How have socio-cultural practices predating a religion often come to be conflated with its scriptural doctrine? Discuss with examples.

Religions expand into societies that already have their own customs. Over time, such inherited practices acquire the aura of divine command, so that what is historically a social convention comes to be defended as an inviolable scriptural duty.

How custom acquires scriptural authority

• Absorption from host cultures: scholars trace female seclusion (purdah) to pre-Islamic Persian court practice, absorbed into parts of Muslim society after the 7th-century Arab conquest of Iraq; it later spread to upper-class north Indian Hindus and has since largely faded among them. A practice that both enters and exits a faith is custom, not doctrine.
• Decontextualised exegesis: verses addressed to a specific context — such as Quran 33:33, spoken to the Prophet's wives — are read as universal commands.
• Institutional control: where no single office settles doctrine, the reading that prevails is the one enforced by bodies owning mosques, madrasas, temples and halls.
• Status value: seclusion presumes a household can forgo women's outside earnings, so it spreads as a prestige marker rather than piety.

Illustrations

• Female genital mutilation: widely believed to be religiously ordained, though WHO records that no religious scripts prescribe it and it predates Islam and Christianity [1].
• Triple talaq: in Shayara Bano (2017) the Supreme Court held talaq-e-biddat manifestly arbitrary and not protected by Article 25 [2]; Parliament then legislated on its harm, not its theology [3].
• Sati: glorified as widowly religious duty until the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987 penalised its commission and glorification [4].
• Sabarimala: exclusion of women aged 10–50 under Rule 3(b) was defended as immemorial custom but failed the essential religious practice test [5].

Disentangling accretion from doctrine is therefore a historical and constitutional exercise, not an attack on faith. The wiser path is the one Parliament and the Court have taken — regulating a practice's demonstrable harm to equality and dignity, while reformers contest interpretation within the tradition's own idiom, so that Article 25 and Article 14 advance together.