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ELENA DMITRIEVA. THE SYSTEM OF ISLAMIC EDUCATION IN RUSSIA (20TH - EARLY 21ST CENTURIES) // The article was written for publication in the bulletin "Russia and the Moslem World."
Keywords: Islamic education, theology, madrasah, maqtab, traditionalism, jadidism, religious school, "Mir-i Arab," Spiritual Board of Muslims.
Elena Dmitrieva,
Senior Research Associate, INION RAS
Abstract. The article examines the history of Muslim education in Russia from the beginning of the 20th century to the first two decades of the 21st century. Three periods of the existence of Islamic education in Russia is analyzed: the prerevolutionary period of the beginning of the last century, Soviet period, and the modern period of the development of Islamic education.
Preparation of the Muslim clergy has taken place in Russia in madrasahs and elementary schools organized at mosques. Such was the traditional form of Russian Islamic education and its foundation. Muslim priests were trained at these schools during the prerevolutionary period in Russia (from the beginning of the 20th century). They worked in all districts of the compact living of the Muslims population in Russia, and this enabled any Muslim believer to receive a more or less decent religious education. Young men who graduated from madrasah could become educated Muslim theologians with a good knowledge of the literary Arab language, if they were persevering enough and went on to study. Such system of Islamic education existed on the territory of the Russian Empire right up to the revolution of 1917 and the changes following it in all spheres of life of Russian society.
At the beginning of the 20th century Islamic education in Russia was represented by two schools: traditional and jadidist. The former gave knowledge based on classical principles of Islamic theological education. Graduates from these schools received profound religious knowledge in the field of Islam and
Muslim theology and their activity was concentrated around solving internal confessional problems. The problems of the adaptation of the system of religious education to the changed Russian world realities at traditional educational establishments were ignored and this was why their graduates were not in demand outside the boundaries of their Muslim community. In an attempt to preserve the traditional foundations of the Islamic ummah representatives of traditionalism came out against even insignificant novelties. Traditionalism was a reaction to changes which emerged in the socio-economic and spiritual-ideological life of Russian society in the 19th century, when a turn appeared to modern development.
Adherents of the jadidist school ("usul-al-jadid" - "new method" in Arabic) called for modernization of the educational system and inclusion of secular subjects in the study process, which were necessary to the Muslim community for bringing the traditional systems of world outlook in line with the rapidly changing requirements of time.
The madrasah curricula have now included such subjects as foreign languages, physics, chemistry, mathematics, psychology, hygiene, agronomy, economics, book-keeping, and commerce. Reformers often came across resistance of the conservatively-minded imams. Well-known theologians, as a rule, were graduates of traditional Islamic educational institutions, whereas the Muslim intelligentsia were represented by graduates from jadidist educational institutions. The main jadidist madrasahs, as a rule, functioned in towns, in contrast to traditional ones, which were mostly in rural areas.
Soviet power put an end to this situation. By the beginning of the 1930s a greater part of mosques and Muslim religious educational centers were closed, and thus the system of Islamic religious education was destroyed. The collapse of the system of Islamic education took place after the complete transfer of the written language of the Muslim peoples of the USSR from the Arab script first to Latin and then to Cyrillic.
Nevertheless, Islamic education as such did not disappear. The drive to religious knowledge still existed, but teaching was carried on unofficially (in private homes or in far-off and hard-of-access places).
During the years of World War II the religious policy of the Soviet Union was noticeably changed: the attitude of the state toward religion was softened. This was largely due to the high patriotic spirit of believers of the country, who took an active part in the fight against Nazism. A new stage in relations between the state and religion set in. In 1945 the higher Islamic educational institution opened in Bokhara, the one and only Madrasah "Mir-i Arab" at the time. The study process there was strictly regimented and controlled by state bodies in charge of religious affairs. Students had to wear secular clothes and lead secular way of life. The curricula of the madrasah consisted of eleven subjects (six religious subjects, three languages, and two secular subjects). Students had an opportunity to pass a probation period at Islamic universities abroad (Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Sudan and Jordan).1
The work of the "Mir-i Arab" Madrasah was supervised by the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, which was considered the informal leader among the spiritual boards of Muslims on the territory of the USSR from 1957 until 1961 the Barak-khan Madrasah worked in Tashkent,2 and the first Islamic institute - Tashkent Islamic Institute named after Imam Al-Buhari was opened in 1971 where future theologians and madrasah teachers could improve and enrich their knowledge. People from all Soviet republics studied there.
Thus, the Islamic educational centers of Uzbekistan contributed to the continuation of the traditions of spiritual education of Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union and tackled the task of training priests for Muslim communities in other Soviet republics.
Muslim educational establishments on the territory of the USSR began to revive only from the late 1980s, when radical changes in the life of Soviet society set in. In 1988 the Moscow
Cathedral mosque opened a madrasah on the basis of the courses to study the Koran, the ABCs of Islam, history of Islam, the Arab and Tatar languages, which later became one of the first Muslim educational institutions in post-Soviet Russia. After the disintegration of the USSR the Muslim community of Russia had an opportunity to restore and develop a system of Islamic education to a full extent.
At the first stage of re-Islamization in the 1990s the questions of the revival and organization of religious education were dealt with by representatives of the traditional Muslim clergy. Many heads of local Muslim communities gave lessons of Arabic and the foundations of Islam, which took place at mosques, at Sunday schools and elsewhere. The initial teaching level was constantly upgraded. At that time the formation of a professional Muslim education began. New Muslim educational institutions of a secondary and higher grade emerge, and also old educational centers began to be revived in almost 11 regions of Russia, where the Muslim people traditionally lived (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Volga Area, North Caucasus, etc.) and where there was no single coordinating center of Islamic education.
Educational institutions appeared chaotically during that period, the teaching process was not elaborated well enough and there were no agreed-on curricula and proper public control. At the initial stage in professional Muslim study centers textbooks printed and used in different countries and on the basis of various religious trends were used, which were not traditional for Russian Muslims. As a result, some of these educational institutions have become bases for Muslim extremists. Foreign missionaries exerted a considerable influence on the formation of the basic concepts of Muslim education in Russia during that period. The democratization of public life has contributed to the restoration of ties with foreign coreligionists. The official heads of the Spiritual Boards of Muslims largely helped the development of missionary activity of foreign preachers, and muftis in Russia themselves allowed foreign religious figures to take part in the education of
Russian Muslims, seeing nothing prejudiced in this. It could also be explained by the absence of our own teaching personnel and educational religious programs, and this was why invitation of foreign teachers was regarded a forced measure, Apart from that, many young Muslims have gone abroad to receive religious education at universities there.
In these conditions it became necessary for the state to take part in organizing a system of religious education of Muslims, on which representatives of the Muslim clergy themselves insisted for a long time. In March 2005 the Council of Muftis of Russia adopted a decision to set up the Council of Islamic Education, which later endorsed a uniform standard for all levels of religious Islamic education. In 2007 the Government of the Russian Federation adopted a program of training specialists with a profound knowledge of the history and culture of Islam for work at Islamic religious associations (priests, teachers, mosque attendants, and officials of spiritual boards and publishing houses). This measure was aimed at countering the spreading of radical Islamic ideas. Several higher educational institutions began to train such specialists (Pyatigorsk Linguistic University, Moscow State Linguistic University, Nizhni-Novgorod State University), as well as Islamic religious higher educational establishments (Russian Islamic Institute in Ufa, Moscow Islamic University, North Caucasian Islamic University). At present there are over eighty Muslim religious educational institutions working in the system of Islamic secondary and higher education. Attempts are being made to evolve basic documents to help studying serious theological problems and uniting Muslims living in Russia. This will help the Spiritual Boards of Muslims of Russia to work out a uniform position on the major problems of Islamic theology and determine the place and role of Islam in the modern sociopolitical life of Russia.
Notes
i
Z. Khalilova... (take the headline from bulletin 2016. No 10, P. 49) 2 V. Ahmadullin. Tipichniye oshibki issledovatelei, izuchayushchikh islamskoye obrazovaniye v SSSR [Typical Errors of Researchers Studying Islamic Education in the USSR] // Post scriptum: Translations, reviews, opinions. No 3 (13). 2013, P. 235-238.
Literature
R. Pateyev. Politichskiye aspekty nusulmanskogo obrazovaniya v Rossii: istoiya i sovvremennost [Political Aspects of Muslim Education in Russia: History and Our Time] // Rostov-on-Don. SKNTs VSh Publishers. 2006. 72 p.
Sh. Kashaf. Modernizatsiya islamskogo obrazovaniya kak faktor religioznoi i natsionalnoi bezopasnosti Rossii [Modernization of Islamic Education as a Factor of Religious and National Security of Russia] // Islam v sovremennom mire. Moscow. 2015. Vol. 11. No 4, P. 47-61.
