&gt;I don&#x27;t think a secular government is a new concept for Syrians or Iraqis. Saudis, Afghans? Sure. But Syria and Iraq have been under secular governments pretty much since the fifties.<p>This is a common misconception while the governments were secular they&#x27;ve enforced very strict &quot;cultural&quot; laws.
In Iraq and in Syria it is perfectly legal to kill your sister for extra-mertial sex, homosexuals are also specifically targeted by either laws that outright make homosexuality illegal (Syria) or by laws that target extra-marital sex (Iraq).<p>So while you can have perfectly &quot;well adjusted&quot; individuals that might even be highly educated there is an almost insurmountable cultural gap that is almost impossible for anyone who isn&#x27;t either from the region or had extensive contact with people from the middle east to understand.<p>You can literally be sitting over tea and talking with a young Iraqi, Syria, Iranian or w&#x2F;e engineer about everything from mechanical engineering to democracy and constitutional law thinking to yourself wow these guys aren&#x27;t that different after all until they mention in the same nonchalant casual manner as you would &quot;hey did you see the game last night?&quot; that they had to kill their sister or that they&#x27;ve reported their room-mate for being gay to the state.<p>Religion and culture aren&#x27;t separate entities like it or not even by being say not even an atheist but an active anti-theist if you grew up in the west the 2000 years or so of shared cultural heritage which at some point or another was (and still collectively is) affected by judeo-christian beliefs, values, or what ever you want to call it (and vise versa) has been imprinted on you from the day you were born the same way it was imprinted on everyone else.<p>The true cultural shock isn&#x27;t when the drinking, chain smoking, club going mid-20&#x27;s Syrian law student comes to Sweden the cultural shock happens when the Swedes figure out that no matter what they tell him they still can&#x27;t stop him from thinking it&#x27;s OK to kill his sister for dating some one he doesn&#x27;t like.