in late 1960s, a kuwaiti friend visited a family in the united states. as the wife of the host prepared dinner, the kuwaiti saw the woman cutting the edges of the fish before putting it in the oven to bake. when he asked why she cut the sides, she said she learned it from her mother. after dinner, the kuwaiti asked the wife of the host to call her mother to know what is the secret behind cutting the edges. she called her mother who told her that she learned it from her mother. when the grandmother was asked why she cut the edges, she said she did it because the oven was too small and not wide enough to accommodate the fish so she had no option but to cut it to size. almost all of us do the same rituals. we act in the same way and speak in the same ‘language’ as our parents. therefore, our tendency towards a kind of belief or food has nothing to do with the quality of that food, as much as we are accustomed to it. in fact it is very difficult or rather impossible to convince a lebanese, for example, that tabbouleh is not delicious, or push a jordanian to hate ‘mansaf’ or convince a kuwaiti that the ‘majbus’ is not a good meal. so, in some or other way we are all prisoners of our customs and beliefs which we have been living with since our childhood. in a funny experiment, dozens of people, from different walks of life, stood in a straight line, some behind each other, and the last one in the row asked the person in front of him to turn and mimic a specific movement after him. he then asked the person standing in front of him to do the same and this continued until the last man and when the turn of the first man came again, it was surprising to note that the simple move that started from him and continued until the last man was completely different. all this happened in a matter of a few minutes so what can we expect of a speech or an event that occurred a hundred or a thousand years ago? during a lecture james wildman pointed to two circles on the screen, one blue and the other red. he said they are not equal and asked the audience to identify the larger circle. some said blue, others said red, and yet others could not distinguish so they remained silent. he said a majority toyed with their instinct because he said one is larger than the other but in fact both circles were equal. this proves that it is easy to adapt to wrong ideas. he said that if we were young and we were convinced that the red is bigger, and put this in our mind, this would become a reality with the passage of time. if a party succeeds in convincing the community that the red circle was bigger, it becomes part of a deep-rooted culture, and if a society succeeds in bringing that culture to the other generation, it becomes a well-established tradition. this shows that the existence of certain traditions in any society does not at all imply that they are morally acceptable. the traditions of many countries which accepted slaves ages ago, are no longer acceptable.i leave it for the reader to decide on the motive of writing this article.
