché bits about coexistence and looking deep inside of us and not the actual real things that Sufism talks about, and makes their whole relationship's description based off the points of views of people who weren't even in the room with them when they were speaking and were jealous of their relationship.
Which gets us to the next point, there were too many different points of views and while I understand how they serve the story, I would have appreciated it more if she didn't shred one event up and let it be told from different people's points of views. it is extremely cliché and a failed attempt at credibility.
Now, you are going to say, why are you butchering the book so much if you gave it 3 stars? It is because I do think people who aren't big readers like the rest of us, should read it. It has an ok message, better than other messages out there and for people who are looking for a breezy read while still thinking they read a great work of literature, it is completely suitable. But for the rest of us who has read the worst and the best of everything, read the disgusting portrayal of some things and the way that description is used to fucking slap you in the face and get you off that privileged throne you reside upon, I was utterly unimpressed. I couldn't believe when I would be done with the book, too.
The fact that it is sold off as a novel based off of Rumi is I think extremely offensive to Rumi himself, no matter how big his heart is. It barely even talks about him, albeit represent him.

The only other thing I enjoyed about the story was the character development of Ella, how she transformed from desperate and resigned, to an adventurous soul, also the occasional Rumi verses (at the end) were highly enjoyable

P.S.: the translation is ok and there was one historical error that I think is more attributed to the translation and not the author himself. there was a lot of confusion when it comes to the age of a lot of characters and some events and mention of people were a bit confusing especially at the ending of Rumi's life.