Braddy Reads The Butterfly Mosque

Two blog posts within a week... I must be regressing.

Honestly, I haven't been doing much reading lately.  I've actually missed book club for the last couple months, because I haven't had time to read the material.  However, when I saw what our discussion would be about in August, I knew I had to give it a try.

I wish I could say that I knew the name G. Willow Wilson from the articles she'd written about being an American Muslim convert, or from her life in Cairo, Egypt.  I wish that I'd maybe read her other novel, Alif the Unseen.  But, of course, I know the name G. Willow Wilson because she recently started writing a superhero comic for Marvel.  It's not shameful knowledge in and of itself, but I'm starting to sense it's representative of a larger imbalance taking place in my life.

Maybe that's why The Butterfly Mosque was such an important read for me at this point in my life - it's ALL ABOUT finding balance.  At least, it's about seeking for balance.  Sometimes, balance is something you don't find.  Rather, you find surrender - maybe even assimilation.

I'm getting ahead of myself - The Butterfly Mosque is Wilson's memoir about her conversion to Islam and her subsequent relocation to Cairo, how she there met the man who would become her husband, and how she sought to reconcile her Western upbringing with the values of the religion she has so wholeheartedly embraced as well as the culture of her new, adopted home.  She struggles with the idea that there can be no such reconciliation - that the American system within which she was raised is incompatible with Cairene sensibilities.  Yet she, with her husband, manage to create something of a "third culture" within which the two of them can be happy, if not always secure.

I have, like, about a half-million ideas that have been swimming around in my head ever since I started reading this book.  I've spent a lot of time thinking of myself and my relationship to God, especially after Wilson mentions a friend who says "God is the love between you and religion."  I've also thought a lot about how selfish I've been, an idea that's been shaken up ever since reading a discussion Wilson took part in with some classmates ranking the culpability of various individuals involved in a tragic murder by their failure to live up to their social responsibilities.  I've questioned my own biases as I've read of brief, transcendental encounters between Muslims of different schools uniting in prayer.  And I've been thinking... and thinking... and thinking...

I doubt I could really explain everything I've been thinking since I started The Butterfly Mosque.  Now that I've finished it, I can tell you that it's made my shortlist of books that have changed my life upon reading, right up there with East of Eden and My Name is Asher Lev.  And, guys, that's really high praise.