Mohammed M. Al-Nasser.
WAC 107.
Assignment # 2.
Islam and Culture

` The religion may be in anthropology is under cultures,but some religion and belief are not related to one place,so sometimes people judge religion because some acts or practices of the follower. This research will search in how Islam judged as a whole without considering the different backgrounds, ethnic, culture, traditions and political view that the followers have from their environments.
There many problems that delivers or show the wrong idea or view of Islam. For example, the mainstream media sometimes treat some problems that happened in islamic countries or by muslim individuals as “problem with Islam”the religion, when the reality problems of a culture, traditions, tribal or ethnic codes the done by some muslim majority region. The religion of Islam does not condone and it actually condemns practices such as dishonorable honor killing, racism or tribalism, oppression of women, banning women from obtaining an education, and many other un-islamic practice that make its way to the sensationalized news, if a muslim or a muslim-majority region practices these despicable acts it is not because of Islam, but despite Islam.
On numerous occasions some authors and pundits have wrongly attacked the religion of Islam for the cultural practice of muslims in certain places in the world. The american public knowledge of Islam misleaded by the media.This is not a surprise that most americans cannot distinguish Islamic religious practices from cultural practice by muslim majority countries.There are certain areas of overlap: a people’s religion influences their culture, and culture influences how they practise their religion. But in Islam there is a clear distinction between the two. In order to explain the differences between Islam and culture, I think it will be useful if you could imagine a Catholic family in Arizona, a Catholic family in South America, a Catholic family in Italy, a Catholic family in Africa.Although these four families have the same religion, they will have different cultures. They will eat different types of food and will listen to different types of music. Their style of clothing will be different and, of course, their languages will be different. More than likely, they will have certain cultural and traditional practices that are not derived from Catholicism. I think the same would be true for Protestant families or Jewish families in different parts of the world. In the same way, Muslims from different parts of the world will have varying cultures even though they share the same religion. For many Muslims, as with people of other faiths, their cultures play a strong role in their lives. Looking back, my country of birth, Saudi Arabia , and its neighboring Gulf countries have cultures that, when viewed from a global level, seem very similar to each other. I experienced culture shock. I found the culture and traditions to be very different from what I was accustomed to. As I was explaining this phenomenon to a friend who was born in Oklahoma, he shared that he had “culture shock” when he moved from Oklahoma to Minnesota. He also reminded me that the culture of Minnesota is different from the culture of Texas, and the culture in San Francisco is different from the culture in New Orleans.
Not everything done by muslims is necessarily islamic. Many of the countries that are commonly called “Islamic countries” which in reality are merely “Muslim-majority countries” practice an amalgam of Islamic practices and pre-Islamic/non-Islamic practices. More than 10 centuries ago, when Islam became the predominant religion of the part of the world that today is Muslim-majority, those countries already had very distinct and very patriarchal cultures, as many remain patriarchal today. After embracing the religion of Islam, many of these cultures, including the culture of my ancestors and the culture that I grew up in, abandoned some of the