By Elaine Margolin, *Book review: Convert to Islam lives a love story* - The Denver Post - Denver, CO, USASunday, July 18, 2010
There weren't any glaring warning signs during 28-year-old G. Willow Wilson's genteel upbringing by her loving and decidedly nonreligious Protestant parents in Colorado that would lead one to believe she would follow the path she did.
Soon after graduating from college in Boston, where she studied Arabic language and literature, she left for Cairo to teach, and fell hopelessly in love with a Sufi Muslim named Omar whom she soon married while converting to the Muslim faith. This all happened at lightning speed, soon after the 9/11 attacks by Muslim extremists whom Wilson has always regarded with fear and disdain.
Wilson's book, particularly in these treacherous times of mistrust and paranoia, is a masterpiece of elegance and determination; the story of a woman looking to fulfill her spiritual yearnings — feelings she confesses have always been an essential part of her DNA.
Most of us struggle to find faith, and if we do manage to find it, we fight to maintain it. Not Wilson, who has written one of the most beautiful and believable narratives about finding closeness with God that makes even the most secular reader wince with pleasure for her.
Wilson is unafraid to think seriously about her life choices and their ramifications, and she doesn't hide from harsh truths. She is not an angry rebel or a blind conformist or alienated from others, and she has great affection for America and the American way of life.
She writes with warmth about her childhood, which was for the most part uneventful. There were friends and music and great times playing drums in a punk rock band while dreaming about boys. But the desire to know and revere God was always there too, an albatross that hung over her, begging for release. For reasons that aren't precisely clear, Christianity and Judaism never appealed to her, but the teachings of Mohammed did.
When she first marries Omar in Egypt and attempts to set up a home for both of them as a proper and devout Muslim wife, she dons a veil and valiantly tries to learn all she can about the local customs and rituals. She is embraced by his family, a large group of aunties and uncles and nieces and nephews who try to help her by teaching her recipes and showing her where to shop and explaining to her the expectations of a Muslim husband, even one as mild-mannered and tolerant as her beloved.
She feels a part of something way larger than herself, but another part of her is rankled by the oppressive politics and chauvinism of the current regime, the heat and filth and danger that lurk throughout the streets of Cairo, and the blaring, angry and howling recitations blasting from megaphones each morning from the local mosques that promote extremism in thought and mandates that she finds troubling.
But none of this diminishes her ongoing fascination with the myths, people and culture of the Middle East. Although a married woman, she spends her time in Cairo writing articles and essays and was able to get an interview with Sheikh Ali Goman after he was appointed to the Grand Mufti, which is considered the highest religious authority in Egypt.
Her husband seems delighted by Wilson's intensity and adventurousness, and often helps her when he can by escorting her to interviews or acting as a translator for her. Like Wilson, he seems self-possessed and mostly caught up in his own personal journey, and somewhat uncertain of what the future holds for him. When she becomes restless and homesick to return to the United States, he willingly accompanies her, and they have spent the past few years in Seattle.
This is Wilson's first nonfiction book, and she is a natural- born storyteller. She has recently published several sophisticated and philosophical comic books [i.e. Cairo] that explore the themes that fascinate her: How does one straddle the boundaries of East and West? How can Muslim women be brought into the public debate? What does it feel like to be dispossessed?
Her comic books intertwine Islamic mythology, ancient and modern history, Egyptian culture and the country's societal ills, and the growing tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Wilson never seems intent upon provoking or inciting anger. Rather, she wants to understand and spread understanding by showing us that things are always far more complicated than we believe them to be. In 2008, she said, "I'd just like to complicate people's existing assumptions about religion and its role in politics. Not necessarily change, but complicate. That's really what art should do, I think. Make suggestions, not absolutes. Dealing in absolutes is propaganda. You have to leave people with enough room to make their own legitimate judgments."
Reading Wilson offers the reader an almost transcendental experience by allowing them to feel authentically connected to someone who is indisputably close to God and finds great solace from this.
She tries to describe the feeling for those of us who don't feel that closeness. When discussing becoming a Muslim, she writes that she knew what it was to be astonished by faith:
"It's a word that makes many people uneasy and embarrassed; like sex, we talk about it as if it performs some efficient, necessary but unmentionable function, and is somehow contained, affecting only a small part of our daily life. But faith in reality is none of those things. I couldn't explain what it was to kneel to the inexplicable and feel not debased but elevated, in more complete possession of myself than I had ever been. . . .
"My faith did not require beauty or belonging — the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all. . . . Though I couldn't articulate it then, it was certainty that animated me; it was certainty that allowed me to watch the progress of the extremists and feel anger and disgust, but never disappointment: I had submitted too completely for either."
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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