Tradition...

Wearing desert protective clothes or posing like an Arab doesn't make you a Muslim, just like wearing dreadlocks doesn’t make you a Rastafarian, and copying everything of Caucasian ethnicity doesn't make you a Christian. Even if what inspired your belief was rooted in the tradition of a certain class of people, you need to be able to tell between the religious part of their tradition and the disposable bit of it.

We need to overstand that with the exception of authentic religious standards, any other tradition, be it family, communal, ethnic or regional, doesn't have to be beyond alteration, criticism or interference. How it was transmitted in succession, as from our ancestors to us, or from their predecessors to them should occasionally be reviewed to adjust inadequacies and assess compliance with the progression of change, growth and development, otherwise we're but sightless successors.

About the launch of tradition, this is a story that a friend once told me. I can’t remember what he said word for word, but I’ll try rewording it to make my point: 

He said there was this Mandinka traveller that had a brief stay in a Fula community. During his stay, he observed that his host wakes his kids up every night saying: “Sofu waalloda.” He never bothered to ask what that meant, but given that Fula’s are mostly religious, he thought the phrase may have some spiritual significance. Upon his return home, he started doing it. He will wake his kids up, pat them on their backs and then pats his own back saying: “Sofu waalloda.” It became a kind of ritual in his family, but that was before it was brought to his attention that the expression was Fula, meaning “pee and go to bed.” 

Now can you imagine the sort of misguided tradition he was about to initiate if wasn’t corrected?