Allah has issued us a great challenge and responsibility. If we do not learn how to understand and respond to this variety the ummah will always be stricken with strife from miscommunication, prejudice, confusion of Islam and culture, and old historical hurts. How often we are told to seek knowledge. How rarely we undertake this responsibility. I thought so.
Culture is an extremely powerful force that shapes our views of others, self and the world.
It strongly effects our interpretation of Qur'an and Sunnah. We recieve our views and understanding of things through our culture. Allah challenges us to use our reason and intelligence to discover right and wrong, good and bad, such that we may encourage the former and prohibit the later. Unfortunately, for most of us our sense of good and bad is not based upon reason and intelligence, but upon the attitudes and pereceptions we have recieved from our cultures. These attitudes and perceptions can be so strong as to be classified as tyrannical.