Society and Culture of Muslims and Christians

 

According to the interviews I took, Christians and Muslims have a very interesting culture just like any other religion. Yes, they are perceived to be more conservative, but even that depends on the person, generation, upbringing or environment.  We all have a few friends belonging to Muslim and Christian religion. We might have different judgements about them.

What I have come to observe is that religion does not matter today as much as it did before. The preceding generation must analyse a person knowingly or unknowingly based on the religion. But today’s generation doesn’t really care about the culture and background and only assess the person seeing if they ‘vibe’ or get along with us.

Living in cities and towns must not really show us the other side of cultures. Every culture is practiced at extreme levels in villages and even in cities, but rarely. Be it Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, villagers have their own orthodox ideologies and are still practicing things. One of the persons (45 years old) I interviewed had an eye opening experience to share. This was when he was in his late 20s. He was at his hometown, a small village in Beed district, and was having a tea party with his friends early in the morning. The Mosque was pretty close to where they were seated. And so when the early morning ‘Namaz’ , the Muslim prayer, started with the loud speaker all of a sudden, one of the friends sitting got startled and blocked his ear out of stimuli, naturally, to protect his ears from the sudden loud noise from the Mosque. It was pretty evident that he didn’t mean to disrespect the prayer. But the Muslim guy standing right behind got offended and slapped the friend tightly, leading to a fight.

Another such experience that I had was when I was around 16, with one of my Muslim friends, that means belonging to today’s generation. He got offended because somebody threw a piece of paper into a dustbin just because ‘Allah’ was mentioned somewhere in the middle of the sentences on the paper. According to him, the paper should have been deposited into a river. Once he even got offended because someone offered him their tiffin food during ‘Roza’ and a teacher had to step in and resolve the fight. What’s more?... His sisters are not allowed to listen to music or dance! That was something hard for me to digest.

So such experiences makes people wary of the Muslims and avoid even mentioning anything about their religion for the fear of offending them. At the same time, one of my best friends is Muslim and I feel very free to talk about anything at all.  For me, this is a critical topic to talk to talk about because I really don’t have enough wisdom and knowledge about it.

Talking about Christians, we have seen complete opposite sides of them, some are very orthodox and conservative while some are very liberal and open minded. But one thing I observed is that we have started to celebrate Christian festivals like our own, like Christmas, Halloween and many more to come. Western cultures depicted on movies and shows are more likely to be the reason for such influence.

In the end, I would say that culture only depends on the person, generation, upbringing or environment. One might follow their religion very strictly, or they might be very open minded about everything around them.