Not quite. We have a rich history, and to narrow it down to politics – or more specifically, religious-politics – is doing a dissservice to our culture.

We are Arabs. We are secular. And we invented hummus.

Sasa, the Syria News Wire.

I know how hard it is to express yourself and have everyone else assume that you’re speaking for everyone else of your race (or religion).

Keep on being rebellious! I love your blog just the way it is!

It’s great to live by a utopian ideal of letting everyman follow their own traditions but how feasible is that idea in the tangible world? As you mentioned “foreign cultures began showing up on the scene” this obviously leads to diversification and situations where tradition and culture just do not fit within the new environment.

It’s a problematic grey area where following your own traditions/culture, as it is followed in the homelands, would endeavor to clash with the diverse settings of a multicultural society.

Segregation of ideals and cultures isn’t the key, but a little compromise might be.

Just on a side note, there is a distinction between culture and religion but it’s a very thin line that a lot of people tend to merge. Take a objective perspective of religion and realize that there are set rules. Now look at the different deviations of the set rules in different demographics. You can then see that everything else that is added to the religious practice can be deemed to be culture and not religion but merged so deeply that they seem a unified front. But it’s almost hard to separate i.e the question of what is culture in saudi arabia and what is religion?

but yea, brian you brought up some very interesting points that got me reflecting.