Elif Shafak

The present paper examines Elif Shafak’s 2011 novel Honour based on Bhabhaian concepts of hybridity and unhomeliness. Bhabha broached the idea of hybridity in order to address the social dimensions of postcolonial analyses. 4 Hybridity occurs when the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized blurs various boundaries. Bhabha explores the possibility of a hybrid space to elucidate the recollections of migrants and their unhomeliness. He defines hybrid identity as one constructed through relocation and separation in the contact zone. In fact, it is in a third space of enunciation in which every thought by both the colonizer and the colonized finds a means of expression or exchange. Using concepts of hybridity and unhomeliness to delve into Shafak's Honour , this research concludes that within the social and cultural structures and discourse of their ‘new’ country, diasporic characters feel unhomed and struggle to fill gaps and redefine their identities. The paper argues that characters in the novel seek refuge in diasporic communities to counter stereotypes. Their attempts, however, result in new experiences and feelings of isolation, nostalgia, insecurity, split self, and a sense of being out of place.

This interdisciplinary study is a mystical reconsideration of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love (2011), FRL hereafter, based on the theologian Mircea Eliade’s perspective on the notion of sacred life as hierophany. Considering the huge bulk of reviews analyzing the Eastern Sufi aspect of the novel as a mystical stand, this investigation probes the compatibility of Eliade’s Universalist spiritual stand with the Sufi perspective reflected in the novel, considering the Islamic tradition through focusing on Maulana’s mystical transformation via Shams of Tabriz. It also pays attention to the Western cultural manifestations absent in most of the reviews and considers the Orientalist features attributed to the novel by some critics. The investigation concludes that the form of Sufism represented in the novel is close to Maulana’s original perspective, and there is a spiritual congruity between Maulana’s Islamic stand, being affected by Ibn Arabi, and Eliade’s Western Christian one. This justifies the depiction of the characters’ mystical transformation within FRL as being touched by Islamic principles and not totally submissive before the Orientalist discourse.