Our Culture – Part 1 – What is Culture?

What persuades a Srinagar café owner to keep, or drop, nun-chai from the menu, and what kind of eatery now owns that cup? What turns the once-sacred Friday bazaar into a selfie-strip of fried snacks where the khutbah fades to background hum? What recasts the neighbourly rite of carrying a bride’s trousseau on foot into a ribboned convoy of rented SUVs built for Instagram? What turns azaan into noise for many? What alchemy makes a blue tick and a quick reply pass for friendship, while silence feels like betrayal? What force lets the same Qurʾānic ayah set one heart ablaze and leave another untouched? And, above all, what chance has any reform if we never name the silent loom that weaves these reflexes into the very cloth of who I am?

What tilts one freshman toward Marx, another toward Milton Friedman, and a third toward “crypto-everything” as the sole road to freedom? What steers some hearts to conserve statues and scripture while others chase perpetual aggiornamento, convinced that newness equals virtue? What tells a climate activist that gluing herself to a runway is moral heroism, yet whispers to her seat-mate that unregulated markets will heal the planet faster? What algorithm lets one reader see Dostoevsky as proof of God and another as proof of nihilism? What logic crowns Camus a prophet of revolt for this mind and a prophet of despair for that? What chance has any reform if we never expose the loom that threads these judgments into the very cloth we mistake for me?

Most of us, if pressed, would answer with a confident shrug: “Simple—I’ve thought it through.” We imagine our café menus, market theories, trousseau rituals, and theological leanings as the trophies of solitary, critical labour. We cite the journal articles we skimmed, the YouTube debates we binge-watched, the coursework we aced; we rehearse phrases like evidence-based, peer-reviewed, rational choice. Whether we side with Marx or Milton Friedman, chant slogans in climate strikes or scoff at them, defend statues or topple them, we tell ourselves it is all the fruit of personal, conscious, data-driven reasoning, the diligent scholar within sifting facts, weighing logic, and freely selecting the creed that best survives the trial. In short, we trust that our convictions are our own handcrafted conclusions, not heirlooms smuggled in by an unseen loom.

Yet scratch the surface and the “I-picked-it-rationally” tale unravels. Hand two groups the same chart of numbers yet each camp suddenly “finds” proof for its pre-set view. Ask friends to justify why they all just upgraded to the same $1,200 phone and they’ll quote battery specs, though rival models match them line-for-line. Scroll your feed: we retweet headlines we never opened, but only when they flatter what we already believe. The bride insists an SUV convoy is “practical,” yet none of her cousins chose a rickshaw even though the venue’s lane allows only walking speeds. We praise critical thinking yet buy bottled water because everyone at the gym does, and share TED clips on mindfulness while doom-scrolling past midnight. We scoff at “echo chambers,” yet most of us cannot name a single long-form essay that ever changed our mind on climate, hijab, or minimum wage, unless it is a Sull Kaak essay, wynk wynk. In short, our loftiest convictions ride on pre-installed reflexes; the reasoning we boast of is often a clever press release issued after the decision is already home.

The hunch has been measured. In Dan Kahan’s “motivated numeracy” experiment, hundreds of adults were handed one data-table. When the header said “Effectiveness of a New Skin-Rash Cream,” the more numerate a subject was, the more likely she was to read the table correctly. Swap the header to “Does a Handgun Ban Reduce Crime?”, leave every number unchanged, and accuracy collapsed. High-numeracy liberals now “mis-saw” success if the numbers favored the ban; conservatives did the mirror opposite. Skill did not neutralize bias; it armed it. Kahan’s team called the pattern identity-protective cognition: arithmetic bent itself to keep tribal honor intact. R. M. Hare would nod and say the combat happened one rung below evidence, inside what he called a “blik.” A blik is an unfalsifiable, guiding frame, like the paranoid student’s belief that every Oxford don plots murder. Facts bounce off because the frame is not a conclusion at all; it is a pre-rational lens that decides which facts may count as evidence. Your stance on gun bans, or on nun-chai versus Frappuccino, rides inside just such a blik, inherited from elsewhere long before your first spreadsheet.

Neurologist Robert Burton pushes the point one layer deeper: the feeling of certainty is itself an involuntary brain sensation, “more like hunger than deduction.” We experience conviction first and invent reasons after; the delicious rush of being right arrives milliseconds before any conscious proof. Thus the skeptic who mocks bliks lives by them too, he just has a blik that says “only what the lab can verify is real,” and his brain rewards that axiom with a warm glow of I know. Moral-psychology labs have photographed the same choreography in motion. Functional-MRI studies show that stories triggering the Care, Loyalty, or Purity circuits light up limbic “taste-bud” areas before the analytical cortex weighs in; the mind flashes a moral verdict and then hunts for rationales that fit. This is why one reader meets a Qurʾānic verse with reverent chills while his roommate, whose purity-sensor lies dormant, scrolls on in boredom. Together these findings hammer a single nail: our lauded “sound reasoning” is often the last actor on stage, delivering lines written by culture’s unseen loom long before the curtain rose.

So the pattern is unmistakable: whether it is Kahan’s partisan mathematicians, Hare’s unfalsifiable bliks, Burton’s neurological “certainty buzz,” or the scanner that catches moral verdicts firing before verbs, the mind does not begin as a courtroom of neutral jurors, it begins as a stage already dressed, lit, and scripted by something older than argument. That unseen playwright slips its lines into bedtime stories, chalk-dust rituals, jingles, hashtags, even the silence between a parent’s raised eyebrow and a child’s quick obedience. By the time we hoist the banner of rational choice, the scenery has long been painted, the props arranged, and the cues whispered into our earpiece; our eloquent verdicts arrive only to read the teleprompter. If we wish to know why menus change, why markets polarise, why verses flare or fizzle, we must first draw back the curtain and study the script itself, its metaphors, its stage directions, its power to make certainty feel like sight.

So what, then, is this prompter behind our eyes? Where do the bliks lodge before we can spell our names? Strip away the personal anecdotes and a telling pattern appears: the same knee-jerk judgements cluster inside the same circles of people. Farmers across the valley trust the river’s moods in ways a tech hub’s interns never will; undergraduates in the grievance-studies seminar flinch at jokes their engineering peers barely notice; an entire mohalla nods in unison when the bride’s convoy must be SUV-bright, while another village still hoists the trousseau on shoulders. Track enough of these clusters and you find no random scatter but a shared library of cognitive categories—templates silently stamped onto flood, family, film, friendship, even Revelation itself. When a society’s members draw from that common library, they talk, feel, and act as one people: the very sight of rising water signals “blessing” to some, “impending doom” to others; a father’s raised eyebrow can still hush a whole courtyard because everyone reads the gesture through the same lens. Locate those templates and you will have located the backstage machinist that cues our certainty long before reason steps into the spotlight.

That backstage machinist has a plain name: culture. Not culture as museum folklore, but culture as the ever-running operating system that installs those shared mental templates before we know we have minds at all. It does the quiet work of sorting the world into pre-labeled drawers, clean/dirty, honour/shame, progress/backwardness, so swiftly that the labels feel like nature itself. We call it culture because nothing else fits: the templates are learned, not wired; collective, not private; durable, yet always updated through stories, schools, weddings, markets, memes. They spread by imitation and sanction rather than DNA, binding a café owner, a bride, and a first-year economics student into a chorus that sings the same notes even when they think they’re improvising. When those notes change, in a decade, a generation, or a conquest, the street food, the sermon volume, the blue-tick “friendship,” and even the heat that noon-chai carries in memory all change with them. That is why culture, and not just personal preference or raw logic, must be the first object of inquiry if we hope to understand, or redirect, the judgments that pass for our own.

A culture is a people who apply the same cognitive categories to the stuff of life. It is the shared mental filing-system a people use: flood = punishment for jeans or flood = insurance claim or flood = climate change; elder = authority or elder = retiree or elder = liability, and so on. Take two real settings to see the contrast. In a certain hamlet snow-melt is catalogued as duʿā answered, the end of winder and a drawn straight from God’s bounty. Mehr is tagged amānah, a trust to shield the bride, not a transaction. A zawq-filled silence during the khuṭbah is “the heart listening.” Phone screens fall under fitnah, a potential seduction to be rationed. Those four labels already lock villagers into common reflexes: they queue gratefully at the public spring, negotiate dowry as moral duty, hush the marketplace at Friday’s first ādhān, and keep devices in pockets during gatherings and shield their children from it. That is Culture A.

Shift to a start-up café district, forty kilometres yet a world away. Snow-melt is filed as premium commodity, worth ₹60 a bottle. Mehr is stamped economic abuse. Khuṭbah silence is downgraded to background audio while reels roll. Phone screens fall under lifeline, the portal where “real life” happens. With the drawers renamed, behaviour flips: bottled water sells out, couples split costs “to stay equal,” the sermon competes with earbuds, and blue ticks set the tempo of friendship. That is Culture B. Same valley, same language, but a wholesale swap of cognitive categories yields two distinct cultures, proving that the drawers, not the DNA, make the people.

Yet those shared drawers never float alone; they are braided with two tougher strands that give them muscle in everyday life. The normative strand snaps into place the moment a label is chosen: if snow-melt is God’s gift, then we ought to pour it free for traveler and stranger; if it is a premium commodity, then charging ₹60 becomes prudent stewardship. If dowry is amānah, families feel bound, almost frightened, to protect it intact; if it is economic abuse, the same request triggers moral outrage. And because values without vehicles stall, a second strand, the material, moves in with bricks, apps, and gadgets to let the ought be done. Thus the hamlet stocks clay kangri stoves beside every threshold, erects a pulpit that amplifies the khuṭbah over the bazaar, and passes copper pitchers across wedding halls; while the café district installs smart heaters, builds Instagram-ready stages, and lays out QR codes for split-bill dowry accounts. Change one strand deeply enough, automate the sermon into a livestream, or import portable fan-heaters that out-glow the kangri, and the entire braid loosens. Soon the drawers themselves begin to relabel, the norms rewrite their oughts, and a new lattice of tools settles in, until the very pronoun “we” quietly points to a different people than before.

What, then, coalesces when these three strands lock in? Identity! A “we” is nothing mystical; it is the moment a population shares the same mental drawers, the same ought-maps, and the same hardware for acting them out. Arabic names this fusion with one triliteral root whose offshoots map the whole arc. ʿUrf (عُرف) – The custom everyone instinctively recognizes; a jurist may even take it as legal evidence because it is already carved into the collective nerves. Maʿrūf (مَعروف) – That which is acknowledged as right: “Enjoin the maʿrūf,” says the Qurʾān, assuming the good is first a shared recognition before it is a rule. Taʿāruf (تعارف) – Recognising each other as in Q 49:13, nations and tribes meet, each bearing its own ʿurf, so dialogue begins with mutual recognition. In other words, the very language of Revelation bundles cognition (to recognize), norm (what is acknowledged as right), and social fact (the custom that already lives in hands and streets). Lose that shared recognition and the “we” frays; guard it, and refine it, and identity stands firm enough to greet the world without dissolving. Culture draws the boundaries within the larger human family, “Kashmiri,” “Punjabi,” “Persian.” Without a shared map of symbols we cannot even point at the good. Identity is therefore cognitive (shared meanings), normative (shared oughts), and material (shared dress, food, landscape).

When we push beyond ʿurf, the shared drawers of a people, we reach something even earlier in the stack: fitrah, the primal tuning with which every soul is born. It is the heart’s native compass that “recognises” truth before any tongue can name it or any tool can shape it. In daily life that compass appears as the first-order cognitive furniture: the a-priori categories that let a child notice mercy in snowfall, feel the weight of a promise, or blush at a naked selfie long before a rule book arrives. Only after this pre-attunement can a community pronounce “this is good” or “this is forbidden”, the normative moment, and then forge the utensils, bylaws, or apps that make the verdict livable, the material moment. Cognition feels primitive because it is the landing-pad where Revelation, landscape, and upbringing must first touch down. But the traffic is two-way: a generation of always-on notifications can chisel new drawers labeled update, algorithm, perform, until the old reflex that said quiet is devotion begins to flicker. Likewise, sustained norms, say, treating bottled water as prestige, can, over years, overwrite the fitrah’s instinct that water is God’s commons. Fitrah seeds the lens; norms prune or distort it; materials amplify whichever distortion wins.

A decade ago, “presence” meant being physically here, embodied, audible, interruptible. Today my phone demands that I be everywhere and always-on: the new baseline is responsiveness. That single cognitive switch, “present = instantly reachable”, has quietly rewritten our ethics and our habits. The cognitive seed has redefined “presence”. The smartphone collapses the old binary here/absent into a new pair reachable/unreachable. Blue ticks, “last-seen,” typing dots are micro-signals that tell the mind: someone is with me, right now. Once the brain accepts that equation, silence feels like social death; even solitude starts to taste like negligence. The norms follow – “the duty to reply”. Because the category has shifted, a fresh norm snaps into place – “a good friend/colleague replies fast.” Norms plus cognition harden into material rites, Push-notification architectures, buzz, banner, badge, make the new “reachable” visible and audible. Read receipts/last-seen toggles codify the norm into software; toggling them off is now a moral statement (“I refuse your timeline”). Always-on data plans and battery packs turn responsiveness into a 24-hour bodily posture – phone on pillow, charger in pocket. These artefacts loop back, reinforcing the category; the pocket vibration is a summons that proves someone “is present with me,” so the brain re-learns the definition every few minutes.

Why does this matter for fitrah? Constant reachability chokes the inner stillness that revelation assumes; dhikr and salah presuppose intervals where no one but God can summon me. If the smartphone makes such intervals feel abnormal, then a device-level convenience has mutated into an ontological threat. Namaz becomes a burden, a difficult task to take, an impossible habit to built – because it is “ab-norm-al”. A generation ago, when I said “friend,” I meant the person who would fetch a ladder at midnight to fix a leaking roof – mind, norm, and material – reality all agreed on that thick, face-to-face bond. That mental template produced clear duties (show up, share food, his sister is my sister) and a tiny paper address-book, nothing more. Today the same word clicks onto any profile you tap “Add,” so the average person strolls around with roughly 338 “friends” in a pocket – far beyond what the heart or brain can truly carry. The lighter cognitive frame spawns lighter etiquette (a quick “like” counts as care) and whole tool-kits that mass-produce connection, yet even teenagers confess these ties feel thin and restless and time proves such connections are meaningless, “friend’s” know of a person’s death months or years later.

Take, for instance, the single word “woman.” Until barely a generation ago, the Qurʾānic-fiqh template stored that word in a drawer labeled amānah – a trust held in honour. In that cognitive landscape a woman’s dignity accrued from relational duties: a husband’s nafaqah (maintenance), a brother’s wilāyah (guardianship). A daughter would say, “My honour is the mirror of my family,” and society nodded: dowry was insurance, gender-segregated space a shield, the mosque partition a given. Rights-talk, when it surfaced at all, was simply the language of someone else’s obligation.

Then, in the late-1990s, a new header slipped onto the table: “rights-bearing autonomous self.” Satellite TV, SDGs, smartphone hashtags, and Islamic-feminist essays fed the label straight into young minds. Now “woman” meant in-built assets – mobility, public voice, bodily choice – and the identity script flipped: “I am a Muslim who must claim my rights; silence is complicity.” Norms inverted just as fast: guardianship became oppression, dowry a means to extortion, gender-specific space an insult. Material life followed suit, blue-check activists, crowdfunding for court fees, modest-fashion conglomerates, Instagram Close Friends lists, AI chat-bots parsing marriage contracts, all presupposing the new autonomous template.

The consequences expose why hidden categories matter. Once autonomy is baseline, any verse or fiqh opinion that speaks of duty or gaurdianship is scanned as patriarchal violence; conversely, those still anchored in the honour template hear equality talk as an assault on ʿiffah (chastity). Facts now serve identity rather than settle it, and states that loosen one curb (driving, travel) while preaching the old honour narrative breed cognitive whiplash. Until we admit that the drawer itself has been relabeled, from trust in a weave of duties to portfolio of personal entitlements, our debates will stay jammed. Reformers who ignore the cognitive seed will repaint façades; tradition-defenders who merely shout “haram!” without re-grounding honour in Qurānic justice will have conceded the battlefield before the first salvo.

The flip from “woman = amānah” to “woman = autonomous rights-bearer” is therefore no side episode; it is the very loom at work. One word’s ʿurf, its taken-for-granted slot in the shared filing cabinet, shifts, the maʿrūf that followed (“how we ought treat her”) flips with it, and even taʿāruf, our mutual recognition, fractures into rival hashtags. In that instant the pattern of identity rewrites itself, proving the claim we sketched earlier: culture is the loom on which the threads of fitrah are woven into a recognisable face. Leave the loom untouched and the threads align into a stable “we”; tug at its cognitive warp with new metaphors or rituals and the whole tapestry – who I am, to whom I belong, what I must defend – re-knots around the fresh design. Identity, then, is the living motif produced when fitrah’s raw yarn passes through culture’s interlocking strands of shared categories, norms, and tools. Identity is the living pattern that emerges when (a) my in-born disposition toward truth, (b) the cognitive categories my society hands me, and (c) the norms and artefacts that enforce those categories, all interlock. Change the weave, new metaphors, new rituals, and the very sense of “who I am, to whom I belong, what I must defend” alters.

Thus, when a single drawer relabels “woman,” the entire tapestry tightens into a different figure, and that confirms the larger lesson: culture is not an accessory you strap on after you become “you.” It is the molten mold that cools around the newborn self, shaping even the tools of noticing, the pair of lenses that decides which sights glow and which vanish in peripheral blur. Once those lenses are in place, they solidify into a felt certainty of who I am, and that very certainty circles back to patrol the culture that first forged it, rewarding what fits, resisting what jars. Think, then, of three strands – culture → cognition → identity – braided in a loop that feeds itself without pause.

First, culture seeds mental grammar. Long before we utter our first “mama,” we are swimming in patterned cues, rhythms of lullaby and azaan, the hush that falls when elders enter, the sparkle of approval when we share a sweet. Those repeated sights and sounds wire a covert syntax into the brain, teaching default splits like pure/impure, mine/ours, honour/shame, success/sin. Anthropologists label the resulting template a cultural schema, and cross-cultural studies, from Marcus and Kitayama onward, confirm that simply by spotlighting different daily moments a society can rear either an independent self (I speak, therefore I am) or an inter-dependent self (we belong, therefore I flourish). In short, the grammar of thought is issued by the cradle, long before logic arrives to conjugate a single verb.

Second, cognition crystallises those cues into categories. With every repetition the brain economises, compressing the swarm of sights and sounds into lightning-fast filing drawers – friend/stranger, clean/defiling, public/private, purity/pollution. These drawers behave like the preset filters on a phone camera: whatever scene appears must first pass through their tint before the mind even notices colour or shape. Precisely because the labels load in micro-seconds they feel like plain fact, as self-evident as gravity, until a bout of travel or a jolt of trauma yanks us into a society that files the same act under a rival heading, and the “objective” melts into a provincial accent of the mind.

Third, identity forms around the categories. Once the drawers are fixed, the heart stitches honour, belonging, and shame to keeping them intact: “I am the kind of person who greets elders first,” or “I could never drink alcohol.” Challenge the drawer and you bruise the person. Social psychologists dub this reflex identity-protective cognition, evidence is welcomed or expelled according to whether it flatters the group’s mental map. So the Kashmiri raised on “tight jeans is behayaeyi” feels a jab of disloyalty when she catches someone flaunting her curves in tight jeans; similarly, a schema where crude language is not used, using the “f” word is not merely a linguistic slip but a breach in the boundary that says who we are and whose honour we carry.

Fourth, identity feeds back to reinforce, or mutate, the culture. Because a self is never silent, we act to signal who we are, choosing a jilbāb rather than ripped jeans, adding he/him to a bio, voting for the party that promises tuition-free madrasa or carbon-free campuses. Each signal hardens into material props: school syllabi that test English fluency but not mother-tongue poetics, app interfaces that flag “Seen ✓✓” so quick replies feel obligatory, municipal bylaws that license food trucks for selfie traffic but not stalls for wanwun singers. In this way the lived environment re-teaches the next generation the very drawers that shaped their parents, or, if a rival identity gains enough actors and artefacts, installs an entirely new set. Cultural psychologists describe the loop as mutual constitution: culture molds selves that, by dressing, voting, coding, and building, sculpt the next layer of culture, so the braid never rests, it only spirals. What we have traced, then, is the anatomy of judgment: how convictions we treat as private verdicts often rest on shared cultural templates—templates that name things, sort things, and pre-decide what will count as truth, as honour, as harm. We have seen that identity is not a static label but a living braid of cognition, norm, and material practice, all looping back on one another in a spiral that feels self-evident to those inside it. We have shown that what feels like personal reasoning is often the afterglow of a culture already in motion, that “freedom,” “friendship,” “presence,” or “woman” carry different weights depending on which cognitive drawer they are pulled from, and that even Revelation speaks into drawers it expects us to share.

Link to Our Culture – Part 1 – What is Culture?

Link to Our Culture – Part 2 – Forces of Displacement

Link to Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion

Link to Our Culture – Part 4 – Towards a Reform Movement

Link to Our Culture – Part 5 – A Reform that Works

Link to Our Culture – Part 6 – The Road to Medina