The thing about gossip

So what's it that people enjoy about gossip?
And I don't mean the who-married-who type of gossip, or the why-did-Brad-Pitt-propose-to-Katie-Holmes type of gossip. No no, it's the other type, the one that's alive and healthy almost everywhere I've been in our "Eastern" societies. The one where you judge people, discuss everything about them, their moralities, their cons, the fatal flaws in them with other people when both parties at both ends of the conversation actually know aboslutely nothing about the discussed.

Interestingly, religion explicitly declares it's a thing you should not do. When it's called by the name "Gheeba" in Arabic, all people would frown upon it, maybe never admit to committing it.
And yet, it's deep in our so called Eastern culture that you respect it. To fear it. And to shape yourself and your behavior so that it attracts the least attention, and hence the least gossip. Just go with the sheep kind of thing if I might say.

Just try to do anything a little bit different than everybody else is doing it, and you're bound to see some magic. The thing that you do could be very trivial, anything would do in Egypt, wear shorts on a hot summer day, get coffee with a work colleague (of the opposite sex), have a group photo on the street, anything... People just won't leave you alone.
They would talk about you behind your back, they would talk to their friends about you (even when their friends don't know nothing about you). They'd formulate theories about your behavior (specially with boy-girl things), and they will discuss findings about you as if they know you better than your own mother.

But hey, those are the bad guys right?
There is still the "good" guys party. What will they do about that? Of course, they can't stand still seeing all the gossip going on around and about you.

Right, they won't. They will come to advise you. In various forms (read: in various degrees of rudeness). They will tell you what to do, what to say, how you should completely change what you're doing and what you are so that people "stop talking". And they'll see through to it that you do. It's their "moral" responsibility.

It's definitely and by far _the_ most irritating thing that I can think of in the Eastern culture.
And it's one of the things that I will definitely not miss when I'm away from home. Thinking about it actually makes me looking forward to the relocation. Guess I'll have to remember that whenever I get homesick.