Summary Of The Butterfly Mosque By Willow Wilson

The Butterfly Mosque is an autobiography about Willow Wilson, an American woman from Colorado, who moves to Egypt and begins a slow conversion into Islam. She uses her memoir as a vehicle to express how personal she believes Islam is, separated from culture, geography, and ethnicity. Through her experiences and reflections, we are able to understand how she grapples with the ‘clash of civilizations,’ until she asserts that is does even exist. In this essay, I will argue that Willow Wilson’s autobiography does not simply foster a dialogue with the idea of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ but ultimately shows how her faith in Islam eradicates its existence by connecting herself to the ‘other’ as an individual, rather than a product of his culture.

When their relationship was beginning to develop, Willow was “disturbed...that [she] couldn’t unlump Omar from the faceless mass of Middle Eastern men [she] had been taught to fear” (Wilson 2010: 49). There were constantly references from Western magazines and movies in her mind that made her hesitant, wary of “the honour-killing wife-imprisoning fundamentalist reality beneath the facade” (Wilson 2010: 49). Omar proves himself to genuinely not fit into an “Orientalist stereotype of a Muslim man: one that is violent and patriarchal. Instead, he is patient with Willow and helps her understand his version of Islam and Arab culture. She learns from her experience in Cairo that this Western representation of all Islamic men as oppressive towards women is inaccurate and vastly overarching. In fact, Willow asserts that Islam is “antiauthoritarian sex-positive monotheism” (Wilson 2010: 62). Despite the fact that she experiences sexual harassment in the streets of Cairo, she is able to recognize that Islam is not the root cause: other factors like Egypt’s social, political, and economic systems are the underlying reason for any inequality or oppression that may