Against the Cult of Preservation

Reclaiming the Duty of Justice Over the Myth of Stasis

“There is nothing like Him.”

Surat al-Shūrā: 11

Change defines our reality. We change and grow as the material world around us does the same. Only Allah is unchanging. All else moves, shifts, passes, begins, and ends. Meanwhile He is as He was. This concept, a cornerstone of Muslim theology, necessarily differentiates between Creator and creation. And yet, in our world, we often seem obsessed with change. More specifically, preventing it.

We often attempt to keep the world in stasis. Politically, environmentally, ethnically, linguistically, socially. We obsess over changes in world climate, lament when a language dies out, and are in a constant cycle of older generations grumbling about how their children and grandchildren adopt new social customs.

Attempting to keep the world in a constant, unchanging state around us is not only a futile task, it betrays and misunderstands the very relationship between creation and Creator and our role within a larger cosmological system.

In many ways, the impulse to slow or stop change is understandable. Loss can feel like erasure. When a language dies, when a species goes extinct, or when old norms and customs fade away, it can feel as if humanity is losing a part of its soul. This is particularly the case when injustice is the cause behind this loss. It is one thing for a language to die out naturally due to globalizing trends and human movement. It’s another entirely for it to be systematically wiped out through warfare and genocide.

But change and evolution are part of the created order. It was never meant to remain static. Besides the numerous references to transformation and cyclical change in the Quran (“You cause the night to pass into the day and the day into the night. You bring forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living” Ali ‘Imran: 27, “It is Allah Who created you in a state of weakness, then developed weakness into strength, then developed strength into weakness and old age” al-Rum: 54), change is also a historical reality that we simply cannot deny or resist.

Culture as a Museum

This desire for permanence often masquerades as preservation, but in practice, it turns into control. Cultures become curated. Languages become standardized. “Traditions” are revived, often artificially, through state institutions or nationalist projects. What began as a desire to honor the past oftentimes quickly becomes an attempt to impose it on the present. In the name of authenticity, societies draw hard boundaries around who belongs, who speaks properly, who dresses appropriately, and who has the right to represent a people or a culture.

The strange framework undergirding all these efforts is that we can pick a point in the past where change is meant to be halted and that all change after that point should be resisted in the name of authenticity and preservation of tradition.

Take for instance food, where this is perhaps most evident. Many cultures treat their cuisine as an untouchable heirloom, guarded jealously against outside influence. Italians bristle at pineapple on pizza or cream in carbonara. The French maintain rigid culinary hierarchies that elevate “traditional” techniques as the only legitimate ones. In the Indian subcontinent, debates rage over the authenticity of butter chicken or whether a biryani is “real” if it’s made in Karachi versus Hyderabad. But each of these “traditional” foods is itself the product of centuries of movement: of trade, conquest, migration, and adaptation. Tomatoes, chilies, and potatoes, now essential to South Asian and Mediterranean cuisines, were all introduced from the Americas in the wake of European colonial expansion. The classic Neapolitan tomato sauce would not exist without the Columbian Exchange.

Moreover, even as these debates rage, change continues on anyways. After independence in 1921, Ireland made a major push to revive the Irish language, seeing it as a core part of national identity after centuries of British rule. Irish was made mandatory in schools, tied to civil service jobs, and positioned as a symbol of cultural sovereignty. But despite these efforts, the revival largely failed. People learned it in classrooms but kept speaking English in daily life. The language had become disconnected from the rhythms of ordinary use, and state-enforced revivalism couldn’t bring it back as a living tongue.

The reality of the situation is that Ireland had changed over centuries of brutal British imperialism. Whether the loss of Irish as a living language was “right” or not is entirely besides the point. You can’t turn the clock backwards and you can’t mandate your way into cultural preservation. Similar examples abound across world languages. Despite the Académie Française’s attempts to mandate the word ordinateur, the English loanword “computer” finds itself as the preferred term among modern French speakers.

Ironically, these attempts to preserve culture and national identity end up creating an even more brittle reality anyways. By ossifying language, food, and identity, you end up making them fragile and devoid of meaning. They become too rigid to adapt, too precious to evolve. Instead of flowing naturally through time, they become hollow performances, easily shattered under the pressure of real life. They become museum exhibits, displayed behind glass wall for preservation, but untouchable to the people who love them. When a people fetishize their own culture, it becomes unnatural to live within it.

Cultural Stasis and State Power

While the preservation of culture is often a deeply personal or social impulse, it can quickly be politicized when states attempt to codify and control cultural identity, using it as a tool to consolidate power. By creating a “right” and “wrong” form of a culture based on an arbitrarily chosen point in the past, nations and states can exclude groups as a means of political control. Famously, Republican Turkey’s notion of a pure Turkish nation had disastrous effects on Kurds, who had historically lived and evolved with Turks in Anatolia over centuries. As Turkey was purging “foreign” words from its vocabulary in an attempt to purify its language (ironically oftentimes replacing Arabic words with French loanwords instead, the Arabic-origin medrese being replaced by the French-origin lise being a particularly egregious example), it used the levers of state power to attempt to create a demographic reality within its borders to match this created notion of an unadulterated past.

As the world transitioned into a secular modernity, sanctity that was previously reserved for the sacred was instead transposed onto heritage, culture, and national identity. By elevating these ideals to a sacred, untouchable status, states could legitimize violence as a means of preserving these new idols.

Justice as Arbiter

So are all efforts futile and we should simply ride the rollercoaster of change and evolution with resignation? Not exactly. There remains an arbiter that draws the line delineating acceptable change and change that we must resist: justice.

Evolution and erasure that comes as a result of physical harm to people is not only a loss of immaterial notions of culture and identity, it crosses the line into injustice inflicted on human beings. In those cases, resistance isn’t about preserving culture for its own sake. It’s about defending human dignity and abiding by the sacred responsibility to enact justice. When a language dies because its speakers were massacred or forcibly assimilated, the loss is not just linguistic but moral. It’s not the change itself that is blameworthy, but the violence and coercion that drive it.

Take, for instance, the history of the Iberian Peninsula. The early 8th century saw the arrival of a Muslim conquest that quickly consolidated control over most of the peninsula. Centuries of Muslim rule necessarily meant a change in demographics at the religious, linguistic, and cultural levels. The old Visigothic culture and administration was essentially erased except for whatever was incorporated into the new order. But by-and-large, the conquest didn’t mean genocide of an existing population and the suspension of their rights. Religious rights were guaranteed and most of the civilian population was minimally affected. Exceptions existed, surely and it would be a mistake to portray this era as a utopian society devoid of all injustice.

But when contrasted with the Catholic conquest and subsequent violent expulsion of non-Catholics from 1492 to 1609, we see a qualitative difference. In both cases we find major cultural and demographic changes as a result of warfare. But in the latter case, we find outright oppression, genocide, and erasure of human life (ironically, with the stated goal of returning Spain to a supposed pure, Christian past). If our arbiter is cultural stasis, they’re both tragedies. But in the latter case, we witness not only cultural erasure, but also state-sanctioned violence, forced conversions, and genocide. If our arbiter is justice, the two are simply not equivalent. There is an ethical distinction between transformation and unjust violence. And while many may lament cultural transformation, it cannot be seen through the same lens as actual physical violence.

In perhaps an opposite example, I would argue that keeping the people of North Sentinel Island as one of the last uncontacted tribes left, is in fact an exercise of extreme injustice. Modern states have somehow determined that in the interest of preserving a living museum exhibit, we will not allow the outside world to contact a people technologically still in the Stone Age. We deny them all the benefits of modern medicine, technology, and knowledge all because we fear the erasure or evolution of their language and culture.

The shari‘ah doesn’t demand the eternal survival of specific customs or dialects, but it does demand justice. That is the line between natural transformation and oppression: not nostalgia, but the ethical imperative to protect the rights and lives of people. Culture can (and will) change, but justice, tied to an unchanging Divine, must be preserved. Our moral imperative is to protect the oppressed, not the museum exhibit.

We must embrace history and reject fantasies of control. We don’t lose any of our dignity when we allow the cultures and identities we love to evolve. Innovating Palestinian imsakhan into the form of a taco in no way detracts from the authenticity of Palestinian culture and identity. But allowing the genocide of hundreds of thousands in Gaza is an indictment of our ability to protect and enact justice.

The point here is not to abandon culture, but to hold it lightly and know that it lives and breathes with us, not apart from us. What we must grip tightly is the command to uphold justice, the trust to protect life, and the duty to defend the vulnerable. In a world where everything changes, it is precisely this unchanging moral anchor that allows us to navigate history with clarity and integrity. Culture will shift, languages will evolve, and dishes will transform. Our job is not to try to hold the world in a frozen, unchanging state. Embrace change and evolution. But recognize that the obligation to enact justice remains firm, rooted in the One who does not change.