When the community is not on your side

Sometimes the imam is excellent. Sometimes he calls both of you in together, and that is the wrong thing, and you should know why in advance.

Bringing you into a room with him to talk it through is mediation, and mediation assumes two people who both want a fair outcome. Where one person is running a control project, everything you say honestly in that room is repaid afterwards, at home, where nobody is watching. That is not a criticism of anybody's intentions. It is a description of what the room actually does.

You are allowed to decline a joint meeting. You are allowed to ask to be seen alone, and to bring somebody with you. And you are allowed to go and find a different scholar, or a different masjid, or a service outside the community altogether. Looking for a second opinion is not disloyalty. In medicine nobody would call it that.