The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

By G. Willow Wilson

Book Overview

The extraordinary story of an all-American girl's conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world. When G. Willow Wilson--already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven--leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future. She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a "third culture" that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802118879
• ISBN13: 9780802118875
• Release Date: June 2010
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.3"