JOURNAL 5: Culture vs Religion?

Somehow, in some situation, our culture made us contradict with Islamic way of practice.

Let us see how it goes..

1. Our culture teaches us to give money for those who performed solat jenazah as a note of appreciation, but Islam discouraged us to do so.

2. Our culture teaches us to give salam to empty house to show respect to the 'guardian of the house', while Islam never teaches us to believe that way.

3. Our culture teaches us to perform the 'bersanding' during wedding ceremony for the reason to show the new bride/groom to relatives and people who come, however Islam not allowed this to be conducted as it will create fitnah to the bridegroom as well as the whole family.

4. Our culture teaches us to attend wedding ceremony and give some amount of money to host of the house, and it is not what Islam teaches us.. (usually happen at Kelantan)

5. Our culture teaches the groom to wear henna at the 3 end fingers, and for the bride to paint the hands with flower motive to beautify it, and Islam does not encouraged it somehow.

picture courtesy from here

There are actually many other issues can be rise up, but what I can think for the time being are all these. Basically it is all happened during cultural ceremony takes place such as wedding, eid celebration, etc.

I believe that Islam has put some consideration to allow the culture ritual to be conducted as long it is not associating Allah to any form of things. But I am not really sure that Islam really prohibit it or not.

We somehow unintentionally follow the culture as we follow our fathers n mothers doing so, without relating it Islamic teaching, and without knowing it is allow to be followed or not.. And usually we started to notice it after we had practice it for a long time, periodically after when we have grown up as we learn and we may see differences between us to others.

Here we started to confuse whether to follow culture or religion?

What will you do?

I also sometime confuse. But what I do is follow Islam of course. But can I able to stop practicing it since other people are still doing it, and the family asks me to do it too? It is a little bit difficult, but still can be change actually. Even with a drop of determination, we still can change our family from practicing culture rituals which contradict with Islamic teaching...

That is all for now.. Thank you for reading.. :)