Muslim First, Arab Second
Dr. Nadine Naber is a scholar activist from Al Salt, Jordan. She conducts research in collaboration with local communities of color, social movements, and policy-based processes.
Dr. Naber received her PhD in Women’s Studies and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis in 2002. She is currently a Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
Her work focuses on racial justice and MENA communities; Arab and Muslim feminist and queer activism; activist mothering within the Arab Spring revolutions and U.S. social movements; feminist abolition; feminist-queer of color activism against militarism, war, and colonization; feminist of color coalition/solidarity politics; and activist research methodologies.
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| Filename | muslim-first-arab-second.pdf |
| Filesize | 98.83 KB |
| Version | 1 |
| Date added | December 28, 2023 |
| Downloaded | 0 times |
| Category | Journal Articles |
| sub-title | A Strategic Politics of Race and Gender |
| authors | Nadine Naber |
| publication | The Muslim World, Volume 95 |
| publish_date | 20051001 |
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.