A lie about prayer that shaped a teacher. Told by Rafa Rjeibi (EP 26).
Rafa Rjeibi was in her second year of primary school in Libya. Her teacher — responsible for religious instruction — told the class that she would know, simply by looking at their eyes, who had prayed that day and who had not. The word she used was tatlaqlaq (تتلقلق): the eyes of those who had prayed would sparkle.
Rafa decided to test the claim. That day she did not pray. Her friend Du'aa did. The teacher looked at them both and identified them correctly — Rafa had not, Du'aa had. To the classroom, this confirmed the teacher's gift. To Rafa, something else happened. She knew the outcome was a fluke, or a bluff that had landed on the right guess. She also knew the teacher had said something that was not true in order to control the class.
Rafa told the story as the moment she first noticed adults lying to children with the authority of religion behind them. The episode she calls "the fly school" (referring to the didactic, rule-bound atmosphere of the institution) planted a lifelong suspicion of instruction that relies on fear of detection rather than on understanding.
As a lecturer in applied linguistics, she now refuses to teach from authority. Her students, she argues, need to know they have a right to an opinion before they can learn to express one in any language. The teacher who claimed to see prayer in the eyes became, by inversion, a model of what not to do.
See: Rafa Rjeibi