First off, I am not saying that culture is always a bad thing, to be without culture is to be, well, uncultured.
But I want to talk to talk about the problems which occur because of culture. I think I can divide it into two catgories, misunderstandings between cultures, and mistaking culture for something else.
MISUNDERSTANDINGS BETWEEN CULTURES
Once upon a time cultures developed in complete independence of each other. These cultures were created to help people understand each other, setting up social norms, defining what is acceptable behavior and what is not. I will put this here now, there are cultural practises which still exist today which violate people's human rights.I will get back to this later.
So these cultures developed in isolation from each other and everyone within the same community knew what the social norms were (whether or not they liked them was another thing), and everyone understood each other.
Then people did what people seem to like to do and started moving around. The result was communities from two or more cultures living together. This caused problems, as people were used to judging people by their own culture, but these other people, they were doing something completely different. Many misunderstanding came about, stereotypes grew, and things just escalated out of control.
Let me show you an example, let us take two communities. In one community it is disrespectful to look an elder in the eye. Looking someone in the eye shows that you think you are an equal with them. Therefor if a young person looked into the eye of an authoritative figure while said authoritative figure was talking to them, they would be being extremely rude.
In the other community, to look someone in the eye shows that you have integrity, that you have nothing to hide from them. In this culture if you do not look someone in the eye this is a sign of dishonesty.
Now put these two cultures together. A policeman from culture two is questioning a teenage boy from culture one. The boy is a good kid, always respectful to his elders, so he does not look the policeman in the eye. The policeman observes the way the kid never looks in his eye, and he becomes suspicious, and questions the boy harder.. The policeman then thinks that teenage boys from this other culture are dishonest and shifty, the teenage boy begins to believe the police have it in for him. Just look at many problem communities to see what happens next.
The key to overcoming this problem is quite simple, we need to learn about other cultures, and accepting that while the practices of other cultures are not necessarily better or worse, they are just different. In above example, if the policeman had known that in the teenage boys culture, not looking someone in the eye is a sign of respect, he would have realized the boy was not being dishonest.
MISTAKING RELIGION FOR SOMETHING ELSE
My main rant here is about mixing up cultural practises with religious ones, but the same thing can be translated to mistaking something cultural for something racial. A lot of racism comes from people of different cultures. Scientifically there is only one human race. There are only a very small number of genes which actually determine someones skin colour, and none of them have any impact on how a person thinks or behaves.
There are a lot of mistakes made about Islam and the Muslim faith, and a lot of it comes down to mistaking cultural practices for religious practices. There are some communities (and countries) which have some barbaric cultural practices and which are predominantly Islamic. But this does not mean that the Islam faith causes these practices.
Let us use a quite controversial issue, how woman dress.
In the past one hundred years what Western culture has regarded as socially acceptable women's wear has changed considerable. We are now encountering other cultures in which this change has not occured (or change occured in the opposite direction).
The wearing of the Burqa is not an Islamic practise. According to the writings of the Qa'ran (at least to my knowledge) it states that a woman must dress modestly. The Bible has similar guidelines.
But what does modest mean?
In Malaysia Muslim woman cover everything but their hands, feet and face. Some of them wear clothing which is baggy, others clothes are very well tailored and form-fitting. This is what the culture of the Malay people has dictated modest clothing to be.
But among other cultural groups "modesty" has been interpreted as the woman being fully covered. This is a cultural thing. Is it the right interpretation? I would say no, because I find it very easy to start forgetting that the clothes in front of me are actually a person. While a woman who is wearing a head scarf, but I can still see her face, I know she is a person.
In a similar vein, "honour killings" are not an Islamic practice, but they are a cultural practice of some Islamic groups. It is not hard to argue that murdering a young woman, often for something that is no fault of her own, is wrong.
There is a need to seperate this understanding because not adequetly seperating them can led to two problems.
1) Islamophobia (or racism). This is being caused by people assuming that the practises of a minority of a group to the majority, (or even the practices of the majority to every single person). This only widens the gap between the two different groups.
2) Negligence of the real issue. People are so worried about people's religious freedom that they forget that these cultural practices are actually putting other people's human rights at risk. Should we tolerate something which violates basic human rights because they claim it is a religious practice? Many people who are protesting against these same practices are of the same religion. They are not going against their religion, they are calling out these practices for what they are.
My end word is this, we must not be afraid of speaking out against practices that we see are not right, which should not be allowed to continue, but we must also be careful not to stereotype, to blame the bigger group for the work of the smaller group.
Instead we need to work from within a culture, to change attitudes, not necessarily to the Western way, but to a way which respects everyone's human rights.
We need to look at the origins of these practices, find where they went wrong, fix them, develop a new culture, a culture of respect.
Look past the stereotypes, find the person underneath and get to know them.
You might just find the best friend you have ever had.
