The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson

Wilson is adept at describing what she finds fulfilling about Islam, and particularly good at unpacking the meaning of prayer and ritual as means of submitting to something greater than the self. During a year spent in Egypt to teach English, she personally and formally converted (the two are quite different things, the former being an act of faith, the second an act directed by the Egyptian bureaucracy) and she met, and fell in love with, a Muslim man whom she married (an act that again occurred more than once according to the dictates of faith, culture, and state). Wilson became interested in Islam while in college in the United States, finding that it provided the best explanation for things she already felt and believed but for which she had no name. Instead it's a wonderful, complicated, thoughtful exploration of Islam, politics, family, and belonging.

Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.ĭespite what the subtitle of this book might suggest, this isn't a frothy little 'white girl has epiphany away from home' piece. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland.

She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. Willow Wilson-already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven-leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.

The extraordinary story of an all-American girl’s conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world.

The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson