The Butterfly Mosque

Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority.

“but be a little careful about whose authority you trust. Plenty of people talk without anything to say, and without understanding.”

beauty and ugliness are so crowded together that the line between the two is faint and you begin to mistake one for the other.

He looked hurt. “No,” he said, “No, no. Be angry at me, be frustrated with me, but never be afraid of me.”

The fact that I could travel halfway across the world and meet people like Javad and Isma’il made me feel, in a strange way, safe; they reminded me that it was possible to encounter home in many different places.

“Of course the will of God is omnipotent. But there is a difference between what God wills and what God asks of us. Whether or not we obey and do what He asks is in our hands. When we do not, we are not straying outside of God’s will—we are simply being disobedient.”

“In a non-Islamic culture, you are an ambassador of Islam,” he said finally. “Our religion teaches that it is bad to isolate yourself from your community, from the people around you. To push them away. It is important to present Islam in a good way, in a way that those around you can understand. Islam is bigger than the veil. The veil is important, but Islam is bigger than the veil. If wearing the veil in a non-Muslim country will only bring hostility toward you, don’t wear it.”

We are cruelest to those who remind us of our capacity for cruelness.

I think there are universal ideas, but there is no universal art form to describe them.

In the meantime, I learned a lesson that was as crucial as it was debilitating: all the formal education in the world, at the best universities and under the best authorities, cannot teach you to understand an environment you’ve never seen for yourself. I have come to see the concept of expertise as something of a myth; there can be no Middle East expert who has never lived unaided in the Middle East. Using academic theory to explain and predict the behavior of real human beings under stress is at best shortsighted.