Question on culture, imposed and shared.

I'm a bit confused by the question. For one thing, what is a "dominant culture?" Is it the culture of the ruling classes who are dominant in a state? Or is it the culture that predominates in a territory whether or not it is shared by the rulers?

Either way I don't see how this is the case either as a fact of history (i.e. dominant cultures did not imitate or influence other cultures) or as a strategic conclusion based on history (i.e. successful dominant cultures did not imitate or influence other cultures). Perhaps you mean it as a kind of moral question of whether or not it should be done? If so I'm not entirely sure that /r/askhistorians is the right place for this kind of question.

My particular area of study is the Middle East from the time of the Arab conquests to the present, a territory and a time span that saw a huge number of cultures all imitating and influencing one another. The success or failure of those cultures or the states that espoused them had little to do with whether or not they influenced or imitated other cultures.

A classic contrast of this is the Arab conquests themselves, which were hugely successful at influencing the culture of the eastern Mediterranean world and beyond, and the Mongol conquests, which are widely seen as resulting in the Mongols ultimately appropriating and being subsumed by the cultures of the conquered peoples to the point that other than sheer destruction its difficult to find a cultural legacy of the Mongols in western Asia today (eastern Asia and the legacy of the Yuan dynasty are topics I'm far less familiar with.)

Other conquerors found a sort of median, for instance the Seljuk Turks who maintained a separate Turkic identity, upheld the Abbasid Caliph as a religious figurehead but otherwise adapted fully to the trappings and culture of the Islamic heartlands around Baghdad.

In other words, historically, it's not a binary question of dominant/subaltern culture influencing/being influenced by one another. The Middle East and its leadership were engaged in a constant interplay of cultural ideas over the course of centuries.

/r/AskHistorians Thread