Posted on 03/02/2006 11:03:51 AM PST by HarmlessLovableFuzzball
....
A lot of multicultural couples have blended their beliefs to make a marriage work, but Deedra Abboud's not just a Southern girl who converted to Islam and married a guy from Iraq. She's the director of the Arizona chapter of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation, a Washington-based civil rights group.
Abboud is 34. Not so long ago, she was a Southern Baptist, a business major at the University of Arkansas, where she warned Muslim students that they were going to Hell for treating women poorly.
Now, she prays five times a day, but chooses which interpretations of Islam work and don't work for her, personally. In conversation, she admits she doesn't understand the fuss over the Danish cartoon controversy that's sparked violent protests around the world.
"If Muslims want to protest," she says, "why don't they protest Guantánamo?"
But her press releases say something else. "The [Danish] paper wanted to instigate trouble by disrespecting Muslims from the very beginning," she wrote in an e-mail to local media on February 9. But, she also wrote, "Deliberate provocations like these cartoons only gives additional power to extremists -- who we are all attempting to fight in the 'war on terror.'"
Her measured diplomacy is an asset, as well as a burden.
Still, Deedra Abboud is the chosen one, picked by Muslim men to be the face of Islam in Arizona. A white, fair-skinned face with ocean-blue eyes and a disarming smile.
And that's just about the only thing that makes perfect sense.
The youngest daughter of four born to a Methodist mother and a Southern Baptist father, Abboud hasn't been in touch with her father -- who Deedra says was a cheater and physically abused her mother -- since she was a kid.
"I never really knew him," Abboud says. "I didn't care to."
She hasn't spoken to her mother, Jean Fullbright, in a year. Fullbright could not be reached for this story, although Abboud says she's living somewhere in the Valley. Fullbright came to live with Abboud and her husband, Ali, but moved out after she and Ali quarreled not about religion but over Fullbright's untidy habits, like eating in bed. The following account is Deedra Abboud's own.
Her parents divorced when Deedra was 4. Abboud says her mother was awarded custody of the children as well as child support that Deedra's father never paid. In 1976, Arkansas law enforcement officials weren't rounding up deadbeat dads.
So Jean became a deputy sheriff, Abboud says, to go after guys like her ex-husband. Jean even spearheaded a state law, according to Deedra, that allowed the state to garnish the wages of noncustodial parents in 1979.
Jean remarried. But when Deedra's father was kicked out by his second wife when Deedra was a teenager, her mother welcomed him back into the house -- forcing her new husband out. Deedra's mother and father parted ways for a second time, though -- and for good -- four years later.
Abboud used to think her mother was a man-hater. Now she knows it's not that simple -- she calls her mom a feminist, instead.
"I learned from my mom that you don't need a man to make it in this world," she says. "My mother was very self-sufficient and taught us girls that we needed to be as well."
And so she was turned off by Islam -- or "Muhammadism," as one of her junior high teachers called it -- when she was told that Muslim women were neither self-sufficient nor capable of being so.
"My teacher also taught us that Muslims were going to Hell. And I think I believed her at first," Abboud says. "But I also wanted to know how this woman knew who was going to Hell and who was going to Heaven."
Deedra remained a devout Christian from her senior year at Little Rock's Central High School until she went away to college at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the early 1990s.
There, she came across Muslim students attempting to spread the word of Islam by passing out pamphlets to fellow students going to class. From what Deedra knew of Islam, the religion kept women sheathed in black and "two steps behind men."
"I used to yell at them that they were going to Hell," Abboud says, laughing. "I think I just got a charge out of arguing with them."
Her love of conflict prompted Abboud to then seek out a copy of the Koran, "just so I could argue better," she says. But after searching throughout Little Rock and coming up empty, she says she drove six hours to Houston, Texas, to find it.
"That's when I sort of became enlightened," she says. "A lot of the things that didn't make sense to me in Christianity were starting to make sense to me through Islam."
Such as the story of Adam and Eve, in which "Eve was supposedly the source of all evil," Abboud says. "Yeah, I had a big problem with that. I learned that, in Islam, [Adam and Eve] were equally responsible and they were equally punished."
In Christian teachings, she never understood how Jesus could be the son of God.
"God doesn't have a gender, so therefore, he cannot be a father," she says. Nor did she comprehend "why Jesus would've died for our sins," she says. "How can anybody take responsibility for someone else's sins?"
Islam was beginning to provide answers to her questions.
"But," she adds, "I still argued!"
Abboud's older sister, Sharm Baker, who lives in Houston and works as a project manager for an engineering firm, remembers discussing what she calls "DeeDee's confusion" about Islam before Abboud converted.
"I think all of us, my mother and my sisters, were a little concerned for her," says Baker, a churchgoing Christian. "Personally, I was surprised, maybe bewildered. I didn't know a lot about [Islam] myself, but I grew to understand how the clarity of Islam drove her.
"We're all looking for direction, a path," Baker says. "Religion helps stabilize us."
The deep South was no place for Deedra Abboud to contemplate a conversion to Islam.
"Bible belt? Arkansas? Come on," she says.
After graduating from college with a degree in business, Abboud took a trip to Phoenix with her mother in 1998. She fell in love with the desert, and moved here.
Shortly after arriving in the Valley, she heard about an open house at the Tempe Islamic Cultural Center, the mosque near Arizona State University.
There, she met Yuko Davis, a Japanese-American Muslim who, like Abboud, was raised in the South. Davis was married to Ahmad Al-Akoum. Al-Akoum, along with the Muslim American Society, was hosting the event. Al-Akoum was a board member with MAS and later became the chairman of the board of the Islamic Cultural Center.
"My wife was in the back of the mosque with the ladies," says Al-Akoum, who is Lebanese. "She was answering questions for non-Muslim people, and she introduced me to Deedra.
"Deedra asked the basic questions about what Islam meant, what were the tenets of the religion. We talked for maybe an hour or so, and not long after the open house, she came to us and said she wanted to convert."
But, as he finds is often the case with new converts, Al-Akoum had to restrain Deedra from strutting her new beliefs too fast.
He warned her, as her spiritual adviser, that maybe she should wait to wear the hijab.
"I think she, like many others, was very excited to begin her new life," Al-Akoum says.
Abboud was so excited that she flew home to Arkansas to tell her mother about her conversion. She chose not to wear the hijab.
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Hope the NSA is keeping an eye on her phone number.
If she moved to Iraq, Iran, or another primarily Muslim nation she'll have no choice in which interpretations work for her, and can expect no police assitance when hubby decides she needs a good beating.
She'll live to regret her choice.
Forrest Gump's momma was a genius.
What is it with these females?
Picked by the men to be the face if Islam?
Picks what works and doesn't work for her in Islam?
Don't worry lady, when Islam takes over in your neck of the woods your head will be one of the first to be chopped.
People like her are the prefect recruits Al Qaeda is looking for. Now if she were to put on Jeans and Tshirt ( doubt she will) and were to walk into some crowded mall, who knows what she could be capable of.
sad, what a dumb chick.
So feminism fuels Islamic conversions, eh?
There are hundreds of sects ~ Saudi is about the only place they are not busy plotting against each other all the time and that's only because everybody there must adhere to the standards set down by Wahab.
All this girl needs is to meet a nice guy who isn't muslim.
She's a trojan horse to put a moderate face on islam.
If she lived in a islamic country, she would end up dead in a ditch for her beliefs.
Just wait 'til her her new husband tells her she's gonna be part of the jihad!
Dumb, dumb, dumb. If and when they have children and her husband takes her back to the Middle East where she can be truly treated like chattel, maybe she'll wake up.
Funny, there's nothing about these characters that makes ME feel like disarming . . .
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