Raised by strictly atheist parents, Wilson didn’t know much about Islam growing up, and as she puts it, her seemingly “liberal” education at Boston College didn’t offer much about the 1400 year-old religion.
Published in 2010 at the cusp of the turbulent Arab Spring, Wilson’s salient book follows her culturally rich and spiritually enlightening journey through Egypt and Iran, where she navigates through themes of religion and spirituality, cross-cultural relations, misogyny, fundamentalism, and femininity. Willow Wilson’s rich memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, after numerous recommendations from a dear friend, and I couldn’t have made a better decision. I started reading a few weeks earlier to get in a consistent rhythm and to rejuvenate my faith in preparedness for the holy month. Determined to make the best of my time, I took a different approach. It is a rare and important insight into the evolving relationship between the boundaries of contemporary religion and culture.Ramadan is quickly approaching, ushering in with it bountiful family iftars, long nights in the masjid, suhoors spent stuffing one’s face until the ardent sound of the melodic athan, mornings devoid of coffee, and hot lazy afternoons spent perched on the couch monitoring the clock for maghrib, or watching mindless TV – where food commercials are seemingly more abundant.īefore every Ramadan, I promise to spend my days reading more Quran and books, and every year this promise silently dissolves as soon as I wake up with dry lips and a growling stomach.
The Butterfly Mosque is a riveting personal account, an investigation into what it means to have faith in our broken society. Drawing together the values of both cultures, she began to move in the world as a liberal and outspoken Muslim woman, a curious mixture of East and West. Although Wilson immersed herself in Islamic culture - learning Arabic, worshipping as a Muslim and adopting a veil - she never rejected her Western identity. Omar's ideas and experiences reflected her own search for meaning and in the tangled thicket of their differences and their similarities, an unlikely romance blossomed. Led by his passions, she discovered a young and moderate nationalist movement that promoted both tolerance and the celebration of identity. This intellectual and emotional exercise created a unique challenge how could she reconcile a devout and conservative lifestyle with the highly secular society in which she was raised? Taking a leap of faith, Wilson accepted a position to teach English in Cairo, where her guide to the bustling city was a student of astrophysics named Omar. Willow Wilson quietly found herself adopting the tenets of the religion as her own. After taking an Islamic Studies course in Boston, G.
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