A Critical Psycholinguistic Study of Sufism in" TheForty Rules of Love"

Sufism, the essential mystical tradition in Islam has appeared from within renunciatory manners of piety (ZUHD) during a period that extended from last decades of the second / eighth to the fourth / tenth century( Karamustafa, 2007:1). This study investigates the image of Sufism in" The Forty Rules of Love" by ElifShafak(2010) and tries to answer the following questions: How does Sufism as an  image influence the writer of the novel and the characters ؟How does Shafak executes  different themes under the brilliant façade of Sufism? How does language signals power and control in the Forty Rules? What connections and relationships drawn via language in the analysis of the Forty Rules?The study aims at: Arriving at influences of Sufism as an image in the Forty Rules.Pinpointing how language signals power and control in the Forty Rules. Arriving at connections and relationships drawn via language in the Forty Rules.This study is limited to analyze Sufism as an ideology in ElifShafak's 'The Forty Rules of Love 2010' and to deal with Sufism from a psycholinguistic perspective. In order to achieve the aims of the study and to test its hypothesis, the following procedures are followed: Selecting texts that fit the aims of this study. Analyzing texts according to an eclectic model. It is concluded that “Sufism as an image has influenced people's minds, values, traditions.The Forty Rules have not signaled fully political issues. Power and control have not revealed in them, except of Allah's. Connection and Relationship through language are so clear in the Forty Rules”.