#dimashqee

“You appreciate culture when you, a monocultural globetrotter, observe the virility of another people and how their culture plays a large role in that. One without culture often fails to see its merits, projecting his own (faulty) worldview unto others.

Part of the issue with anti "bid'ah" - basically anything deemed to be an impure inflection on the unadulterated practises of the Sahaba (whatever that means, considering their variance in the doctrinal, legal and personal characteristic) - is that its replacement is worse.

In theory, it seeks to revitalise the faith by cleansing it of cultural marks and traits that have dragged the vitality of the religion down. In reality, it enforces the "Render unto Christ what is Christs, and unto Caesar what is Caesars" dichotomy. Attacks on the culture of a people leaves a vacuum that will only be replaced by hegemonic liberalism.

Constantly assailing the music, art-forms, or even smaller mannerisms such as kissing palms, wearing tasbihs and so on leave a people vulnerable to more invasive norms. In a way, such attacks mirror the ubiquitousness of liberalism.

For instance, Saudi-Salafism will rail against the impure innovations of Turkish or Indian or Indonesian Islam, while being completely oblivious to the very cultural inflections its own idea of Islam bears. More often than not, attacking culture is but a cover for wars of doctrine - attacking Turkish customs is because of "innovations" is a covert attempt to attack the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition of that people. And so on for other places. Instead of embracing the diversity of the Ummah; that entropy-defying perpetual motion machine that sustains our people, we attempt to create our own tasteless, hegemonic idea of Islam. In attempting to counter modernity through "purification", we mirror and ultimately serve it.”