Episode 18: Wallah Bros And A Staff Gorilla

See Something Say Something

Ahmed Ali Akbar

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 550 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2017

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Arabic is a part of pretty much every Muslim's life, whether it's in the salaams they share with their family, in their name, or it's the language they speak at home. In this episode, Ahmed talks with Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Amy D. about what it's like to grow up Arab versus growing up non-Arab, and the different ways of learning the language—from the Qur'an to "lughat al-Net" (language of the internet). And, they talk about how the sacred-sounding "wallahi" (I swear to god) came to be used to describe a certain type of young, Arab guy known as the "wallah bro." Then, Reeda Saleem and Ahmed talk about people messing up their names, and this weird thing that's been happening online where people mispronounce the hell out of of Arabic phrases. A staff gorilla.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm Amid al-Yukber, and this is See Something Say Something, the BuzzFeed show where we drink jai, tell stories, and talk about being Muslim in America.
0:12.0	Big stuff is happening on the show. We got a newsletter, the first one came out last week, and we also released a video on the See Something Say Something Facebook page where we played halal or not with Basim Usif.
0:22.6	If you see something, you better, you better say something.
0:31.6	Nothing at all, nothing at all.
0:36.6	So we wanted to do an episode about Arabic and its role in different Muslim American communities
0:41.3	and how it affects different folks.
0:43.3	We're going to talk about that.
0:45.3	And then later we're going to be getting together with BuzzFeed's Rida Salim about mispronouncing of names
0:51.3	and mispronouncing of Arabic that we've encountered in our lives and on the internet that are just like totally ridiculous.
0:58.3	But first, I'm joined by two folks who are going to help me explain the term wallabro.
1:09.5	Camelia Omeyamah Yusuf is a poet, grad student, and teacher based in Detroit who grew up in Dearborn. Welcome, Camelia.
1:16.6	Hey, Ahmed. And Amy D. is a high school teacher working in and from Dearborn. Welcome to the show, Amy.
1:23.6	Hey there. Thanks for having me. You guys are in Detroit or are you in Dearborn right now? We're in Detroit. Technically Detroit. Yeah. We're in Detroit. But you're both Deerborn, like Deerborn background, basically. Yeah. We both went to Deerborn public schools, grew up in the community. Which has like a huge, you know, obviously Dearborn has one of the most hugest Arab populations outside of the East. Yeah, it's the second largest Arab population and all of the United States.
1:47.4	I think Orange County.
1:48.7	Right.
1:48.9	Orange County has the highest population.
1:51.4	We have the highest concentration.
1:53.1	There you go. Okay.
1:53.6	Of Arabs outside the Middle East.
1:55.8	So there's this thing I encountered when I went to college, meeting a lot of folks from Dearborn, which is why I asked
2:02.5	you guys on, which is that all of them said this term, Wala. Because Wala, you know, as I understood
2:08.9	it, is explained to me. It's short for Wollahi, which means I swear to God. And then there was also this
	...

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