Investigating the place of religion within the professional identity construction of two Muslim English language teachers in Saudi Arabia

Abstract Whereas the topic of “Religion” has garnered considerable scholarly attention in the general education literature, its place within TESOL circles has long been contentious. It is only recently that the religious dimension of the TESOL profession and professionals has seen the light of day. Yet, even when the literature in ELT does engage with these issues, it mostly investigates links between evangelical Christianity and ELT. The relationship between other religions [e.g., Islam] and English language education remains remarkably underexplored . This qualitative multiple case study is an endeavor to address this scholarly gap as it investigates the place of religion within the professional identity construction of two male Saudi Muslim English language teachers in Saudi Arabia. By drawing on in-depth interviews as the primary source of data, and following the principles of an abductive content analysis approach, the study illuminates that Islam was central to the participants’ professional identities in three significant ways, namely: (1) supporting their wellbeing, (2) shaping their relationships with students, and (3) providing them with a sense of duty to safeguard students’ religious values. The study concludes with both theoretical and pedagogical implications as well as future research directions.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
Recent research has demonstrated that understanding language teacher identity (i.e., who language teachers are) is vital in understanding how language teaching is carried out. Hence, increasing studies have investigated how the identity of language teachers is formed at the intersection of multiple factors (e.g., race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender). However, it is surprising that religion has hardly surfaced as a factor in this process. Even the few studies that have dealt with the topic of religion, they mostly focus on evangelical Christian teachers. The influence of other religions (e.g., Islam in this study) on the identities of language teachers remains remarkably underexplored. This study addresses this gap and provides convincing evidence that researching the place of religion within the professional identity construction of English language teachers is timely not only because of the lack of inquiry on the subject in general -and on Muslim English language teachers in particular-, but also because of the significance of religion as an integral aspect of the participating teachers' professional identities.

Introduction
The vast majority of people worldwide are religious believers, meaning that they believe "in the existence of a god or gods, and the activities that are connected with the worship of them" (Religion, n.d.). According to the Pew Research Center (2017), it is estimated that 84% of the world's population is affiliated with a religious institution and engaged in some form of religious practice. Teachers are no exception as they constitute a subset of the general population, and, whether applauded or not, their "religious and/or spiritual beliefs do not remain outside the door" when they walk into their professional contexts (Mahboob & Courtney, 2018, p. 207). Indeed, as the ample empirical research within the last three decades on how teachers' religion inform their pedagogical practices and interweave with their professional identities has shown, teachers bring a variety of religious worldviews and beliefs to the classroom (e.g., James et al., 2014;Mansour, 2008;White, 2009White, , 2010White, , 2014. Although scholarship on the interrelationship of religion and education is currently wellestablished (for an extensive bibliography, see, Bleistein et al., 2013), it is only recently that "religion came out of the closet in language teaching and education" (Canagarajah, 2018, p. 1). It is true that the publication of monographs (e.g., Johnston, 2017), edited books (e.g., Wong & Canagarajah, 2009;Wong & Mahboob, 2018), and journal articles (e.g., Baurain, 2007;Mambu, 2016;Varghese & Johnston, 2007), though sporadic, has pushed the door ajar for academic discussions on a topic that for a long time has been considered contentious within Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)/English Language Teaching (ELT) circles. Yet, it is important to highlight that even "when the literature in ELT does engage with these issues, it mostly explores or questions links between Christianity and ELT. The relationship between other belief systems [e.g., Islam] and English language education remains under-examined" (Mahboob & Courtney, 2018, p. 207). Thus, the current study endeavors to address this lacuna and enrich the literature by qualitatively examining how the religious identities of two tertiary-level Muslim English language teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) intersect with their professional identities.

The role of language teachers: shifting perspectives
Over the years, our understanding of the ELT nature has shifted drastically. In the past, effective language teaching was viewed as "a mechanical input-output process and the teacher as the operative implementing approved techniques to deliver the curriculum" (Kiely, 2014, p. 210). The research thus primarily attended to teaching methods and curricula rather than teachers (Farrell et al., 2020). With classroom-based research gaining more prominence, however, it has become evident that language teaching is a more complex process than merely a teacher implementing the appropriate teaching methodology. In particular, it has been revealed that the teacher plays a paramount role in constructing classroom practices; and his/her moment-by-moment as well as long-term decisions about "what to teach" and "how to teach" are not solely informed by techniques or methodologies learned in educational or training programs. Many aspects of the teacher's identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, gender, class, etc.) were found to be of "the utmost importance in the language classroom" (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 22).
This increased recognition of the significant role of the teacher has brought forth the idea that understanding who language teachers are (i.e. teacher identity) is vital in gaining deeper insights into how language teaching is carried out; as Varghese et al. (2005) posit, "in order to understand language teaching and learning we need to understand teachers; and in order to understand teachers, we need to have a clearer sense of who they are" (p. 22). This in turn has resulted into placing "Language teacher identity" (LTI) at the center of the field's research focus. Plethora of studies have investigated how LTI are constructed at the interstices of multiple axes. Early studies, for instance, focused on LTI with regards to the linguistic status (i.e., native vs. non-native; see, Mansour, 2008). Later on, studies on LTI, as Kayi-Adar (2019) elucidates, have expanded and begun to consider "the ethnic, racial, cultural, and gendered identities of teachers in historical, sociopolitical, educational, and socio-economic contexts demonstrating the complexities associated with language teacher identities" (p. 282). Although these explorations have been significant in structuring a rich portrait of LTI, it is intriguing that "religious identity has rarely surfaced as a topic of inquiry and thus remains decidedly understudied" (Vaccino-Salvadore, 2021, p. 21). Religion, as described by Wong (2018), has been "the neglected domain of [language] teacher identity research" (p. 15).

The emergence of religion in TESOL scholarship
Whereas religion has received a great deal of attention in the general education literature, "its place in our research field [TESOL] has largely remained implicit or emergent rather than focal" (Ushiodaa, 2018, p. 449). Among many possible reasons, it appears that the current disinterest in this topic derives largely from two sources. The first is "the narrow conceptualizations of language, the learner, and teaching and learning in the field of applied linguistics" (Han, 2018, p. 433). As mentioned earlier, for most of its history, the TESOL field has largely viewed "teaching and learning as the transmission and acquisition of a body of knowledge which exists outside the individual" (Tsui et al., 2009, p. 26). Because of this view, "language teachers were seen as technicians who needed merely to 'apply' the right methodology in order for the learners to acquire the target language" (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 22). The field's focus thusly has been directed towards "what teachers should know and what they should do, but the topics of who the teacher is and what the teacher believes remain unconsidered" (Farrell et al., 2020, p. 7).
The second, and probably more pertinent, reason for resisting the integration of religiosity in the TESOL field is the close alliance between Christian missionary work and ELT. For a long time, "evangelicals have continued using English and English teaching as a major means of reaching the 'unreached' or those who have not heard the gospel" (Han & Varghese, 2019, p. 4). This has triggered a harsh criticism against the unethical practices of, mostly untrained, evangelical Christian language teachers who have exploited the global spread of English and used ELT as a cloak for proselytizing and religious conversion (Edge, 2003;Pennycook, 2005;Vandrick, 2002). In other words, English, as Pennycook and Coutand-Marin (2003) contend, has become "the bait" by which students have been lured into Christianity (p. 339). This stigmatized association of Christianity and TESOL has led to the condemnation of religion in TESOL, treating it as obstructive to conscientious language teaching. Indeed, "there has been a general expectation in TESOL that the religious faiths of teachers are irrelevant and should be left out of classrooms" (Ding & De Costa, 2018, p. 533), or what  astutely describe as an "unspoken agreement to not allow one's religious faith to 'intrude' on one's professional practice" (p. 2). This sidelining of religion from the field's mainstream practices has in turn resulted into excluding it from the research scope too.
At the dawn of the 21 st century, however, a few edited collections (e.g., Wong & Canagarajah, 2009;Wong & Mahboob, 2018) have provided a space to re-examine what has long been "a neglected area of inquiry" (Smith & Osborn, 2007, p. 1) and a "blind spot" in the TESOL scholarship (Morgan, 2009, p. 193). The driving force behind this surge of interest is the increased realization that "the main object of concern has not been intrinsic matters of faith, but rather on their worldly articulation, more specifically, a concern based on the historical alignment of English with colonialism and Christian missionary work" (Morgan & Clarke, 2011, p. 828). Along similar lines,  warningly pointed out how the justifiable critique of evangelical excesses has led to shying away from discussing other possible links between religion and language teaching praxis. Such observations have recently found their way into mainstream publishers and academic journals who seem to have become more interested in and accepting of topics related to religion (Han, 2018), contributing "to spawning an emerging area of inquiry on religion and second language learning" (Kim, 2019, p. 10).
Understandably, due to the recency of this research area, most of the visible work has been ideological and conceptual in orientation; that is, scarce empirical research exists regarding the manner and extent to which religion is intertwined with language teachers' professional identity. Nonetheless, the few empirical studies that investigated the topic evidence how not factoring religion into the overall picture of ELT might lead to missing a vital element of this complex phenomenon. For example, the findings of Baurain's (2016) multiple case study showed that the Christian faith of 11 overseas English language teachers influenced their professional identities in three ways, namely: (1) professionalism (i.e. how participants viewed what it meant to be a TESOL professional through the lens of their Christian faith), (2) relationality (i.e. how the participants' relationships with students were undergirded by their Christian beliefs), and (3) witness (i.e. how participants communicated their Christian faith with their students through their roles as language teachers). In a similar vein, Ding and De Costa (2018) examined the lived experience of May, a veteran English lecturer in China, and found that Buddhism helped "transform her professional identity from an English instructor who cared only about language points, to an English teacher who emphasized the meaning of using language and who cultivated and educated students" (p. 542). Discussing the relevance of Hinduism to ELT, Sharma (2018) in a different study argues that religious values and beliefs "may not only be a part of the content of teaching and learning, but they could form the very foundation of what it means to teach and learn" (p. 85). Such studies, limited as they are, point out that further work is needed in relation to the intersectionality of language teachers' religions and their professional identities, especially in a context like Saudi Arabia where the relationship between ELT and religion (i.e. Islam) has always been contested and uneasy.

TESOL and Islam in Saudi Arabia: a contested relationship
In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), all citizens are Muslims, and all life aspects are governed by the Islamic Sharia law; that is, all moral principles, social norms, values, traditions, and practices need to be in line with Islam (Saudi Arabia Constitution, n.d.). This vivid presence of Islam is also conspicuous in the country's education system as it has been the bedrock of all educational planning and decisions. Throughout its history, education in KSA has made it a priority "to build a proper and integrated understanding of Islam, to implant and propagate the creed of Islam" and "to inculcate in students the values, teachings, and ideals of Islam" (Ministry of Education, 2020). "English like the rest of the curriculum is represented as directly linked to 'the faith of Islam'" (Elyas & Al-Ghamdi, 2018, p. 245).
Strikingly, however, and in spite of the Saudi government's commitment towards the Islamization of ELT, a discourse of fear and suspicion has always surrounded learning what has been dubbed as "the language of the infidels" (i.e. English) (Elyas & Picard, 2019). Studies "on the implementation of English education policies in the KSA constantly report that actors (e.g., teachers, employers, senior officials, and parents) are still apprehensive about the current English education policy and practices" (Barnawi & Al-Hawsawi, 2017, p. 205). The reason behind this attitudinal resistance is twofold. The first is the powerful place of Arabic in the KSA and the intimate bond that exists between Arabic and Islam. Many believe that ELT comes at the cost of the Arabic language and the Islamic identity (Alrahaili, 2019). Some even argue that "there is a conspiracy to destroy the Arabic language in the country and the Islamic heritage associated with it" (Barnawi & Al-Hawsawi, 2017, p. 205). The second is the conceptualization of language as a "conduit" -although a contested conceptthrough which the West passes their secular ideas and values, which in turn might lead to cultural alienation and de-Islamization (Elyas & Al-Ghamdi, 2018;Elyas et al., 2020).
This feeling of mistrust among many locals towards ELT was further exacerbated when the educational curricula came under sever scrutiny in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11. The fact that the majority of the hijackers were Saudis made the West exert unparalleled pressure on the Saudi government to reform its educational curricula which allegedly were responsible for fostering anti-Western hostility and producing extreme fundamentalist Islamic ideology (Karmani, 2005). In response, the Saudi government initiated multibillion-dollar educational reform projects to counterbalance this extremist ideology. What appears most evident in these projects is the incorporation of more English into the local curriculum at the expense of the time allocated to the teaching of religious courses. This critical decision was made with the underlying belief that "learning the English language could bring nations together, and promote democracy, freedom, peace, justice, tolerance, and openness" among Saudi citizens (Barnawi, 2018, p. 21).
However, these governmentally-promoted "calls for 'more English and less Islam' only fueled the speculations and unrest towards English" (Elyas et al., 2020, p. 3), bringing forth a conflict between the need to learn English-advocated by the government's educational policy-on the one hand and the deeply-embedded sociocultural will to preserve the tenets of Islam and the supremacy of the Arabic language in the Saudi community on the other (Alrahaili, 2019). Amidst these conflicting discourses, what becomes palpable is the focal role that religion plays within the Saudi society in general, and its educational system in particular.

The study
Participants in the study were two English language teachers at two public universities in the KSA.

The research question guiding this study was: In what ways does the participants' religion (i.e. Islam) influence the construction of their professional identity as English language teachers in Saudi
Arabia? The nature of this research question lends itself to a qualitative methodological design. Due to the complex, multifaceted, and inherently subjective intertwinement between religion and language teachers' identity construction, the study employed a multiple instrumental case study approach.

Focal participants
A purposive sampling approach was adopted to select the study participants. In purposive sampling, the researcher should first identify the inclusion/exclusion criteria that make the participants (in)eligible for the study. Establishing these criteria will "reflect the purpose of the study and guide in the identification of information-rich cases" (Merriam, 2009, p. 78). On the one hand, the participants in this study had to be: (1) English language teachers, (2) Muslims, and (3) teaching within the Saudi education system for at least three years. Working in the same department as the researcher, on the other hand, was the only exclusion criterion. The rationale for this criterion was to ensure the participants' full voluntary participation. The fact that the researcher occupied a senior position within the hierarchical structure of the department could have caused teachers, who are in a subordinate position, to feel obliged to participate in the study.
Another important aspect of sampling is deciding its size. Whereas "a well-designed qualitative study usually requires a relatively small number of respondents" (Dörnyei, 2007, p. 127), there is no clear-cut answer to how small the sample should be. Duff (2019), for example, states that multiple case study research often features two to six cases. A wide array of factors, either under the researcher's control (e.g., the objectives and design of the study) or outside the researcher's control (e.g., availability and willingness of participants, access to research sites, and time and funding constraints), come into play when deciding the exact number of cases to be included in a study.
In the present study, the decision to limit the number of cases to two was largely driven by the constraints faced during the recruitment process. To recruit teachers, the directors of nine English language departments/centers at different Saudi universities were initially contacted -either inperson or over the phone-, and the research, its goals, significance, benefits, risks and procedures were verbally explained to them. Of those nine directors, only four granted access to their teachers and provided lists of their teachers' email addresses. An email containing a detailed information sheet and a consent form was then sent to a total of 96 teachers, inviting them to take part in the study. Three weeks later, another reminder email was sent out to those who had not responded. Of all the teachers approached, only fourteen responded to the email; eleven politely declining to participate due to time constraints and the burdensome nature of their work, and the remaining three indicating a willingness to participate, providing signed informed consent. Unfortunately, one of the consented participants decided to withdraw at the stage of data analysis due to feeling uncomfortable about sharing very personal experiences and beliefs with the readership, leaving the researcher with two participants only, Ali and Mohammed. 1

Ali
In his mid-thirties, married, and a recent father, Ali is a Saudi male English language teacher who was born and raised in a religious Muslim family. At the time of the interviews, Ali had more than nine years of teaching experience in both public school and university. Early in his twenties, Ali earned an undergraduate degree in ELT from a state university in the KSA. Upon graduation from university, Ali taught in a public school for one year. In no time, however, he realized that he did not want to spend the remaining of his career teaching high school students, with no prospect of conducting academic research. Fueled by his burgeoning desire to deeply probe the impact of recent technological development on English language learning and teaching, hence, Ali applied to and successfully secured a position as an English language teaching assistant in the same university where he once had been a student. Shortly after joining the university as a novice faculty member, Ali was granted a scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies abroad; and in 2016 he obtained a Master´s degree in TESOL from a highly ranked university in the UK. Thenceforth, he had been teaching a variety of general English and English for Academic Purposes courses to foundation-level students at university.

Mohammed
Mohammed is a single Saudi male in his early thirties. He was born and bred in a Muslim family. After graduating from secondary school, Mohammed had no doubt that he wanted to become an English language teacher. He made it clear that this decision was significantly moulded by his family. When asked about the reason behind this choice, he unhesitatingly referred to family members who were or had been teachers. Mohammed therefore attended a teacher preparation program majoring in English, the subject in which he excelled throughout his schooling. Whereas the natural step for recent graduates of teacher preparation programs is to teach at public schools, however, Mohammed's excellent grades in his BA study cemented his ambition and made him realize that he could go beyond that. Right away after graduating in 2012, he thusly embarked on his postgraduate education. Financially supported by his family, he earned a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from a top-ranked Australian university. Armed with such qualifications, it did not take Mohammed long to find a job as a university language instructor. At the time of data collection, he had been teaching English language courses for university-level students for almost six years.

Research context
Two newly-established public universities located in mid-sized cities in the KSA were the context in which Ali and Mohammed were teaching at the time when the study was conducted. Both universities have an annual enrollment rate of approximately 7000 students -aged between 18 and 20 years old-, most of whom are Saudi and all of whom are Muslims. As previously explained, English currently lies at the core of Saudi education, including tertiary level. Not unlike other higher educational institutions in the KSA, all students in these two universities, regardless of their subject specialization, are required to complete a foundation/preparatory year program as a prerequisite to embark on their four-year undergraduate studies; during this year, students take intensive English language courses (16-20 hours a week) as well as other STEM courses (e.g., mathematics, physics, and computer sciences), which are all taught in English. What is more, an increasing number of academic programs in both universities have adopted English as the main medium of instruction and assessment.

Data collection
In-depth interviews constitute the major source of data in this study. The core purpose of using interviews, as Seidman (2006) contends, is to understand the lived experience of other individuals and how they make sense of that experience. Interviews allow the researcher to enter individuals' inner worlds and probe aspects that cannot be directly observed, such as their feelings, motivations, beliefs, perceptions, opinions, thoughts, intentions, and their interpretations of the world around them. Besides, interviews can be the right means to reconstruct past experiences that cannot be replicated, or other current events that preclude the presence of an observer (Merriam, 2009;Patton, 2002). That is the reason why interviewing has recently been utilized extensively in qualitative applied linguistics studies that seek to understand "participants' identities, experiences, beliefs, and orientations" (Talmy, 2010, p. 128).
In this study, three face-to-face in-depth semi-structured interviews, each spaced a week apart, were conducted with each teacher. Interview guides for all interviews were designed with openended questions and follow-up probes to stimulate teachers to share their beliefs and narrate their experiences. The interview questions were shared with the teachers prior to the interviews, and they served as a guide for the interviewing process. All interviews were held in the interviewees' first language, Arabic, and took place in venues that suited the teachers best. The interviews, which lasted about 60 minutes each, were digitally recorded, and then simultaneously translated and transcribed into English. In order to confirm the translation accuracy, a professional bilingual translator backtranslated some selected segments of the translated transcripts into Arabic. After all interviews had been transcribed, they were shared with both participants for corrections and/or comments.
Using Seidman's (2006) three-interview model, the first interview was exploratory in nature as it sought information about the participants' biographical backgrounds, their past formal and informal language learning experiences, their reasons for becoming a language teacher, and their previous and ongoing language teaching experiences. The second interview focused on the place of religion in the participants' personal and professional lives (e.g., their personal definition of religion, the development of their religious identity, how religion is integrated into their daily lives, their views on any possible links between religion and education, and how their religious identity has shaped both their current beliefs about language teaching and learning as well as their pedagogical practices). During the third and last interview, the interviewees were asked to reflect deeply and critically upon the meaning of their experience as Muslim English language teachers in the specific context of Saudi Arabia, wherein the relationship between ELT and Islam is uneasy. The last interview also provided the opportunity to expand into areas and topics that might have been mentioned but not fully explored in the first two interviews.

Data analysis
With the assistance NVivo 11, the transcribed interviews were analyzed following the principles of an abductive content analysis approach (Hennink et al., 2011). This approach entails a cyclic and iterative movement between the extant literature (deductive) and the collected data (inductive). The value of this abductive approach is that, whereas it acknowledges that it is improbable for any researcher to begin any analysis as a blank slate -a notion Pavlenko (2007) describes as "naive and misleading, because it obscures the sociohistoric and cultural influences on the researcher's conceptual lens" (p. 167) -, it does not overlook the uniqueness of each case as it embraces and addresses emerging themes not yet recognized in the literature.
The data analysis commenced after the completion of the data collection and it consisted of three interrelated phases. The first phase was developing detailed familiarity with the data through multiple readings of each interview transcript while simultaneously listening to the recordings in order to reconcile any errors and ensure accuracy. The second phase of analysis involved coding the data and identifying emergent themes. During this phase, line-by-line NVivo deductive coding was incipiently applied. While a priori codes shaped the initial analysis, a subsequent inductive coding (datadriven) was carried out in order to expand understanding without forcing the data into preconceived codes. In line with the strategies suggested by Hennink et al.'s (2011), I immersed myself in the data again in an attempt to identify codes beyond the literature. This involved actively reading and rereading the data several times. Whereas several explicit codes were identified in the first reading, subtle codes and underlying concepts often appeared after several close readings. Annotating the data, writing reflective memos, questioning the data, and reflecting on them were also helpful in stimulating code development. Both deductive and inductive codes were later grouped into broader overarching themes that go beyond the semantic content of the data to capture key ways in which the participants' religion shaped their professional identities. The last phase of analysis was relating the themes back to the original data to ensure their validity and consistency. This was done by selecting expressive quotations from the transcripts and using them to elucidate the themes in the findings section below.

Findings
The findings from this study clearly showcase the central place of religion in the participants' construction of their professional identity as English language teachers. The following subsections present the three themes that emerged from the data analysis, namely: (1) Supporting Wellbeing, (2) Shaping Teacher-Students Relationship, and (3) Safeguarding Students' Religious Values.

Supporting wellbeing
Teaching has been described as "a demanding and straining profession with a rather high risk of burnout" (Häusler et al., 2019, p. 35). Teachers burnout primarily causes "emotional and physical exhaustion, anxiety, and depression, which are often manifested in behavioral reactions such as tardiness, absenteeism, poor job performance, and lack of interest and commitment" (Zhang & Zhu, 2008, p. 111). A salient theme in this study was the role that religion played in supporting the participating teachers' mental and emotional health in the face of factors that could result in professional burnout. Both Mohammed and Ali, for example, talked about how Islam mitigated the deleterious side-effects of work overload. "I teach 20 hours a week. That is not easy! Yet, I know it is an 'Amanah' [i.e. a moral responsibility], and I seek the reward of Allah when teaching. That gives me the strength to carry on", said Mohammed. Ali also described his job as "exhausting. I plan lessons, prepare extracurricular activities, write exams, mark homework and exams, attend departmental meetings, and participate in trainings. I try to fulfil these duties sincerely and tolerantly because I know that Allah will reward me in the Hereafter".
Also evident in the Ali's comments is how his religious beliefs helped him overcome the frustration he experienced due to the lack of recognition and appreciation from his institution. He spoke of the matter as follows: Sometimes the devil whispers to you: 'You don't have to work hard. No one in the department will appreciate that extra effort you go to!' That's true and frustrating. I, however, keep reminding myself that the work I do is for the sake of Allah. Allah is always there watching me. I therefore strive to satisfy Allah in all my deeds.
Another, more pertinent to the ELT profession, factor is the issue of job insecurity; the global spread of English has resulted into the expansion of ELT to become both a "commercial enterprise" and a "global commodity" (Neilsen, 2009, pp. 85-86). This industrialization and marketization of ELT has made it subject to market law, thusly deeply affected by the local and international economic conditions. This volatility has in turn had a direct impact on the employment opportunities for language teachers and the length of that employment. Nowadays, language teachers are "usually and mainly a transient work-force, frequently only employed part-time" (Aboshiha, 2007, p. 70). This sense of "instability and changeability" (Varghese et al., 2005, p. 23) often generates feelings of insecurity among many contractually-employed language teachers worldwide.
Mohammed is no exception as he was hired under the contract system in which his contract was renewed annually. This attendant instability of his employment status laid the foundation for a stressful working condition that put him in an emotionally exhausting situation. That is, by the end of each year, he was on pins and needles waiting to hear good news about the renewal of his contract. He described the renewal process as "extremely stressful". Nevertheless, the data also revealed that Mohammed turned to his religious beliefs for solace during such a difficult situation. He said, "deep in my heart, I do realize that nothing will happen to us except what Allah has decreed for us. Accepting that this is the will of Allah gives me comfort".

Shaping teacher-students relationship
A second theme that emerged from the data revolved around the importance of religion in shaping the relationship between the participating teachers and their students. The emergence of this theme can be seen as a corroboration of other studies that demonstrate the deeply-rooted influence of religious faith on teacher-students relationships (e.g., Baurain, 2012;Hartwick, 2015a;Vandrick, 2018). Running throughout this study's interviews was a sense that both teachers viewed their students not solely as language learners but also as valuable human beings who are worthy of care, love, and respect. It was also equally apparent that this benevolent relation with students was explicitly mediated and motivated by the teachers' Islamic religion. The following extracts support this claim: Islam induces me to be a good teacher; that is, to be friendly, caring, compassionate, patient, and forgiving with my students. It is a sort of pact between Allah and me. Allah created mankind with different abilities; not all students are high-flyers; there are those who are -not by their own choice-underprivileged. That is Allah's will. It is not for me to judge. My job is to embrace every single one of them and use that as my avenue to unleash their full potential. That's what matters most in teaching. (Mohammed) I have always loved and cared about my students irrespective of their differences and shortcomings. I respect them and treat them like a family. I do whatever I can to help them succeed, expecting nothing in return. To exemplify, I can recall several occasions when I exceeded the working hours that I am paid for to tutor those kids at my office. That's what our religion and our prophet taught us. And believe me, learning happens fastest and best when students love you. (Ali) These comments clearly suggest that Mohammed and Ali felt encouraged, by the force of conviction that arises from their Islamic religion, to create a bond with their students as a basis for teaching and learning. Especially central to this point is that both teachers characterized quality teaching more profoundly in terms of cultivating humane relationship with students rather than merely in terms of imparting knowledge to students. This is particularly significant given that teachers' internalized image of quality teaching is "firmly imprinted in what the teachers do in the classroom, what concerns them about their practices, which classroom events they are determined to act upon and to which, in contrast, they, subconsciously or deliberately, turn a blind eye" (Kubanyiova, 2013, p. 122). Most importantly, although the attributes the participants associated with this teacher-students relationship (i.e., "love", "care", "forgiveness", etc.) are not Islamically exclusive, yet it is significant that the participants cited them as being profoundly driven by and derived from their Islamic religion.

Safeguarding students' religious values
Of the three themes listed earlier, safeguarding students' Islamic values was the one that the participants addressed in most detail. It was also evident that the participants' perception of the relationship between English, the West, and Islam is far from straightforward. On the one hand, they both seemed to equate the West with Christianity and view them as two sides of the same coin, and thus stand in complete opposition to Islam. Regardless of the source and legitimacy of this association, it is not uncommon for Muslims to view Christianity as "an inherently Western phenomenon" (Zebiri, 2001). This holds true for the participants in this study who, throughout the interviews, interchangeably used the terms "Christian/Christianity" and "Western/West" as if they were the same. This association is even more apparent in the examples the participants gave about the inappropriateness of Western teaching materials, as shown later in this section.
On the other hand, although differently reasoned, both participants rejected the perspective that views the English language with dismay and associates it with the West. Despite the literary problematization of the language-culture nexus, the participants concur with Hofstede et al. (2010) that "language and culture are not so closely linked that sharing a language implies sharing a culture" (p. 389). Mohammed, for instance, evinced a fervid belief that "English can be taught within an Islamic framework. We don't have to teach English along with its culture". As he continued, he justified the need for learning a foreign language in order "to spread the message of Islam and refute the fallacies and stereotypes often thrown at Islam". In a similar vein, Ali, taking a pragmatist view, concedes that "the global dominance of English is a contemporary reality" (Hamid, 2016, p. 269), thereby emphasizing its utilitarian, rather than cultural, value in the present-day context of English as an international language and as a global lingua franca. He further posited that "English is in fact the main medium of communication between many non-Arab Muslims across the globe".
Nevertheless, Ali and Mohammed's acceptance of the instrumentality of the English language in today's globalized world is indicative of neither their obliviousness nor their submission to the exploitation of this phenomenon, chiefly by "inner-circle" ELT publishers and the coursebooks they produce, to strategically reinforce "hidden cultural agendas" (Tajeddin & Teimournezhad, 2015). In line with John Gray's (2013) argument that commercially-produced textbooks, "in addition to being curriculum artefacts, are also cultural artefacts" (p. 2), the participants overtly expressed deep concerns about the publishers' imbrication of English with Anglo-centric values that, in their views, are often Christian and antithetical to Islam. Mohammed postulated that "the textbooks in use are culturally inappropriate. They come from the West and expose young students to several aspects of the English culture that are incongruous with the Islamic teachings". Elsewhere in the interviews he also said, "I think they [the textbooks] are designed by Christians, for Christians". Similarly, firm in Ali's belief that those textbooks are not innocent. You know that I did my Master's in the UK. I can't deny that religion was always implied in the materials we used to study. In fact, those materials, as I have noticed, lure students to read more about Christianity and its values. Alas, we use similar textbooks here, without any kind of filtration.
Faced with this perceived threat, the participants had to reconcile their professional identities as language teachers with their religious identities as Muslims. That is, in parallel with their professional duty to meet institutional requirements and achieve course objectives, Mohammed and Ali felt that it was also a religious duty on their part to protect students' religious values and beliefs. An interesting commonality is that both teachers opted for "censorship"-though to varying degrees-as a strategy to screen out those Islamically inappropriate teaching materials (Hyde, 1994, p. 296). Ali, for instance, adopted a strict censorial approach in the sense that he attentively avoided any topics that, in his opinion, were culturally and religiously offensive, and rather exerted extra effort to replace them with more Islamically-sensitive ones that target the same learning objectives. He went on to say, I personally tend to skip topics that are in conflict with the tenets of Islam and against our traditions. I prefer to keep myself and my students distant from those taboos. As Allah ordained us in Quran to 'Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble'. To clear my conscious, however, I incorporate supplementary materials that cover the same points but better align with our culture and religion.
Muhammed also followed a similar, yet more lenient, censorial approach to his teaching. That is, problematic topics were neither completely ignored nor spotlighted; only if an issue is raised by students would Mohammed address it. As he put it, I try to steer clear of western references that abound in the textbook. My students are still young; I must protect them. However, I sometimes feel compelled to answer their questions if they, for example, ask about Christmas or pre-marital relationships. I answer briefly without dwelling on the details. When I do so, however, I ensure that I also highlight the discrepancies between us and the West.
It is true that the literature is replete with studies documenting teachers' adaptation of teaching materials for a variety of reasons (for a review, see, Tomlinson, 2012). What the above examples particularly highlight, however, is the central place of religiosity in the teachers' professional identities. Rather than being passive consumers of the institutionally prescribed textbook, the participants actively engaged in filtering and/or appropriating the textbook content in order to shelter their impressionable students from the potential harm caused by exposure to Islamically unacceptable norms and values. Unlike English language teachers whose censorship is either externally imposed or fear-induced (e.g., Hudson, 2019;Kasztalska & Swatek, 2020), the censoring practices by Ali and Mohammed were entirely self-initiated and religiously-driven. That is, despite not being in a position to select the textbooks they use in class, they refused to compromise their own religious identity and still exercised their agencies as they made their own deliberate decisions about which parts of the textbook to use, which to adapt, which to abandon, and which to supplement with other materials, all with the ultimate goal of protecting students' Islamic values in the face of western and Christian influences.

Discussion and implications
It is important to highlight that these findings by no means suggest that religious teachers are more effective than their nonreligious counterparts. They, however, point out that teachers' religion can significantly impact who they are as professional English language teachers. To return to the primary research question above, it became evident that religion mattered a great deal to the participants in three specific ways. Firstly, the participants talked about the role of religion in supporting their wellbeing and warding off the burnout they face in a profession that "can be peculiarly draining and challenging to one's sense of self" (Smith, 2018, p. 121). This finding endorses Hartwick's (2007aHartwick's ( , 2007bHartwick's ( , 2015b series of studies which repeatedly reported positive association between teachers' religiosity and their ability to persevere through difficult times. Secondly, the participants also narrated how their Islamic religion orients how they interact and communicate with their students, which, in their view, is at the heart of quality education. White (2014) found the same finding to be a central aspect for the participating teachers in her research who "stress that relationships are what matter most . . . and insist that optimal learning can only occur if positive relationships between themselves and students, as well as amongst students, are first established" (p. 71). Consistent with the literature on the role of English language teachers as moral agents on learners (e.g., Baurain, 2007;Farrell et al., 2020;Soleimani & Lovat, 2019;Varghese & Johnston, 2007), the participants thirdly elaborated upon how their religion provided them with a powerful sense of duty to protect students' religious values from being corrupt by Islamically-inappropriate teaching materials.
Based on these research findings, two broader implications are proposed for the field. On a theoretical level, we now know that teachers' religion can genuinely influence their professional identities, thereby, it can be legitimately argued that overlooking the religious dimension "of language classroom life can be very limiting to the development of the TESOL profession" (Farrell et al., 2020, p. 8); instead, further and deeper inquiry should be directed towards the intersection between the religious and professional identity of English language teachers. The findings can additionally be seen as a step towards pushing scholarly research beyond its longstanding focus on evangelical Christianity and ELT. As mentioned earlier, evangelism has long been viewed as the sole point at which religion intersects with ELT. That is why "the lion's share of research on religious or spiritual identity in ELT has focused on educators who identify with a Christian belief system" (Vaccino-Salvadore, 2021, p. 2). This study, however, provides convincing evidence that other religious belief systems (i.e., Islam in this study) are worth examining as they can also find their way into language teachers' identity and practice.
On a praxis level, this study accentuates the need to expand the content of teacher education programs. Nowadays, it is rare, if not unprecedented, to find a language teacher education program that acknowledges the religious dimension of the ELT profession and professionals. "An examination of recent textbooks on second language teacher education programmes, for example, will turn up no reference to this topic either explicitly or implicitly" (Farrell et al., 2020, p. 7). Despite the abundant calls for more focus on different identity categories -among which religious identities-(e.g., Olsen, 2011;Wong & Mahboob, 2018), most education programs are still centered around equipping prospective teachers with "knowledge about" the language (i.e. content knowledge) and "knowledge how" to teach it (i.e. pedagogical content knowledge), almost to the exclusion of the teacher (Richards, 2008). However, the participating teachers' experiences lend extra support to the proposition that education programs need to recognize, value, and explicitly address 'the teacher-as-person', including their religious identities. So doing can only result into more integrated, self-aware, and agentive English language teachers who are able to interpret, shape and reshape their practices in accordance with their and their students' beliefs and values. Thus, it is incumbent upon teacher education programs-as well teacher development programs-to deliberately and systematically open up opportunities for (preservice) teachers to critically examine and reflect on the complex and dynamic interactions among their religious faiths and their pedagogical practices.

Limitations
The small number of participants is the major limitation of this study. Despite the use of incentives (i.e. gift cards) to encourage the participation of potential teachers, the sensitive nature of discussing religion, which to many is a private matter that does not belong in the public sphere, may have contributed to the low recruitment rate of participants. This was clearly evidenced in the previously mentioned case of the participant who decided to withdraw after the interviews had completed. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that the findings of this study are neither claimed nor intended to be representative of all Muslim English language teachers in the KSA. Rather, the study provides a much-needed glimpse into a still largely neglected, yet important, research area. Future research therefore should continue exploring the religious identity of Muslim English language teachers within the Saudi context and even beyond.

Conclusion
The findings of this study have helped address the odd gap described in the literature review above. They also have demonstrated that researching the place of religion within the professional identity construction of English language teachers is timely not only because of the lack of inquiry on the subject in general -and on Muslim English language teachers in particular-, but also because of the significance of religion as an integral aspect of the participants' professional identities. As noted above, whereas the existing research has largely focused on the formation of English language teachers' identity in light of factors such as nativeness, race, ethnicity, class, or gender, the current study has also added teachers' personal religion as one of the main formative influences. Hopefully, this study will generate a greater interest in exploring this vital aspect of English language teacher identity in different educational and cultural contexts.