In 2008 and 2010 respectively, former social worker-turned-journalist Güner Yasemin Balci, published two books titled Arabboy and Arab Queen in German, her mother tongue. Balci’s main character in Arabboy is Rashid, who grows up into a life of crime. The novel opens with Rashid’s arrest after an armed robbery, and in his cell, Rashid recalls every sordid deed of his childhood and young adulthood that ended him in prison. Balci’s two main characters in Arab Queen are the sisters Fatime and Mariam. The novel opens with the sisters holed up in their bedroom, with Mariam about to be married to her cousin from Lebanon she has yet to meet. Rashid’s story is one of drug dependency and violence, while Mariam empowers herself and walks away from her family. The narrative tropes juxtapose male deviance and female victimhood among Muslim Arab migrant families in the transnational city of Berlin. What made the novels particularly controversial are that they are written by a Muslim woman. A child of migrant workers of Kurdish origins, Balci grew up in Berlin, and spent her early adulthood as a social worker in a youth center working with Muslim youths, and in particular with young Muslim women. In her introductions to both books, Balci explains that her fictional characters are composites of persons she encountered during her years of social work, and still runs into on occasion on Berlin’s streets. This paper analyzes the ways Balci’s two novels deploy the trope of “the Arab family” as determinant of choices open to young Arab men and women who live as migrants or refugees in Germany. As part of a larger body of German-language “Muslim migrants speak out against Muslims” literature, Balci’s work contrasts the traditional milieu of Berlin’s Arabs with the identities of hybridized individuals like herself. It is a contest between a civilizing, multicultural humanism and proud, Arab and Muslim traditions that ends in tragedy (Rashid) and triumph (Mariam). The novels play into a larger German debate over the country's relatively recent identification as an "immigrant country" in general, and Muslim migrant minorities in particular, reaffirming the neoliberal values of individualism and independence.