Hey everyone, I'm Amid al-Yakber, and this is see-something-say-something.

This week we're talking to the author Hossein Kisvani about his work covering online Muslim communities.

If you see something, you better, you better say something. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.

So before we get into the interview, I just wanted to talk about my experience online,

because I think it informs this show. And, you know, I tell this story when I talk to

Hussein, but basically growing up, my relationship to the internet was that I never found any Muslim communities that spoke to me.

I mostly used the internet as a place to, like, find info about stuff I liked, and when Islam came up, it was in a very hateful way, and I spent most of my time arguing.

And I got really, really sick of arguing with the Islamophobes. So it was only when I started working as a journalist and, you know, started at Tumblr, Rad Brown Dads, where, like, I found a community that made sense for me. And I was interacting with a lot of folks online. I realized there was, like, a group of people who were, like, interested in using the internet, felt comfortable online, talking about, you know, Muslim identity, Desi identity, all the stuff that I was super interested in. And it was so

funny because like on Tumblr, for instance, where I first really like kind of went viral, I guess,

I would try to find Muslim communities and it was really hard. It was really, really hard. Like

there was just people who had post Quranic ayas. There were people who would post, you know, like photos of mosques. But, like, I wanted, like, discourse. I wanted dialogue. I wanted conversation. And it was really, really, really hard to find. There's something to be said about the fact that in the last five or six years, special as I've been a journalist online, you know,

there's been a lot of space opened up. There's a lot of conversation happening. It's really

interesting and really weird. Like in this conversation with Hossein, we're going to talk about

an online community of Muslim men who are entirely devoted to talking about how not to

masturbate because they don't want to masturbate before they get married,

they don't want to like impurify themselves, which is such a fascinating and strange thing

that is like really maybe it wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago.

Everyone has their own space online and, you know, I've found mine and in many ways this podcast

is mine and I thank you all for being a part of it.

I think it's worth looking into the widest, weirdest, most interesting stuff that's happening

online, and Hussein is really like somebody who does an excellent job at getting at the

source of that. So I wanted to talk to him about his book. So Hussein is a journalist. He's a co-host

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