Free The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson Page A

unacceptable?”
    â€œOh, yes.”
    He touched the back of my hand. “I hope you know that this is going to be very, very hard,” he said.
    â€œI know,” I said. “I know.”
    *   *  *
    A simple team-building exercise given to the staff at Language School showed us what we were up against. The principal was an Egyptian woman who had taught for years in the United States. It’s safe to assume, then, that when she gave us this exercise she knew exactly what she was doing. We were given a handout with a short scenario: a woman whose husband is always away on business goes out at night to meet a lover. A known madman is on the loose. At the end of the evening the woman asks her lover to escort her home in case the madman appears. The lover refuses. The woman goes to a friend’s house nearby and asks her friend to walk with her; hearing the reason why the woman is out so late, the friend refuses. The woman goes on alone. At the river separating her neighborhood from her lover’s, she asks a ferryman to take her across. Because she has no money to pay him, the ferryman refuses. As a result, the woman is trapped on the wrong side of the river and killed by the madman.
    â€œWho,” said the principal, her eyes twinkling, “is responsible for her death? Rank the characters by the order of their guilt.”
    After a few moments of silence, like a communally gathered breath, the room erupted into shouting. The westerners all came down on the same side: obviously, the madman was number one, because he had committed the murder. After that, the friend, lover, ferryman, and wife came in various orders, and the husband, that gray absent figure, floated at the bottom of the list.
    The Egyptians were aghast at this interpretation. Clearly, the wife was number one, as she was the one who decided to have an affair and leave her house late at night in the first place. The madman, they said, was insane, and could not be held fully accountable for his actions. Most of them put him at number six. Hearing this, all the Western women—including me—nearly went crazy ourselves. Our feminist principles had been insulted and we argued, patronized, and went red in the face to defend them. Some of the women looked shaken to the point of tears. Here was Arab culture, as chauvinist as everyone had warned us it was, staring us in the face after we had so generously assumed that beneath the differences in language and custom there were westerners waiting to emerge.
    I looked at Omar; he held my eyes for a moment and then shook his head, as if to say,
The bridge you want to cross doesn’t exist.
We could do no more than look; our engagement was not public knowledge. I felt it wouldn’t be fair to my family if strangers knew about my engagement before they did. Here was another river that couldn’t be crossed except by telling small lies.
    I was pulled aside by Hanan, an Arabic teacher, who seemed eager to explain why the Egyptians thought as they did. The wife was the only one directly responsible for her actions, she said. No one forced her to have an affair, and emphatically, no one forced her to leave the house when she knew a madman was loose. Next to her in accountability was the husband. He had failed in his duty to his wife and should be ashamed of himself for neglecting her and, by doing so, indirectly causing her death. This startled me. Itwas a common thread in the argument being made by my Egyptian colleagues, both men and women: most of them had ranked the husband at number two and spoke of him with as much disgust as if he had been a real person. The westerners, on the other hand, had no idea where to put him, and usually stuck him between four and six.
    While the westerners were arguing literal responsibility—who wielded the knife and who could have helped the woman but didn’t—the Egyptians were arguing moral responsibility. Morally, the madman was like