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[...]After she converted, her great-aunt demanded, "How could you leave your mother's faith?"
In the United States, Ellis kept asking herself: Where do I fit in? As a black Latina, she found many black Americans didn't accept her. And Latinos she met were largely from nations without many blacks.
"For me, the perfect niche was the Muslim community, because for us it doesn't matter where you are from or what you look like," said Ellis, 44.
She is now called Farhahnaz Ellis.
In public, her Latino identity, like those of most converts, is often invisible. Ellis remembers the day in a bodega in Reston when she overheard two women looking at her Islamic garment and speaking aloud in Spanish: "Oh my God, look at her. She's crazy. It's so hot."
Ellis, who is tall and slender, walked up and broke out in Spanish. The startled women quickly headed out the door.
Religious Curiosity
When the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks occurred, Avelar, then a George Mason University student, was dating a Pakistani American Muslim. One day, she angrily asked him: How could Muslims commit such acts? Yet she also grew curious. When her anger died down, she asked him to tell her about Islam. After they broke up, her interest continued.
"I absolutely had no intention of converting," Avelar recalled. "Even though I felt Islam was inside my heart, I didn't want to admit it to myself."
She was thinking about her father.
On the night of her senior class photography exhibition, Avelar's family and friends sat in the audience. Here, a photo of Avelar wearing a necklace with a cross, only dangling from her back. There, a photo of Jesus on his cross, only his face was smeared.
Millie Jimenez, 31, who grew up with Avelar, caught on. "It symbolized that she was turning her back on Catholicism," she recalled.
Avelar wanted her father to understand this. But on that night, his children said, he felt something else for his only daughter. (He declined a request to be interviewed.)
"He seemed proud that she had an art show," said Selwyn Avelar, 25, her brother.
Two weeks later, she converted.
Avelar told her mother, then Selwyn. They gave support. But it would take her two months to work up the courage to tell her father.
When she finally did, she said he replied: " 'You're a grown woman. I believe I've raised you well.' "
Then, he said: " 'Before your grandmother died she left us specific instructions to never abandon or change our religion.' "
His attempt didn't work.
'I Love Islam'
Avelar stopped eating pupusas revueltas, tamales de cerdo and any other Salvadoran dishes with pork. In her house, she stopped eating any meat that wasn't halal , or permissible under Islamic dietary laws.
Alcohol was out, as were tank tops. On Christmas Eve, she drove her family to midnight Mass and dropped them outside the church.
Avelar's beliefs are shaped neither by politics nor injustice toward Muslims, she said. In her mind, she's still a hyphenated immigrant -- only with one more hyphen.
"I love my country. I love living here. I love being Latina," she said. "But more than anything else, I love Islam."
Avelar's family held out hope that her conversion would be just a phase. That changed the day she came home with a Muslim man. He was also Latino. They had met two weeks earlier. They wanted to get married.
Her father angrily said no and blamed Islam. " 'They want to marry you off to a man you don't even know,' " she remembered him saying. Then, he took away her Islamic books and said: It's either Islam or the family.
Avelar replied: "Don't ever ask me to choose between you and my religion because I won't choose you."
"That was the day he realized how serious I was," she said.
Later, Avelar and her boyfriend had differences. They did not marry.
Portrayals of Women
After the juma , where Avelar recited verses from the Koran in the back of the mosque with the other women, she left through the same door she had entered.
She said it doesn't bother her that women in Islam have different roles, roles that many westerners describe as repressed. Where they see inequality, she sees respect. A respect, she said, she doesn't see often in Latino culture.
"The way Latin men portray women, it's terrible," Avelar said. "You look at Spanish CDs, and you see women in bikinis on the cover."
Before Islam: The day laborers at a nearby 7-Eleven whistled and cat-called -- " ¡Oy Mamacita ! " -- as she passed them.
After Islam: The day laborers stared in silence as she, in her hijab, passed them.
"The fact they stayed quiet, I was like, ' Alhamdulillah! '," said Avelar, reciting the Arabic phrase "Praise be to Allah."
"I love the respect that I get from the opposite sex [when I'm] in hijab."
Her relationship with her brother also changed.
Before Islam: "We were close," said Selwyn Avelar. "We used to go out and have a drink. We used to talk."
After Islam: "I felt like she was a different person," he said. "She wasn't the girl I had known for 25 years. . . . I felt like she was trying to convert me.''
Yet she's also his sister. And he loves her. In recent months, he said, he's grown to admire her, for learning Arabic, for using her time wisely and for living a healthier and more constructive life.
"Maybe there are times I don't talk to her about my life because she'll give me advice on the Muslim way," he said. "But she's become more of an interesting person. I can learn more from her."
And what about Avelar's father?
Now, whenever a man visits their home, she said, he waits to see if his daughter is properly covered. He likes it that men don't ogle her and she doesn't drink alcohol and stay out late.
His daughter believes he has found a comfortable balance.
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