The Sources of Cultural Enrichment
22nd July 2009
The article below is a reminder that the “cultural enrichers” imported to Western countries did not invent their barbaric practices after they got here. The customs we have come to associate with them — including “honor killings”, FGM, rape, and general misogyny — are part of their day-to-day lives at home, and form the culture with which we have decided to enrich our own.
Strangely enough, the countries and cultures within which these barbarities occur are overwhelmingly Muslim. When incidents such as this one come to light, in 95% of the cases an Islamic culture is involved.
Yes, it is true that these are archaic cultural patterns that pre-date Islam. Yet many of them they were common everywhere two millennia ago, and not just in the Arabian Peninsula. Why did they disappear in the civilized world while remaining relatively untouched in the Ummah?
Let’s face it: Islam is a self-sealing ideological system which has preserved the barbaric practices of antiquity as if in amber. Cultural anthropologists are fortunate to be able to study Islamic cultures as a window into the distant past.