Muslim First, Arab Second

This article focuses on the deployment of one specific identity category, “Muslim First — Arab Second,” emergent among Arab American Muslims in San Francisco, California. 1 I argue elsewhere that the racialization of Islam within U.S. state and corporate media discourses, particularly in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, has provided a socio-historical context that makes the emergence of “Muslim First” as a collective identity possible. 2 Here I focus on how Muslim student activists have utilized this category as a strategy for articulating Muslim identities in their everyday lives. The narratives behind “Muslim First” are also gendered, deployed by many youths who argue that they provide a broad ideological framework for confronting and reconfiguring family relationships, in particular, their immigrant parents’ constructions of masculinity, femininity, and marriage. I also contend that intersections of race and gender are central to the articulation of “Muslim First” identities. When it comes to interracial marriage, for example, “Islam” becomes a vehicle for unsettling parental authority when parents inhibit their daughters from marrying across racial lines.