The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam in Around the World in 80 Books

Nov 04, 2014 Madeleine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, bio-memoir, swana, favs

I loved this book. So much. I loved it so much that I feel like I am a (very) slightly different person after reading it, or at least that I better understand the person I am after reading it. This may become my new way of explaining why I occasionally actually give a book *gasp* five stars.

This is such a beautiful story of seeking and finding faith, of finding love unexpectedly, of cross-cultural...everything, of being young and abroad, of re-learning one's own country. Willow Wilson writes abo ...more

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Jan 13, 2017 Katie rated it really liked it

Shelves: female-author, non-fiction, __middle-east, memoirs, religion

This book was incredibly fascinating and thought provoking. G. Willow Wilson is an American convert to Islam, and in this book she talks about her conversion to Islam and her time spent in Egypt, where she met her husband. Part of me was afraid this book would be overly apologetic in trying to explain the virtues of Islam to westerners. It was nothing of the sort. Wilson gives a thoughtful and personal account of why she was drawn to Islam without falling into the trap of explaining why her expe This book was incredibly fascinating and thought provoking. G. Willow Wilson is an American convert to Islam, and in this book she talks about her conversion to Islam and her time spent in Egypt, where she met her husband. Part of me was afraid this book would be overly apologetic in trying to explain the virtues of Islam to westerners. It was nothing of the sort. Wilson gives a thoughtful and personal account of why she was drawn to Islam without falling into the trap of explaining why her experience with Islam is more true than a fundamentalist interpretation of the religion.

When Wilson meets her husband, she is confronted with all sorts of difficulties that come with trying to understand another culture. She describes these challenges very honestly, continually recognizing the complicated nature of trying to understand a culture you really just don't get. She mentions in the book that when she talks about the early months of her relationship, people assume that there must have been common ground and a place for the two cultures to come together with some sort of commonality. Her response was "no. There was nothing. Violently, utterly nothing." For some reason this stuck out to me. I want to think that we are all more alike than we are different, but sometimes we are just so different. Throughout the book, Wilson does a really good job addressing the fact that just because you can't understand something, doesn't necessarily mean that thing is wrong or untrue, sometimes it can just be different.

In learning to navigate a new culture with entirely different social mores, Wilson seemed to be under a constant state of stress. She describes the challenges she faced in everything from figuring out what to eat, to the challenges of being in a romantic relationship in a culture where that is an entirely different thing, to trying to figure out how to act as a western Muslim woman in Egypt. She doesn't offer any easy answers, but she explains the challenges with a lot of thought and self-awareness. Wilson loves a lot about Egypt and she loves her Egyptian family, but she in no way romanticizes her experience, describing well the utter exhaustion that comes with trying to navigate an unfamiliar culture on a daily basis.

There really was a lot to think about in this book. I recognize that this is just one person's experience with Egypt and Islam and there are tons of different perspectives out there, but I found this to be an interesting one. I am interested to know more about Wilson's life after she moved back to the U.S., but she has said it was really hard for her to write about herself and she doesn't intend to do it again. ...more

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