Western Whiteness in an American Way of Religious Conversion in Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque

The purpose of this study is to delve into the matter of religious conversion of the narrator in Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque who is deemed to be a representation of a western ideology and society, the USA. The colonizer narrator who finds himself dominated by the western ideology considers her new religion as escapism and attempts to justify her thoughts and the ramifications occurred after experiencing conversion with reference to Islam that brought him with spiritualism. As the writer, the narrator, introduces herself an American Muslim, the whiteness of ideasand ideologies can declare an in-between character who reminds her memories with both sweet, days of Christianity, and confusing, days of being a Muslim. The hybrid narrator in this novel displays his life and journeys she has had to make so as to justify her psychic experience she faces. Being an Other despite her conversion from the heart is represented through questioning her new religion concepts as well as recalling the previous ideology which is officially misled so that the narrator could identify herself with the new conditions. This article is meant to cast light on the matter of conversion in a colonizer position and then otherness, myth making, the role of racism in representing Muslims are designated to be analyzed. As well as this, it addresses the colonized colonizer’s paradigm shifts from Albert Memmi’s postcolonial theory of amalgamating the colonized and the colonizer into the stage of acceptance with the introduction of more in-depth concepts in his book, The Colonizer and The Colonized.