The Butterfly Mosque Quotes

“to do the right thing you must sometimes defend people who don't understand you, or who fear you, or who are angry at you. There are times when you have to operate purely on faith and continue to trust human decency even when it is no longer visible.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“Once you discover that the world rewards reckless faith, no lesser world is worth contemplating.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“To live beyond the threshold of identity, to do so in the name of a peace that has not yet occurred but that is infinitely possible - this is exhilarating, necessary, and within reach.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“It reminded one that the only permanence is through God; everything else begins to fade as soon as it is created.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“I’ve learned something about westerners,” said Omar, smiling a little. “The ones who feel guilty are the ones with the least reason to be. And the ones who should feel guilty never do.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“To people unfamiliar with the last thirty years of post-colonial academics, this might seem a ridiculous word, without meaning or substance. They may be right. It’s a fancy word for racist, but implies much more: an Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority. Orientalism is a very serious charge to lay at the doorstep of a left-leaning academic.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“The struggle for the Islam I loved and the struggle for the West I loved were the same struggle, and it was within that struggle that the clash of civilizations was eradicated.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“We try men through one another. —Quran 6:53”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“In Islam, prayer is a full- body experience: you stand, bow, stand, kneel with your forehead to the ground, and stand again repeating a variation of this cycle several times You become part of a mathematical algorithm linking earthly and heavenly bodies. Your calendar is based on the phases of the moon, your daily prayers on the movement of the sun across the sky. Mecca becomes an idea with a location. You orient yourself toward it not with a compass, but with a Great Circle, calculating the shortest distance between the spot where you stand and the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca believed to be built by Abraham.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“The third party in our marriage—geography—said nothing, but waited in the background to be recognized.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“he asked me whether I would love him in America the way I loved him in Egypt.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Earlier he had voiced quiet concern that western outrage over Arab attitudes toward homosexuality was being used as a smoke screen to divert attention from the exploitative gay sex tourism perpetrated by western travelers. “I’m not an ignorant man,” he had said, “I know there is homosexuality in every culture. But these boys who are involved are all very young and very poor, and willing to do anything for money—it’s child abuse.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Rights would put the flaky and the idiotic on equal footing with the worthy and the able; what was the point? At a time of tremendous change and instability, why cause more disruption? You might end up with less than you started out with.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“brutalized men turn around and brutalize the next most vulnerable population.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“a game of unintended consequences: in the case of Islamic spiritual authority, it seemed to have eroded traditional opportunities for female leadership rather than created new ones.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can’t communicate anything meaningful. I want consensus.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“I did not believe in Islam; I opened my eyes every morning and saw it.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“I think . . . there’s a kind of sanity that comes from making most of your life about other people. You have less time to spend with your own neuroses. Even though there’s an awful lot of bullshit to deal with, in some ways people in Egypt seem mentally healthier than people here. There’s a greater willingness to—” I fought for the right words. “People are so comfortable with the word love. It’s okay to tell your friends that you love them—friends of your own gender anyway—really passionately love them. It’s not considered weird.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“The more cherished a woman is, the more inaccessible she is made.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Shahsevan,”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“The Trouble with Islam”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Sultan Hassan”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“one for each of the four schools of Sunni law. The half-dome directly opposite the imam is reserved for women; men pray in the open courtyard.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“We are cruelest to those who remind us of our capacity for cruelness. It was this that made Jo’s and my relationship with our neighbors so bitter: it was clear that they did not like who they became around us.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“To me, faith in human potential is intertwined with faith in God and inseparable from it.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Nothing was hidden, nothing required serious effort to attain.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“They were aghast at the suggestion that enlightenment could be bought on tape, and that right and wrong were fluid and could change from situation to situation. They hated being made to sympathize with adulterous couples in American movies. They hated the materialism that was spreading through Egypt and the Gulf like a parasite, turning whole cities—Dubai, Jeddah—into virtual shopping malls, and blamed this materialism on western influence.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque