Willow Wilson, Butterfly Mosque

https://www.amazon.com/Butterfly-Mosque-American-Womans-Journey-ebook/dp/B003XVYZ9A/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=G.+Willow+Wilson&qid=1556301218&s=digital-text&sr=1-5


pg 74 To me, religion was like a pill: once swallowed, it began to work in ways I could neither control nor anticipate, nor unswallow.

pg 84. Up until now, I’d lived my life in the space wealth creates between those forces, space where art and education and ambition can exist.

pg. 107 the principal stopped in her tracks, wide-eyed, and without a pause asked “Is this a veil I see before me?” For a second I couldn’t get words to come out of my mouth. “It’s a permanent religious bad hair day,” I said finally.

pg. 110 Timidly, as though I might break, my family and friends began to speak up. My parents were supportive in a weary and slightly self-recriminating way, as if my decision to do something this terrible resulted from a defect in their parenting. They didn’t say so, but guilt flowed between the lines.

pg. 137. The fundamentalists, in their own way, were mourning the loss of legitimately beautiful ideas. They knew they could not make the ritualized, morally appraising culture of traditional Arab Islam—in which one must be worthy of truth, love, and God to attain them—more attractive than the lifestyle endorsed in the West. So they demonized attraction itself.

pg. 145. Do you think there is such a thing as universal art? Art that anyone can appreciate, no matter where he’s from?” “Do you think so?” Reem asked. “No,” I said, “I don’t. I think there are universal ideas, but there is no universal art form to describe them.”