The Butterfly Mosque

It’s hard to know how to feel about this book. G. Willow Wilson is an excellent writer — very poetic at times and astute observations, and she doesn’t filter out many of the details it might be tempting to exclude. I always enjoy stories about travels into foreign lands. I appreciate also her attempts to be a cultural bridge. I learned some things about Islam.

The main negative for me was that reading this book, you would think no other American or Westerner has ever visited Egypt while also trying to be sensitive to cultural differences. She tended to generalize based on the bad seeds in her own culture, while looking only up at anyone in the new culture. Also, I didn’t understand why she was making life-changing decisions so quickly, like snap judgments.

This was a unique adventure and for that reason alone is worth a read. I appreciated the author’s honesty with herself and the world that she wanted to be Muslim. That took moxie. She was pretty young when living this book and I suspect I’ll be 5-starring something of hers someday!

Willow is attracted to Islam, and moves to Cairo to see what living in an Islamic country is like. She falls in love and marries an Islamic guy- Sufi- and struggles to fit into the Egyptian culture and his family.

All that was fascinating!

But there’s also a lot about her religious path- and, I admit, I just don’t get it. The things she finds inspiring, religiously, are completely opposite my own spiritual path. For examples: she finds submitting to the ineffable to be elevating, while I find it debasing; she finds making common ground with people who don’t share her religion to be demeaning, while I find it a blessing. (But then, that’s one of the reasons I’m Pagan!)

It was very well-written, evocative, and honest, and I appreciate that! For me, it was a fascinating window into attitudes I just don’t comprehend, and a very different culture with its own strengths and weaknesses.

I was required to read this as a text on Islam for my religion and literature class while taking my undergraduate degree. Now, as an atheist and a mechanical engineering student, this book challenged a lot of preconceived ideas I had about Islam. For that, I appreciate it.

So, why two stars? Well, I enjoyed the look at Cairo and Egyptian society during the Bush administration; but the book cuts off right as (spoilers) Willow and her husband Omar are about to emigrate back to America. We never get to see what happens to them? Do they Westernize? Do they decide to stay? Does Omar hate living in America? Is Islam different here than in Egypt? Is there latent islamophobia? How do they handle it? A million questions present from a cliffhanger.

If Willow really wanted her western audience to understand the plight of Muslims in America and how westernization is destroying Islamic culture, you’d think she would jump at the chance to show the contrast in a literal way through Omar’s perspective on America. Is it really so different? What stories do they have when they go visit Cairo again, if they do? How does Willow’s extended family process this? It is this separation that the reader fails to feel; instead, the ending feels like the reader spends so much time in the culture of interdependence Willow discusses, with no independent culture to contextualize it.

Maybe Willow thinks all Americans are the same? That we all know what her life was like before she went to Egypt, and what it was like after she got back but we don’t. She fails to give us the other side of this story, instead remaining an empty character in which she struggles to tokenize herself for her audience. A shame, since with more personality she might have made more of an impact here.

The Butterfly Mosque is the memoir of an American woman raised in a secular family who discovers the value of religion during her travel to Egypt. She is there to work and stay a year in Cairo. The book follows her encounter with Egyptian society and with her own spirituality as she converts to Islam. While in Egypt, she falls in love with Omar and they get married. There is so much that I enjoyed about her memoir but it was the little details and stories of her everyday life which made this book really work for me. The story about learning to shop in the souk, and the merchant who sells Wilson a turkey to see if she can tell the difference. Wilson captures the strengths and flaws of America and also Egypt with a compelling voice. The book explores larger issues in both American and Egyptian Muslim society, and challenges the reader with observations about the way Americans and Muslims interact. I found it very interesting and informative. A 4.5 read for me.

Islam fascinates me, I think because its in the news so often and, because its in the news so often, I want to understand the real Islam practiced by the majority of Muslims who just want to be left alone to worship in peace. Theres a horrid habit in Western media of hearing the word Muslim and thinking terrorist, and I want to educate myself out of my own ignorance.

When I was a teenager society had taught me, and I therefore believed, that all Muslim women are oppressed, which is just ridiculous. Naturally, I was incredibly intrigued by what it was that called G. Willow Wilson to the faith.

Wilsons writing is so readable. I flew through this memoir, and it was so nice to be reading non-fiction again. She writes in a very comfortable, honest manner, and, like any book about religion, I couldnt help wondering if this was going to be a this is why you should be a Muslim book, and it wasnt at all. This entire journey is very personal, and while Wilson has no agenda she does a brilliant job of shedding light on the parts of Islam that the media glosses over because it doesnt fit with their view of the Middle East.

Even better, Wilson herself doesnt gloss over some of the darker parts of the Middle East, shes a very fair guide to life in Cairo in the early 2000s, and I loved reading about how she adapted to a life and culture so different from the one she grew up in, and how she dealt with feeling like she wasnt Egyptian, but she wasnt quite American anymore either.

To be honest, Im not sure what to say about this book other than that I would love more people to read it. Its a wonderful eye-opener to Islam and the Middle East, particularly as were introduced to this world through the eyes of a Westerner, and so respectfully and affectionately written that it pulled me through the pages with ease. I was sorry to see it end!

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