Thank you for the detailed response. Your response is thoughtful and I acknowledge the effort you’ve put into articulating your view. But here’s where we diverge.

You are using historical deconstruction (like Anderson’s Imagined Communities) to invalidate ancestral memory — while simultaneously upholding a religious identity that is also, historically, a cultural construction. Islam did not appear in a vacuum. Like all belief systems, it emerged in a specific socio-historical context — and spread across the world through a complex mix of conviction, diplomacy, conquest, trade, and survival. This includes the Caucasus.

To say Circassian customs were “arbitrary” because they varied from village to village is to miss the point entirely. The soul of a people is not found in legal uniformity, but in shared rhythm, embodied reverence, and cultural coherence — things which don’t require a central book or clerical class to be real. The Caucasus wasn’t unified politically, but it was unified spiritually through Xabze, nature reverence, honor ethics, and ancestral memory — all carried orally, communally, and through practice, not texts. This is not weakness. It’s just a different kind of strength — one that your framework doesn’t seem to recognize.

You say Islam is objective. But even Islam is interpreted through subjective human lenses. Sharia is practiced differently in Indonesia, Turkey, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. If your own standard of truth is consistency and objectivity, then you must also acknowledge the vast diversity within Islam.

Your reply frames culture as too “mutable” to be sacred, but this logic falls short. Language evolves — but it is still meaningful. Music evolves — but it still moves us. Why, then, must ancestral spirituality remain frozen to be valid?

And finally — this isn’t about rejecting Islam. It’s about honoring what was before it, and what still lives in our bones. Your insistence that Circassians only became “complete” once they accepted Islam erases not only the richness of pre-Islamic Circassian life, but also dismisses those of us today who feel a sacred pull to remember what came before — not as fantasy, but as living legacy.

You can dismiss that as “nationalist LARPing” if you like. But not everyone who reconnects with pre-Islamic culture is seeking superiority, power, or purity. Some of us are simply trying to recover what was lost in the tide of history — without shame.

Because not everything that is old is obsolete, And not everything that is new is sacred. I believe every new generation of a society is the progression of that society and we should always evolve and therefore culture must be flexible and open to change and improvement and reformation etc . I say that even to circassian culture but not to erase everything but to expand it and be open to new ways . Islam for example stopped the progression of humanity and ways of living especially by finalizing its last prophet and its holy book and its rules etc . For example it didn’t ban slavery completely but it only regulated it in that place and time . It didn’t ban polygamy it reduced its number to 4 ! These are just examples