musaafer:

One of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard is when people claim to “hate culture” in an attempt to be/seem more pious. It only shows how little they understand about culture in the first place. What you speak, what you wear, what you eat, what you consider to be polite, what you consider to be disrespectful, what you celebrate, what you don’t celebrate, how you celebrate, how you mourn and many other things are all part of your culture and you literally can’t completely distance yourself from all cultures. 

What then ensues is a shallow statement, “I hate all cultures, all I ever need is Islam!”, without any possible way of acting on that statement. You say it, but still fit into all kinds of cultural norms and it just makes you look like an idiot for saying one thing and doing another. 

Islam never came to abolish culture, it came to perfect it. There might be a dress code in Islam, but there’s no uniform. You might recite the Qur’an in Arabic during Salah, but can recite your regular Du’aa in any language you wish. There might be guidelines on what foods are impermissible to eat, but there is no rigid recipes to follow for food you can eat. What this tells us that Islam teaches us right from wrong but never once tells us to abandon culture entirely. It teaches us to leave behind the bad stuff — the infanticide, the patriarchy, the injustice, the corruption, the murder — and to enhance the good stuff. 

This doesn’t mean that you have to burn your own cultural dress, abandon your practices, forget the language, crap on the history and traditions, and put on an Abaya or Thobe to act as Arab as possible. This means that you embrace your culture within the framework of Islam and don it proudly, because culture is not something to be ashamed of, it is something to love.