Excerpt:
Camie Ayash was raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of an agnostic nurse and a New York City cop with a skeptic's approach to religion.
She is the last person one might expect to be pushing to build a mosque in middle Tennessee.
"My dad was always telling me to compare this with that, to read everything I could and find the discrepancies," she said. "He would stay up into the night reading the Old Testament, the King James Bible, the Torah and look up translations of the Quran, pointing out conflicting statements within the same book.
"Question everything, decide with an independent, open mind, and be strong when you do," said Ayash, now 32. "I was always like, 'OK, Dad, fine.' But now get it. I seriously get it."
Earlier this year, she and her husband of 15 years, a Kuwaiti Muslim, announced plans to build an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a city of about 100,000 people 35 miles southeast of Nashville. The city has a burgeoning Middle East refugee community, many from Iraq.