Several of my teachers, at least three, had disappointed me. These were people I admired, people I had given the status of mentors. It left me with this big hole and a lot of questions. I'll mention just three for now.
1. How is it that you study and teach Deen all day and lack basic conduct?
2. If a person is not good at something, can they still train and teach others in that skill? I think of Deen as a very practical subject. How can a trainer teach something they don't practise themselves?
3. Or should I change my mindset and consider them messengers rather than trainers? Would their own conduct then make no difference?
For days, I stayed with these questions, confused. Then I started trying to break things down.
I began to distinguish the two by their roles and the work they do. If I don't open the message myself, don't think about it or reach any understanding of it myself, and take away less of the words and more of the person's understanding and conclusions, then, to me, they are more than messengers. They are mentors and trainers, and their own conduct matters.
The way I was thinking about it, a messenger just gives you the message. They don't make interpretations for you. Trying to understand a message without thinking about it yourself is outsourcing that thinking. To claim I want to understand, yet give that study neither my time nor my own intellectual effort, is lazy and dishonest.
Anyway, I realised I had given them a role without properly assessing them. And, honestly, I had never really given my time and my own intellectual abilities to reading what Allah Subhanahu wa Taala is saying.
So I decided: this time I would read the Quran, and just the Quran. Read it as a book like any other book, and see what the author is trying to communicate to me.
I would try to go in blank. Read as if I knew nothing about it, setting aside the definitions and religious knowledge I already had. The only resources I would refer to would be about the Arabic language: dictionaries, grammar books and etymology books.
Oh, I had no idea how much there was to discover!