Elif Shafak: The Forty Rules of Love

An on-stage conversation revisiting the novel sixteen years after it was written — a book within a book, Ella Rubenstein reading a manuscript about Shams of Tabriz and Rumi, the two timelines mirroring each other across centuries. Shafak says she followed intuition rather than a plan and “never knew quite what I was doing until I finished the novel.” The sharpest passage is on certainty: she is not religious, has “too much doubt” for that, and what frightens her is absolute conviction in either direction — “faith without doubt is a dogma,” but someone certain of their atheism to the point that not a speck of faith remains has lost “the magic of life” too. She names three reconnections she thinks the moment demands — with other people across borders, with nature, and with an inner garden she deliberately refuses to give a name — and cites a Yazidi teaching that in April you tread the earth gently because the earth is pregnant, offered not as charming folklore but as what a culture produces when it treats nature as an equal rather than as material. There is no mention of AI anywhere in the hour. Its value here is the epistemic stance underneath: doubt held as a discipline, in a register the field rarely borrows from.