{"id":35550,"date":"2026-02-12T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/videos\/poetics-and-aesthetics-of-transgression-in-the-forty-rules-of-love-the-body-music-and-the-figure-of-the-sufi-poet\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T08:11:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:11:03","slug":"poetics-and-aesthetics-of-transgression-in-the-forty-rules-of-love-the-body-music-and-the-figure-of-the-sufi-poet","status":"publish","type":"videos","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/videos\/poetics-and-aesthetics-of-transgression-in-the-forty-rules-of-love-the-body-music-and-the-figure-of-the-sufi-poet\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetics and aesthetics of transgression in The Forty Rules of Love: the body, music and the figure of the Sufi poet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paper presented at the 5th international congress of the University Platform for Research on Islam (Pluriel)<\/a>, held in Cordoba from 10 to 14 February 2026 on the theme “Ethics and Aesthetics in Islam”. Laure Zeghad<\/strong> (University of Rouen) spoke as part of Strand 2, Aesthetics, ethics and everyday life: prohibitions, representations and practices.<\/em><\/p>\n

Summary of the paper<\/h3>\n

In The Forty Rules of Love<\/em> (2010), Elif Shafak weaves together several narrative temporalities and builds a space where artistic creation and spirituality intertwine: what remains of the legacy of the poet Rumi and of thirteenth-century Muslim spirituality today? Through the figures of Rumi and of his guide Shams of Tabriz, the novel explores the power of the aesthetic, notably through dance, music and poetry, in the face of prohibitions, and of the history and heritage of Islam.<\/p>\n

This paper analyses the tension between the aesthetic (understood as artistic representation and practice) and religious constraints within the novel. How does the figure of the Sufi poet embody an aesthetic and ethical posture still illuminating today? How can the dance of the whirling dervishes and poetry still be forms of resistance? What cultural stakes does this representation raise in contemporary literature, especially for a Western readership? The paper explores the aesthetic dimensions of the work, the dancing body as a vector of spiritual elevation, music as a mystical language, and poetic speech as a site of transmission of the divine, so that The Forty Rules of Love<\/em> questions the fragile balance between respect for beliefs and creative freedom, in a context where the aesthetic is always traversed by religious, political and identity stakes.<\/p>\n

\nRead the panel synthesis by Xuyen Parsy<\/summary>\n
\n

This synthesis was written in the aftermath of the congress by Xuyen Parsy<\/strong>, under the Pluriel student-fellowship programme. It covers all three papers of the panel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Conceiving the body, transgression and imagination in Muslim ethics and aesthetics<\/h4>\n

On Thursday 12 February 2026, in Hall 1 (Amphitheatre), a panel was held under the chairmanship of Mohamed-Ali Mostfa, scientific delegate of Pluriel. Laure Zeghad, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Rouen (France), spoke in French on “Poetics and aesthetics of transgression in Sufi, my Love<\/em>: the body, music and the figure of the Sufi poet.” Nada Amin, doctor in Arabic linguistics and civilisations at Universit\u00e9 Lumi\u00e8re Lyon 2 (France), presented in French “Aesthetics, ethics and identity: the body of women as an object of debate in contemporary Egypt.” Ahmed Kaza, doctor in philosophy at Chouaib Doukkali University (Morocco), delivered his paper in Arabic on “The gnostic constitution of aesthetic values \u2014 Ibn Arabi.” The three papers were part of the second day of the congress, devoted to the theme “Aesthetics, ethics and everyday life: prohibitions, representations and practices.” They brought together perspectives, temporalities and cultural areas so as to question the everyday and the power dynamics tied to the body, transgression and imagination in the Islamic heritage.<\/p>\n

The first line of reflection focused on the body as a site of both spirituality and social norms. Whether men’s or women’s, the body was almost omnipresent. Laure Zeghad explained that, in the Sema dance of the novel Sufi, my Love<\/em>, the body becomes the medium of inner spirituality; the circular movements mirror the order of the cosmos, in line with the theory of microcosm and macrocosm. The second paper shifted the cursor to the question of veiling and unveiling in a different geographical area, Egypt. There, the female body ceases to be merely a domestic space and becomes a collective claim, visible in public space: it is the ground of negotiations between social norm and women’s autonomy. The regulation of the female body needs no recourse to legal constraint; it operates through symbolic and social pressure. The third paper analysed the aesthetic values of Ibn Arabi’s thought, in which one finds a call to “moral transformation”: the aim is to assimilate oneself to the divine essence through the divine names, and to reach the beautiful and the sublime, to which only God has access.<\/p>\n

A second line of reflection addressed transgression as the point of convergence between the Sufi experience, unveiling and the contestation of the social order. The figure of Shams of Tabriz, in Sufi, my Love<\/em>, is perceived as a heretic in the court context of the Middle Ages: he refuses social conformity in order to defend a personal and inner experience. In contrast, the question of the veil and the dress of Egyptian women becomes a kind of moral indicator, betraying a will to normalise society \u2014 even though, as underlined during the exchanges with the room, no legal text obliges Egyptian women to wear the veil, unlike other countries such as Iran. Unveiling can then be understood as a disruption of the normalising apparatus. The January 2011 revolution marked a turning point in the hegemony of the Egyptian political regime: protest and revolt disarticulated public space and authority. The wearing or non-wearing of the veil by Egyptian women reflects deep social transformations \u2014 from the Nahda onwards, the unveiling of the face was seen as a means for women to take part in public life, and thus in the development of the country.<\/p>\n

The final axis questioned the function of image, music and imagination in access to the beautiful and to the divine. In Sufi, my Love<\/em>, alongside dance, the music of the ney plays an essential role: it becomes a space where the unsayable is mediated, and supplants rational, verbal discourse. Ahmed Kaza raised the question of the place of beauty and truth in painting, and thus of the relation between art and religion. Painting, as a pictorial art, is a form of imitation of Creation and cannot, therefore, be divine \u2014 hence a certain iconoclasm. Yet in the writings of Ibn Arabi one finds a form of divine manifestation in artistic creation, for the human being was created in the image of God and thus bears within divine significations, including the faculty of imagination. For this thinker, it is by rejoining the beautiful that we can weave bonds of fraternity between communities, peoples and, a fortiori<\/em>, between religions, and thereby reach a form of coexistence and cooperation.<\/p>\n

The three lines of research crossed several times, in an entanglement of great richness. The question of veiling and unveiling gave rise to numerous exchanges at the end of the panel, since it is at once highly political, social and even economic, as the phenomenon of “modest fashion” \u2014 the subject of another paper at the congress \u2014 makes clear. Alterity and religious plurality also ran through this panel, whether through the conversion to Islam in Sufi, my Love<\/em>, or through interreligious dialogue, which would be facilitated by the spiritual path rather than by the dogmatic doctrinal path. This reflection, shared by many thinkers of the Arab-Muslim world, is a fitting way to close this synthesis.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/details>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"date_tournage":"","lieu":"","nature_evenement":"","vt_type":"Conf\u00e9rence","vt_yt_views":120},"video_collection":[854],"class_list":["post-35550","videos","type-videos","status-publish","hentry","video_collection-congres-de-cordoue-2026"],"date_tournage":"","yoast_head":"\nPoetics and aesthetics of transgression in The Forty Rules of Love: the body, music and the figure of the Sufi poet - Pluriel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/videos\/poetics-and-aesthetics-of-transgression-in-the-forty-rules-of-love-the-body-music-and-the-figure-of-the-sufi-poet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poetics and aesthetics of transgression in The Forty Rules of Love: the body, music and the figure of the Sufi poet - Pluriel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Paper presented at the 5th international congress of the University Platform for Research on Islam (Pluriel), held in Cordoba from 10 to 14 February 2026 on the theme “Ethics and Aesthetics in Islam”. 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