#these are very diverse mashallah

[apollos-olives]

lemme make a list of some non western songs. Not all of them will be Arabic, there’s some African singers here too.

Habibi - KAYAM (Tanzanian/Kenyan/British/Indian - Canadian born)

Naïf - GIMS (also known as Maître Gims, Congolese French) (VOCALSSSSS) (I could make a whole list of him and the next artist I’m about to put down)

L’enfer - Stromae (Rwandan-Belgian) (extremely popular, you might have heard Papaoutai or Alors on Danae. Papaoutai is about his father who died in the Rwandan genocide ☹️ you should listen to it, it’s very sad)

Sante - Stromae

Mets moi bien - GIMS (change of pace lol)

Born without a Heart - Faouzia (Moroccan-Canadian)

Puppet - Faouzia

Ghazaleh- Dana Saleh (Jordanian/Palestinian/American)

Call Me - MANAL (Moroccan)

Jayeb Khbari - RYM (Moroccan)

Very Few Friends - Saint Levant (Palestinian/Serbian/Algerian/French)

FaceTime - Saint Levant

Sability - Ayra Starr (Nigerian - Beninese)

I think that’s enough for now lolllll sorry

thank you so much!!!! i'll listen to them as soon as i have a chance 🫶🫶

[starlightervarda]

hi lucy! I'm new to the tog fandom and i just discovered your blog. I love your informative posts about joe's culture and I'd like to share my own experience. I was raised catholic in a country where most people are muslims and I very much agree that saying Astagfirulah, masyaalah, insyaalah is a thing that almost every indonesians say without caring about their religion (I'm agnostic myself now and i use it constantly but varying it like yaoloh, insyaoloh etc)

(2/3) contd- i do wonder if muslims are bothered by non muslims saying it without care as some muslims here are pretty radical (the ones who think every arabic word is a muslim thing even though it means something very common and not a prayer or smth, there was a heated discussion about somebody who carved his sandals to say left/right in arabic and people are mad at him because they're saying that the language of God must not be tarnished by stepping on them even though it literally meant left/right)

(3/3) contd- so yeah i am very glad to read from your posts regarding this matter and how it's mostly a cultural thing everywhere around the world apparently. I get excited reading kaysanova fic that dives deep into their respective cultures because i understand both catholic upbringings and muslim traditions and sayings. i do wish that nicky and joe had conversed in arabic also rather than just italian, it would show a very good diversity about how both their cultures have assimilated to each other)

Hi nonny <3

1) I always found this behaviour from Muslims who don’t speak Arabic very confusing. The possessiveness over the language and treating it and Mideastern culture as inherently religious is just...No.

The idea that Arabic is a Muslim-only language and that ‘Allah is the Muslim God’ is both wrong and weird. There are Arabophone Christians and Jews, Allah is literally just the Arabic word for God. It’s no different than the Romans calling Zeus ‘Jupiter’.

*sigh* Shit like this is why people think Arabic is a violent and scary language, because fanatics keep using it in their bullshit, tying its association to radical religion. Makes me want to throw some very suggestive romantic, even homoerotic, Arabic poetry in their faces. Or an Arabic bible, I bet that would blow their minds.

2) I made a post about how you generally use religious phrases and that they’re used a lot in jokes, sarcasm and even memes. There’s even a running joke in my family when someone uses a phrase which means basically ‘For the Prophet’s sake’ someone will follow up with ‘Which prophet?’ and we’d respond with any of them, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, David, etc. For maximum comedy, the answer is typically more obscure like ‘The Prophet Daniel/Elijah’.

So, no! No one is (or should be) bothered by non-Muslims saying these phrases because they’re not Muslim, they’re Arabic. I’ve known a lot of Christians and they ALL say Allah, Inshallah, Wallahi, Mashallah, etc. because they’re just part of our language, and they, like Arabic itself, existed before Islam.

Only things both religions don’t share are things specifically related to central religious figures like Muhammad/Jesus. (There are some general cultural phrases that do reference them, but not religious, you know?)

3) I made a post about people expecting Joe and Nicky to speak Arabic, and it’s not that simple, because there are many kinds of Arabic, and many options they could use/take into account. And it has many sounds most people can’t manage, even if they’ve been speaking it for years. I had mixed friends with foreign mothers who learned Arabic but couldn’t make distinctions between many sounds.

Nicky will need to sound like he’s been speaking it for centuries, managing letters like ع and خ and ح and غ among others. It was easier for Marwan to speak Italian probably because he already speaks French. Unless Luca starts taking lessons in pronunciation and diction now, anything he says is going to sound very weird.

TBH I’d love it if Nicky is the one who dishes out insults in Arabic, that’d be hilarious because no one would expect it. Like he shoots someone that he calls ‘son of a filthy whore!’ and Joe remembers that it was the first thing he said to Nicky while they were killing each other.

[shakchunni]

desi tag!

tagged by resident ig baddie @lblis 💜

1.What’s your name and what does it mean? zaheen, according to my mom means talented and i also heard from my pakistani teachers that it means intelligent in urdu

2.Where from the motherland is you/your family from? everyone in my family is from chittagong bangladesh 

3.Would you move back to where your family is from, why or why not? as much as i love bangladesh... no lots of reasons involving me having less freedom there as a wamen and the political climate lol but also i dont feel a sense of home there anymore :’(

4.What language(s) can you speak? bangla hindi urdu english mainly and french ig

5.Favorite Bollywood movie? probably kabhi khushi kabhi gham or kuch kuch hota hai

6. Favorite desi meal? tehari, paya, hilsha fish w mustard yum yum n fish paturi

7.Where in the motherland do you want to visit? sylhet ! it’s known for it’s tea gardens n lots of historical landmarks and sonargaon (it means village of gold!) for the architecture

8.Favorite desi singer? bengali bands my parents listened to: souls, miles, renaissance, and bhumi

9.Describe your favorite desi outfit? currently i rly love gararas i bought a pink one for the last eid and it was so gorgeous 

10.Can you make a round roti? YES ! i have always been naturally talented at making perfect rotis (wife material mashallah) my grandma used to taunt my mom when i was little bc she sucks at it hehe

11.Favorite Bollywood actor? i hate men

12.Favorite Bollywood actress?  kajol, deepika, sonam, madhuri, priyanka 

13.Favorite desi in the western media? hhmm priyanka ig 

14.Strange superstitions you’ve heard from relatives. dont go out during maghreb dont have ur hair loose at/after maghreb bc jins if u bite ur tongue or get hiccups someone is thinking about u dont play with shadows bc it will bring bad luck

15.Describe your spice tolerance. very high my family is from the part of bangladesh stereotypically known for eating extra spicy food hfjkjs and my dad’s family eats rly spicy food on top of that so both of those combined.. 

16.Best street food. fuchka! otherwise known as pani puri. also bhelpuri and those little newspaper cones they sell with fried muri and onions and peanut and chillies 

17.The weirdest question you got from a non desi person. “how come u dont have an accent if u lived there”

18.How do you like your chai? i dont :/

19.When was the last time you have visited the motherland (if you dont live there)? 3 years :”((((

20.Your favorite and least favorite part of your culture?

favorite: literally everything aurang said really “desi” culture is so vibrant and diverse we have so many different kinds of cultures and within those sm languages and clothes and food and music and everything it rly makes me proud to belong to such a colourful culture :”) i was reading some books my grandad gave me and the author was talking about how dhaka, where i grew up, was one of the most prosperous cities in the subcontinent in the medieval times n makes me kinda mad to think abt how we had that taken away from us thx to white ppl :)  

least favorite: how brown people are late to everything and colourism and antiblackness and how the colour of ur skin denotes the way people, especially women, are treated. also the other day my mom was saying how i cant take this one pair of pants to bangladesh bc u can kind of barely see the outline of my legs and it look’s “trashy” and no one wants to see that when literally every man in my family walks around shirtless only in a lungi like i dont wanna see that but i digress 

im gonna tag @sitaaras @bengalifairy @ubhokami @hoseoch @kuraepika and any other desitual who may wanna do this i can’t rmbr anymore even though i know u guys exist :/