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Western academia is NOT the place to learn your culture - go back to your home countries. Westerners who studied your culture via government funding are not who you should get your culture from.
Our traditions are living, they're passed down from elder to youth. Someone who spent a few years of their twenties studying abroad and did a PHD is not passing down your lived tradition. You'll just end up internalizing their Western bias, I've seen it too many times.
Though I studied economics, I took some upper-level Middle East studies courses in my later years, and I noticed many of the fellow Muslims in those courses had thoroughly internalized a liberal / Western perspective of their own cultures.
They could have returned to their home countries to study their culture, but instead spent years learning the Western interpretation of themselves. Even when they visit their home culture to study abroad they end up almost indistinguishable from Whites in their cohort.
Sometimes I find it easier to talk about MENA to a Westerner with little to no knowledge - they're a clean slate. But when it comes to these Western Middle East studies people I find their Western academia bias prevents constructive dialogue centered in our native paradigm.
