From 1998 to 2001, she was the Iran correspondent for the British newspaper, the Guardian, and a regular contributor to the Economist. She was the first American journalist to be based in Tehran since the United States cut off ties with Iran in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She is author of the books Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2006) and No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), and the coauthor of Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran (Henry Holt, 2003). Her commentaries and essays on Islam have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy magazine, the Washington Post, the Washington Quarterly, the International Herald Tribune, the New Republic, the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and Middle East Report.

Abdo has been a commentator on Now with Bill Moyers, National Public Radio, the BBC, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Oprah, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CNN, and other radio and television services. From 2001 to 2002, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. That year, she also received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. She also has earned research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. She received her B.A. in political science and Middle East studies from the University of Texas. She was part of the Intensive Arabic Program at Middlebury College and the American University in Cairo and was a fellow in the MA program in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Currently, she is developing a project on internal Iranian politics, which includes the publication of a Web-based bulletin to be launched in September 2009.