If a human being carries the divine word inside them, enslaving that person is like putting scripture in chains. This belief in the dignity of every carrier of the word drove religious wars against the Atlantic slave trade.
By the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed modern classroom methods in leading centers of religious learning. In doing so they turned away from the tradition's own idea that knowledge is formed in the body.
Sacred knowledge need not live mainly on the page. These schools train the whole person, body, habits and conduct, so the learner becomes a living copy of the scripture, in the way the founding prophet was a living example of it.
One way of knowing treats knowledge as something absorbed into the body through practice and imitation. The other treats it as information held apart from the knower. The embodied way is old and classical, and the detached way only became dominant among modern believers.
A religion can spread across a region through teaching rather than conquest. Its schools then become visible marks of community identity and centers for resisting outside domination.