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The extraordinary story of a young North American's conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with an Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim worldAfter graduating from university, Willow Wilson, a young American €” and newly converted Muslim €” impulsively accepts a teaching position in Cairo. There, she meets Omar, a passionate young nationalist with a degree in astrophysics. Omar introduces Willow to the bustling city, and through him she discovers a young, moderate nationalist movement, a movement that both wants to divest itself of western influence and regain cultural pride. When the two find themselves unexpectedly in love, despite their deep cultural differences, they decide that they will try to forge a third culture, a new landscape that will embrace some of each of their cultures, and give their fledgling romance some hope of survival.Wilson weaves this engaging personal story with dee
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About the Author:
WILLOW WILSON's articles on modern religion and the Middle East have appeared in major media including the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times. She has also published a graphic novel, Cairo, with Vertigo Comics. Wilson and her husband divide their time between the U.S. and Egypt.
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Kun
We say unto it: Be! And it is.
—Quran 16:40
In a way, I was in the market for a philosophy. Five months into my sophomore year of college at Boston University I was hospitalized, in the middle of the night, for a rare and acute reaction to a Depo Provera injection I’d received several days earlier. Up until then I’d been lucky enough never to see the inside of an emergency room. The most dangerous things I’d ever done were take the Chinatown-to-Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, walk home alone late at night once or twice, and get my lower lip pierced at a dimly lit shop in some basement off Commonwealth Avenue. At the turn of the millennium, even rebellion was fairly sanitary. Landing in the hospital because of legal medication seemed like a violation of the way things were supposed to work.
For days I was in and out of doctors’ offices with the mostly untreatable symptoms of adrenal distress: heart palpitations, sudden attacks of sweating and dizziness, and insomnia so severe that no amount of tranquilizer could keep me asleep for more than four or five hours. In a blow to my vanity, I was losing hair. Later I would learn that I was also losing bone mass. At seventeen I was immortal; at eighteen I was a short and arbitrary series of events.
I wasn’t very good with pain. And having always been the kind of person who could catnap at will, I wasn’t very good with sleep deprivation, either. By chance, the three people who watched over me most diligently during the first days of my illness—a classmate, his mother, and a nurse—were all Iranian. Semidelirious, I took this as a sign. Addressing a God I had never spoken to in my life, I promised that if I recovered in three days, I would become a Muslim.
As it happened, the adrenal distress lasted a year and a half.
It was this unanswered prayer that sparked my interest in organized religion. I had been raised an atheist but was never very good at it. As a child I had precognitive dreams about mundane events like the deaths of pets, and I could not remember a time when I was not in love with whatever sat behind the world. Yet God was taboo in my parents’ house; we were educated, and educated people don’t believe in nonsense. Both of my parents came from conservative Protestant families. They left their churches during the Vietnam era, sick of the racist warmongering peddled from the pulpits. To them, God was a bigoted, vengeful white man. Refusing to believe in him was not just scientifically correct, it was morally imperative.
I learned to hide, deny, or dress up all experiences I could not explain. In high school a fatuous brand of neopaganism was popular, thanks to movies like The Craft; this gave my heretical impulses a temporary outlet. By the time I was in my late teens I had adopted the anemic mantra “spiritual but not religious.” I couldn’t have told you what it meant.
Three days turned into three weeks. Doctors told me to sit tight—the Depo injection was effective for three months, and it might take another several months after that for my body to rebalance itself. I tired easily. Assignments that once took a few hours to complete now took days; walking from campus to my dorm left me exhausted. Twilight began to look bleak, the precursor of dark empty hours without sleep. Being eighteen and fortunate, it was a struggle to realize that this was not the end of everything. And, in fact, it wasn’t. Since the big things were enough trouble, I began to let the small things slide. I went out without makeup. I stopped going to all the parties I didn’t really care about. An alchemical process was taking place that I didn’t quite understand. By small increments, my sense of humor and ability to cope were coming back, along with a new interest in the God who had not answered my prayers.
“I guess the Almighty doesn’t bargain,” I said one day to Elizabeth, who lived down the hall. We were on our way to Eli Wiesel’s annual lecture on the Book of Job, about which we had to write a paper.
“Not with miserable sinners,” she said cheerfully. She was Episcopalian.
“There is such a thing as respect, you know.” Javad, whose steady supply of dining hall cookies and sympathy helped prompt my brush with Islam, appeared behind us with some other students from our section. “Even if God is only a hypothetical to you.” He was a serious person, and smoked Djarum Blacks; he was not amused by my attitude toward the whole thing.
“I’m being respectful,” I said. “I was serious. Hypothetically serious.”
“So you feel like hypothetical God abandoned you?” He raised one eyebrow.
“No, I don’t. But I’m having trouble understanding why that is.”
“Of course you don’t. You can’t feel abandoned by a God you don’t believe in,” Elizabeth pointed out. I shook my head.
“I’m not sure it’s that simple.”
We found seats in the middle of the lecture hall just as Dr. Wiesel was being introduced. Since we were humanities students, the idea of listening to a lecture on Job was not all that terrifying. We had already faced Confucius, the Stoics, and the Bhagavad Gita and come through relatively unscathed. But as Dr. Wiesel talked about the role of suffering in God’s covenant with the Jews, I began to feel uncomfortable.
“I don’t think that’s what it means,” I muttered.
“What?” Elizabeth frowned at me.
“Job. I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think it’s about—”
Someone several rows back made a shushing noise.
“I think it’s about monotheism,” I said, “the idea that faith in the God of mercy is also faith in the God of destruction. God causes Job’s suffering, not the devil.”
The shushing became more insistent. I slumped in my seat, dissatisfied.
When I made my desperate offer to trade faith for health, I had not read a word of the Quran. My otherwise exhaustive liberal education skipped right over it. The professors I queried said teaching the Quran as a work of literature angered Muslim students and put everybody at risk. I was skeptical of this answer. When we studied the Bible, it was as a work of holy literature, and there was a level of respect and suspension of disbelief in our discussions. If the Quran was afforded the same treatment, I had trouble believing Muslim students would be so ominously displeased. The few that I knew—Javad and one or two others—seemed benign enough. Through them, I had picked up some stray facts: I knew there were two major sects of Islam, and I knew not all Muslims were Arabs. But I knew almost nothing about what they believed, and even with a $30,000-a-year education, I had no idea Islam was the world’s second-largest religion.
I began to investigate Islam on my own, and tried to understand the relationship of the three Abrahamic traditions. The beliefs of my religious friends, once a source of silent pity, were now fascinating: I wanted to know about the Trinity and the Eucharist and the Jewish concept of the afterlife. I discovered opinions I did not know I held.
“If there is one omniscient omnipotent God, why send a holy spirit to impregnate Mary? Why the extra step? Couldn’t He just cause her to become spontaneously pregnant? Isn’t that what omnipotence is? Why do people always point up when they talk about Heaven? If heaven is up there, where is it in China? Down? Where is it on the moon? How could there be such a thing as inherited sin? Isn’t that a fundamentally unjust idea?” I was persistent, maybe even rude, and my questions were often met with ruffled silence. These are questions atheists often use to dismantle religion, but to me, they were urgent attempts to name what I was finding harder and harder to ignore.
I had been taught that it was weak minded to believe the world was created by an invisible man with superpowers. But what if God was not an invisible man with superpowers? Atheism had never taught me how to answer that question. It had only taught me to reject primitive little-g gods; anthropomorphized, local entities subject to the laws of time and space—it had taught me, in other words, to reject Zeus and the Keebler elves. And the God to whom I had prayed so desperately was not Zeus.
When I prayed, maybe I was trying to justify a belief I already held. Being ill had shaken something loose in my head. Sitting up at night under dark windows, my perceptions had altered. My body was no longer an infinite resource but a union of thousands of fragile things, chemicals and precursors and proteins, all in a balance that could easily be upset. That so many people were well—that I had been well for so long—seemed miraculous.
Illnesses usually bring people to religion through the front door; mine brought me through the back. I did not need to know if I was being punished or tested. Neither my health nor my illness was about me. The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me.
That unifie...
We say unto it: Be! And it is.
—Quran 16:40
In a way, I was in the market for a philosophy. Five months into my sophomore year of college at Boston University I was hospitalized, in the middle of the night, for a rare and acute reaction to a Depo Provera injection I’d received several days earlier. Up until then I’d been lucky enough never to see the inside of an emergency room. The most dangerous things I’d ever done were take the Chinatown-to-Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, walk home alone late at night once or twice, and get my lower lip pierced at a dimly lit shop in some basement off Commonwealth Avenue. At the turn of the millennium, even rebellion was fairly sanitary. Landing in the hospital because of legal medication seemed like a violation of the way things were supposed to work.
For days I was in and out of doctors’ offices with the mostly untreatable symptoms of adrenal distress: heart palpitations, sudden attacks of sweating and dizziness, and insomnia so severe that no amount of tranquilizer could keep me asleep for more than four or five hours. In a blow to my vanity, I was losing hair. Later I would learn that I was also losing bone mass. At seventeen I was immortal; at eighteen I was a short and arbitrary series of events.
I wasn’t very good with pain. And having always been the kind of person who could catnap at will, I wasn’t very good with sleep deprivation, either. By chance, the three people who watched over me most diligently during the first days of my illness—a classmate, his mother, and a nurse—were all Iranian. Semidelirious, I took this as a sign. Addressing a God I had never spoken to in my life, I promised that if I recovered in three days, I would become a Muslim.
As it happened, the adrenal distress lasted a year and a half.
It was this unanswered prayer that sparked my interest in organized religion. I had been raised an atheist but was never very good at it. As a child I had precognitive dreams about mundane events like the deaths of pets, and I could not remember a time when I was not in love with whatever sat behind the world. Yet God was taboo in my parents’ house; we were educated, and educated people don’t believe in nonsense. Both of my parents came from conservative Protestant families. They left their churches during the Vietnam era, sick of the racist warmongering peddled from the pulpits. To them, God was a bigoted, vengeful white man. Refusing to believe in him was not just scientifically correct, it was morally imperative.
I learned to hide, deny, or dress up all experiences I could not explain. In high school a fatuous brand of neopaganism was popular, thanks to movies like The Craft; this gave my heretical impulses a temporary outlet. By the time I was in my late teens I had adopted the anemic mantra “spiritual but not religious.” I couldn’t have told you what it meant.
Three days turned into three weeks. Doctors told me to sit tight—the Depo injection was effective for three months, and it might take another several months after that for my body to rebalance itself. I tired easily. Assignments that once took a few hours to complete now took days; walking from campus to my dorm left me exhausted. Twilight began to look bleak, the precursor of dark empty hours without sleep. Being eighteen and fortunate, it was a struggle to realize that this was not the end of everything. And, in fact, it wasn’t. Since the big things were enough trouble, I began to let the small things slide. I went out without makeup. I stopped going to all the parties I didn’t really care about. An alchemical process was taking place that I didn’t quite understand. By small increments, my sense of humor and ability to cope were coming back, along with a new interest in the God who had not answered my prayers.
“I guess the Almighty doesn’t bargain,” I said one day to Elizabeth, who lived down the hall. We were on our way to Eli Wiesel’s annual lecture on the Book of Job, about which we had to write a paper.
“Not with miserable sinners,” she said cheerfully. She was Episcopalian.
“There is such a thing as respect, you know.” Javad, whose steady supply of dining hall cookies and sympathy helped prompt my brush with Islam, appeared behind us with some other students from our section. “Even if God is only a hypothetical to you.” He was a serious person, and smoked Djarum Blacks; he was not amused by my attitude toward the whole thing.
“I’m being respectful,” I said. “I was serious. Hypothetically serious.”
“So you feel like hypothetical God abandoned you?” He raised one eyebrow.
“No, I don’t. But I’m having trouble understanding why that is.”
“Of course you don’t. You can’t feel abandoned by a God you don’t believe in,” Elizabeth pointed out. I shook my head.
“I’m not sure it’s that simple.”
We found seats in the middle of the lecture hall just as Dr. Wiesel was being introduced. Since we were humanities students, the idea of listening to a lecture on Job was not all that terrifying. We had already faced Confucius, the Stoics, and the Bhagavad Gita and come through relatively unscathed. But as Dr. Wiesel talked about the role of suffering in God’s covenant with the Jews, I began to feel uncomfortable.
“I don’t think that’s what it means,” I muttered.
“What?” Elizabeth frowned at me.
“Job. I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think it’s about—”
Someone several rows back made a shushing noise.
“I think it’s about monotheism,” I said, “the idea that faith in the God of mercy is also faith in the God of destruction. God causes Job’s suffering, not the devil.”
The shushing became more insistent. I slumped in my seat, dissatisfied.
When I made my desperate offer to trade faith for health, I had not read a word of the Quran. My otherwise exhaustive liberal education skipped right over it. The professors I queried said teaching the Quran as a work of literature angered Muslim students and put everybody at risk. I was skeptical of this answer. When we studied the Bible, it was as a work of holy literature, and there was a level of respect and suspension of disbelief in our discussions. If the Quran was afforded the same treatment, I had trouble believing Muslim students would be so ominously displeased. The few that I knew—Javad and one or two others—seemed benign enough. Through them, I had picked up some stray facts: I knew there were two major sects of Islam, and I knew not all Muslims were Arabs. But I knew almost nothing about what they believed, and even with a $30,000-a-year education, I had no idea Islam was the world’s second-largest religion.
I began to investigate Islam on my own, and tried to understand the relationship of the three Abrahamic traditions. The beliefs of my religious friends, once a source of silent pity, were now fascinating: I wanted to know about the Trinity and the Eucharist and the Jewish concept of the afterlife. I discovered opinions I did not know I held.
“If there is one omniscient omnipotent God, why send a holy spirit to impregnate Mary? Why the extra step? Couldn’t He just cause her to become spontaneously pregnant? Isn’t that what omnipotence is? Why do people always point up when they talk about Heaven? If heaven is up there, where is it in China? Down? Where is it on the moon? How could there be such a thing as inherited sin? Isn’t that a fundamentally unjust idea?” I was persistent, maybe even rude, and my questions were often met with ruffled silence. These are questions atheists often use to dismantle religion, but to me, they were urgent attempts to name what I was finding harder and harder to ignore.
I had been taught that it was weak minded to believe the world was created by an invisible man with superpowers. But what if God was not an invisible man with superpowers? Atheism had never taught me how to answer that question. It had only taught me to reject primitive little-g gods; anthropomorphized, local entities subject to the laws of time and space—it had taught me, in other words, to reject Zeus and the Keebler elves. And the God to whom I had prayed so desperately was not Zeus.
When I prayed, maybe I was trying to justify a belief I already held. Being ill had shaken something loose in my head. Sitting up at night under dark windows, my perceptions had altered. My body was no longer an infinite resource but a union of thousands of fragile things, chemicals and precursors and proteins, all in a balance that could easily be upset. That so many people were well—that I had been well for so long—seemed miraculous.
Illnesses usually bring people to religion through the front door; mine brought me through the back. I did not need to know if I was being punished or tested. Neither my health nor my illness was about me. The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me.
That unifie...
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- PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 0771089341
- ISBN 13 9780771089343
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages312
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