Balancing Faith, Culture, And Growth - Mental Health 4/7
As-salamu alaykum. I am Berak Hussain, the Muslim counsellor. Who am I? What am I? What is my identity? I was born in one place, brought up in another. Am I Arab? Am I Western? What kind of Muslim am I? These are all really good questions that we ask ourselves when we are trying to figure out what our identity is, who we are, and where do we fit in in all of this confusion. How do we find a happy and acceptable medium, between religion and culture, especially when living in a non-Muslim country?
There are so many challenges and problems with that, especially as developing youths or young people who are just starting to wear hijab or young men trying to figure out how to just fit in, but still stay true to themselves. And also the elders who are trying to live in a society that is not the same where they came from, still trying to maintain their identity and trying to raise young people and the cultural clash and the cross-generational clash that can occur. These are all very valid and real problems that are happening within our communities today.
Some of the fears that parents have, are very valid when it comes to losing potentially religion or culture. Again, our parents grew up in a different generation, in a different time-frame, and different conservative values that sometimes can be at odds with what we are living here in West. So what do the parents do? Control, and try to hold and try to tell their youngsters what to do and how to do it. The youngsters are trying to develop their personality, try to figure out who they are, what they are, and how they fit in in both this world as well as the world that they live in, whether it is school or work. And basically, this all comes down to trying to be just accepted by everybody and becomes really confusing for the mind that is trying to develop and to figure out who they are and how they fit into all of this.
So part of the solution could be trying to understand where both sides are coming from, whether it is the parents or the youth or the society, just trying to figure it out. And this is a life-long journey. You cannot expect an 18-year-old to know exactly what they are going to do for the rest of their lives in terms of their career, who they want to marry, or what their set personality type is. It is a journey. And along that journey, we will all be experiencing different things at different stages that will redefine who we are, what is important to us, and what we need to be doing to bring inner peace to ourselves.
Again, the journey of acceptance, the journey of opening up to what is happening around us, because what comes into our head will change the way that we think about things biologically, emotionally, mentally, and as well as physically in terms of how the behavior is exhibited.
There is religion, and then there is culture. Then, of course, there is cultural religion, which our parents are infamous for. And this also contributes to the identity crisis that a lot of youth are experiencing today. And I hear this a lot from these youth. And so it becomes really important to understand the difference between the two, but also to have compassionate, open, and respectful chats with our parents, both back and forth, to come to that understanding.
Finally, living in the West, we have the opportunity to take the good from the culture that we are living in, combining it with the religion that we have, as long as, of course, it doesn't clash with our religious and moral values. So this can be quite challenging, but this is also something that is part of our journey, contributing to our identity, contributing to our understanding of who we are by taking the good from all around us.So we don't necessarily have to have a specific identity because it can be very It can be fluid, and it can be changing according to the different experiences and the different challenges that we go through.
Who said that you have to have your identity set? Who I am now was not who I was 10 years ago or who I will be 10 years from now. It is always going to be changing depending on the different experiences, depending on the different challenges. That is the journey of self-identity. As-salamu alaykum.
