The Butterfly Mosque

A Young Woman's Journey To Love and Islam

G. Willow Wilson

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857890535
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

After taking an Islamic Studies course in Boston, G. Willow Wilson quietly found herself adopting the tenets of the religion as her own. This intellectual and emotional exercise created a unique challenge; how could she reconcile a devout and conservative lifestyle with the highly secular society in which she was raised?

Taking a leap of faith, Wilson accepted a position to teach English in Cairo, where her guide to the bustling city was a student of astrophysics named Omar. Led by his passions, she discovered a young and moderate nationalist movement that promoted both tolerance and the celebration of identity. Omar's ideas and experiences reflected her own search for meaning and in the tangled thicket of their differences and their similarities, an unlikely romance blossomed. Although Wilson immersed herself in Islamic culture - learning Arabic, worshipping as a Muslim and adopting a veil - she never rejected her Western identity. Drawing together the values of both cultures, she began to move in the world as a liberal and outspoken Muslim woman, a curious mixture of East and West.

The Butterfly Mosque is a riveting personal account, an investigation into what it means to have faith in our broken society. It is a rare and important insight into the evolving relationship between the boundaries of contemporary religion and culture.

The Conqueress City

On the path between death and life, within view of the watchful stars and within earshot of beautiful, obscure anthems, a voice told of the trials and joys promised.

—Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish

I HAD BEEN IN CAIRO FOR LOSS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WHEN a man on the street asked me for a blow job. He was in his thirties, skinny, with a mustache that drooped at the edges. From the window of a taxi, I had asked him for directions—Jo and I were lost in Maadi, the fashionable district where the apartment we inherited from Ben was located. After pointing vaguely over one shoulder toward the street we were looking for, he spat out his proposition, in an accent so heavy that “blow job” sounded like bastardized French.

“Did he just—?” I looked at Jo, barely comprehending.

Jo’s pretty, aquiline features were twisted into a nauseated expression.

“Okay, just go,” I said to the taxi driver, and slumped back in my seat. My face felt hot. The driver looked over his shoulder at me, frowning. To him, the address we gave was an obscure jum-ble of numbers. Like most Cairene taxi drivers, he navigated by landmarks—pass the white mosque, turn when you see a shop-keeper with a face like an angry rooster sitting in the shade. If we could not describe the landscape, he could not take us where we wanted to go.

“We can go,” I said again, motioning with one hand. The taxi jerked forward.

We had arrived to find a city in a state of moral and financial collapse. Almost every man we encountered, from the taxi drivers who called to us in the airport parking lot to the umber-robed doorman who met us at our apartment, watched us with an expression of repressed sexual anger. Women were indifferent. The air was thick with the metallic smell of dust, a scent that invaded clothing and hair like perfume. This was the most pervasive quality of Cairo, I thought, this dust; even the palm and banana trees that rose from little walled gardens were more gray than green.

In the heart of the city, ancient mosques were crammed into the shadows of slapdash high-rises, some of which tilted precariously on their foundations. The crush of human traffic and the noise of machines were constant. Down the center of this metropolis snaked the Nile, coffee-dark and wide. From every direction, desert threatened to erode what was left of the river’s rich floodplain; its seasonal glut of silt was bottled up behind a dam in Aswan. An ecologist might look at Cairo and see an omen of the future: a flat, burned, airless plain, the wreckage of too much civilization.

I loved it. I loved it obsessively, starting the minute I stepped out of the airport and into the fetid August heat. Confronted with this city, my anxieties seemed self-indulgent. The calm of some long-dormant survival instinct kicked in.

Meanwhile, I was a Muslim. Alone in my room, behind wooden-shuttered windows that looked out at a fringe of palms, I prayed. Prayer was difficult at first. I had never been taught to bow toward anything, or recite words when no one was around to hear them. The first time I prayed, I did not face Mecca—instead I faced west, toward home. It was there that I had first spoken to God. Mecca, on the other hand, was a place I had never seen, full of people I had never met. For a convert, I was unusually obstinate. Bowing—putting my forehead on the ground—felt embarrassing. At that time, if you had asked me what religion was, I would have answered that it was the expression of one’s love for God. Years later, a Bohra Muslim friend would suggest something very different: God, he said, is the love between you and religion. Today, this makes profound sense to me. I quickly discovered that religion is an act of will. I assumed prayer would flow naturally from belief, but it didn’t —it took practice. So I practiced, privately, without telling Jo or anyone else what had occurred.

For a week, Jo and I barely ate. We didn’t understand how or where to buy real food. The apartment previously inhabited by Ben and his roommate sat on a side street lined with straggling hibiscus bushes. There was a series of little shops at the end of our block, but they made no sense to us. One sold finches and lovebirds in cages, another sold cell phones, a third displayed unmarked piles of computer parts on wooden tables. When we finally came across a tiny general store—a duken, we later learned to call it—we bought olives and bread. A donkey cart supplied us with mangoes. Programmed for supermarkets, we were bewildered that we couldn’t buy meat or fish from the same place we bought milk.

One afternoon during this first proteinless week, the phone rang. Jo and I stared at it in dismay. The only other call we’d gotten was from the director of Language School, welcoming us to Cairo. Too late, I realized I had no idea how Egyptians greeted each other on the phone.

“You answer it,” said Jo.

“Why?” I asked wildly.

“Because it might be someone speaking Arabic,” she said. “Pick up, quick.”

I did.

“Hello?”

“Is this Willow?” The voice was male and spoke in a pleasant Anglo-Egyptian accent. He introduced himself as Omar, whom I remembered from Ben’s e-mails—he was a physics teacher at LS, as we called it, and one of Ben’s closest friends in Egypt. Worried about all the trouble a couple of American girls could find in Cairo, Ben had asked him to keep an eye on us.

“I remembered today that you arrived on the fifteenth,” he said. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay. Ben said you brought someone with you?”

“A friend,” I said. “She’s going to be working at LS as well.”

“Oh good,” he said politely. “Is there anything you need?”

I decided not to tell him about our state of enforced veganism. He apologized for not having called sooner—he had been in Sinai for the past few days.

“Can we invite you over for some tea?” I asked, grateful for his concern. “I have a book that Ben asked me to bring you.”

“Sure,” he said. “What time should I be there?”

He arrived an hour later and I opened the door to a tall, olive-skinned man in a button-down shirt and khakis. His expression was kind and curious, and faintly amused; he reached out to shake my hand when I hesitated, unsure of the polite way for an American woman to greet an Egyptian man.

“This room has changed since the last time I was here,” he said as I ushered him inside. He stood in front of the coffee table and narrowed his eyes. The watercolor that hung in the living room while Ben lived there was gone, replaced by a framed print of the Ninety-Nine Names of God.

“Whose is that?” he asked, turning to me. “Not yours, surely.”

“Actually, it is mine,” I said.

“Really?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes.” I excused myself and went to help Jo with the tea. I looked back at Omar from the doorway of the kitchen. He stood with his arms crossed, head tilted to one side, gazing at the calligraphic names. Light from the window glazed his cheek, turning it honey-colored. He smiled.

Omar must have noticed how little food we had in the house, perhaps because we had none to offer him. When he pressed us about what we were eating, we admitted that we mostly weren’t. “Language School usually sends someone to look after the foreigners for the first week,” he said. “You shouldn’t be left alone like this.”

“Are there supermarkets here that sell meat?” asked Jo.

“There are, but they’re very expensive—only for rich people and those who get paid in dollars,” said Omar.

“We can’t do expensive,” I responded.

Omar nodded. “Khalas. Tomorrow I’ll show you the souk. That’s where ordinary people shop. Okay?”

Too eager for protein to say no, we agreed.

Omar arrived promptly the next morning, bringing with him stewed fava beans and bread from a street vendor. When we’d finished eating and cleaned up, he led us out into a late morning mottled with glare and watery shadows. We took a cab a short distance to the underside of a bridge that ran over the Maadi metro stop. Here was the edge of the souk, an open marketplace that meandered through a series of cramped, unpaved alleys strung with tarps. Vendors sat behind piles of green and yellow mangoes, guavas, carrots, sweet potatoes, purple and white eggplants, and tomatoes as heavy as fists, all in dusty profusion. In stacked bamboo cages, chickens and ducks muttered to each other in the heat. Today the market was full: men and women wearing long robes and head cloths moved from stall to stall and called to their friends and neighbors.

“You get your meat from a butcher, like that one,” said Omar, pointing at a reeking stone terrace, above which hung several carcasses that might once have been water buffalo. “But be very careful, especially in the summer—it’s easy to get bad meat. When you find a butcher you like, stick with him.”

Neither of us had an appropriately profound response.

“Chickens and ducks and doves come from poultry sellers,” continued Omar. “Pick whichever bird you like and they’ll kill it for you. Fruits and vegetables should be easy. For bread, go to any bakery. Most are fine. For cheese or oil or olives, anything like that, go to a duken.” He pointed to a small shop similar to the deli near our building.

“Six stops for five food groups?” I muttered in Jo’s ear. She giggled.

We wandered through the maze looking for fresh spearmint to use for tea. As we walked, I felt increasingly dizzy and nauseous, stifled under the long shirt and jeans I was wearing. Despite the sun beating down on my head, I began to shiver. I had a feeling that this was not a good sign.

“Are you okay?” Jo asked. “You look really pale all of a sudden.”

Little points of light danced in front of my eyes. “I’m fine,” I said, inwardly swearing not to faint in front of all these people. “But I should probably find some shade soon.”

Jo turned and said something to Omar, who looked over her head at me, concerned. He spoke at a rapid tempo to a man crouched beside several boxes of greens. The man handed him a bundle of mint. Omar turned to me.

“Do you have fifty piastres?” he asked. “I have a pound but I’m out of change.”

I didn’t and neither did Jo. The man didn’t have change for our twenty- and fifty-pound notes. He said something to Omar, who thanked him in a long-winded way I didn’t fully understand.

“He says it’s okay. You can give him the fifty piastres next time.”

I looked at the man, swaying on my feet. He was grinning at me from under his turban, amused by my obvious discomfort, my out-of-placeness, maybe both.

“Thank you,” I said in English, forgetting where I was. Jo took my arm and steered me away from the crowd, toward the shade of the tree-lined square opposite. Omar stood between me and the light like a sundial, casting a slim shadow across my face.

“Feeling a little better?” he asked.

“Yes. Just not used to the heat. I didn’t sleep very well last night, either.” At some point, the insomnia caused by adrenal exhaustion had become a physiological tic. Though I was healthy now, it sometimes cropped up again when I was stressed.

Omar quoted a few lines from Macbeth’s sleep-no-more speech, smiling in a half-blithe, half-bitter way that I would come to associate with moments like this, when his considerable knowledge of western literature showed through. It was knowledge he did not particularly want. He had been educated in the British system, the last cultural and linguistic outpost of the colonial era. In order to learn more about his own society’s literary history, he searched through the shelves of underpatronized Arabic bookstores and taught himself. This was the smile of a man who, like so many in the Middle East, wished his intellect could be put to better use.

Feeling a little cooler, I looked up and smiled back.

“When the hurly-burly’s done.”

“When the battle’s lost, and won.”

In the weeks that followed, I fell in l...