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 27--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.
