Working more closely with religious teachers brought disappointment. There was a gap between the values I expected that learning to cultivate and the conduct I experienced. I do not want to turn this into an account of particular people. What has stayed with me is the question it raised: how can someone spend so much time studying and teaching something, yet struggle to live it?
I had wanted the practical work to have clear responsibilities, rights and obligations. A commitment affects other members of a team; it cannot be treated as if it concerns only the person making it. That was the point of accountability for me. We were trying to do something together, and our own preferences and egos could not come ahead of the work and everyone else involved.
I do not think these were malicious people. They were ordinary human beings, like you and me. But recognising that did not remove the disturbance. I had expected a relationship between religious knowledge and character. If that relationship is less straightforward than I assumed, I need to understand what is missing between knowing, believing and acting.
I had also encountered integrity in people who did not share my religious beliefs. That mattered because it complicated the picture. I could not explain character simply by asking which beliefs someone professed or how much religious knowledge they possessed. Nor could disappointment with a teacher tell me whether the religion was true. These were different questions, even though the experience had brought them together for me.
And then another thought: what if the difficulty is not simply that a person says one thing and does another? What if the way they understand the teaching already makes room for the way they act? How would I know? I began wondering how their worldview entered the interpretation itself, not only whether their behaviour matched what they taught.
That is particularly difficult when I need the teacher to reach the source. In English, I can read different opinions and follow the arguments myself. My Arabic was still basic. Perhaps answers existed that I could not yet reach. So I needed help, but I also needed to understand what I was receiving through that help. How could I judge an interpretation without having enough access to what was being interpreted?