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“I…feel that a priority in the activities of Islamic organizations themselves should be placed on the positive image of traditional Islam as an important spiritual component in the common identity of the peoples of the Russian Federation…this significantly impacts the nurturing of our youth. This is extremely important for young Muslims, who have, unfortunately, become the target audience of those who wish us harm.” (Vladimir Putin)
One of the most important function of any church or religion
is the education of its clergy. An
educated clergy preserves not only the traditions, beliefs, and ordinances of a
religion; it also protects it against radicalism.
Islam’s history in Russia has ancient roots. The first Islamic missionaries arrived in the
seventh century and three hundred years later, around the Tenth Century, the Volga
Bulgaria became an Islamic state. Then,
in the Thirteenth Century, the Mongol Golden Horde conquered Kievian Rus’. This occurred at about the same time that the
Mongols began converting to Islam and Berke became the first Islamic Khan. From this time onward, the Islamic presence
on modern-day Russian territory expanded under Mongol rule.
In the Sixteenth Century, the Russian Empire began the
conquest of Muslim lands in the Northern Caucasus, along the Volga River, and
eastward. Russian Islam dates from this
period. Widespread state repression
characterized the first years of Russian rule over Muslims. However, in order
to strengthen her hand against the Ottomans, Catherine the Great revoked
restrictions on building stone mosques and other public Islamic buildings in
1767 and issued the decree entitled On the Tolerance of All Religious
Confessions in 1773. This gave Muslims
freedom of worship, officially making Russia a multi-confessional state.
At the time of the 1918 Revolution, thousands of madrassas and other Islamic centers of learning dotted the Russian Empire. In the city of Orenburg alone, there were two specialized secondary theological madrassas, 122 regular madrassas, and 222 maktabs (Islamic elementary schools).[2] The city encompassed a vibrant Islamic community, supported by a cadre of educated imams and other religious personnel.
Religious higher education of all confessions suffered under the antireligious policies of the Soviet Government. Islam was no exception. While some Christian educational institutions continued to operate, all Muslim institutions on the territory of present-day Russia were liquidated. Only in 1945 did the USSR Council of Muftis succeed in re-opening the Mir-Arab Madrassa in Bukhar, Uzbekistan. This institute built in the 16th Century, together with the Al-Bukhari Islamic Institute re-opened in 1971 in Tashkent, were the only institutions of higher Islamic education in the USSR. This is why the majority of today’s leading muftis are graduates of Mir-Arab.
Therefore, until 1988, when the Ismailiya Medrassa was opened as part of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, there was nowhere on the territory of Russia for students of Islam to study. This meant that many imams did not have a formal education. The lack of institutions of learning meant that during Glasnost, when it became possible open madrassas and institutes, there was a deficit of qualified teachers to staff them.
With Glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union, not only Christian, but also foreign Muslim missionaries and preachers arrived in significant numbers. Although many of them played a key role in restoring Islam and establishing a new system of theological education in Russia and the former Soviet states, some also advocated a more radical version of Islam historically foreign to Russia.
To add fuel to the fire, the conflicts in the Northern Caucasus attracted militarized representatives of radical Islamic movements. Militants like the Jordanian Khattab were not only field commanders, but also proponents of radical Islam. Moreover, several of the fighters from the Russian Federation underwent training in Afghanistan and other places, where they learned not only partisan tactics but also the radical teachings of the Islamists there. These Russian Islamist militants have fought in the wars in the Northern Caucasus and other hotspots in the world including Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq supporting Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS. As part of or influenced by these domestic and multinational organizations, they and/or their proselytes have organized terrorist acts in Russia and around the world.
The rich Arabic states and wealthy private Muslims who sponsored former Soviet students to study abroad were another factor. While this helped rebuild a qualified Islamic clergy in Russia and the other republics, these students often came under the influence of people with radical views or studied at institutions, which taught a more radical interpretation of Islam than was practiced in their homeland. As they returned, they began to teach these ideas to their fellow Muslims. Furthermore, the lack of official recognition of their degrees from these foreign theological programs complicated their ability to integrate into the establishment. This problem has still not been resolved.[3] This left these educated Muslims outside the official system where their education could have been used and adapted to the needs of Russia’s Islamic community.
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| Vladimir Putin with the Council of Muftis in Ufa (Kremlin.ru) |
Since many Soviet imams could not obtain a formal theological education, they did not have the ability and knowledge to counter these radicals. Therefore these philosophies spread among the lay members. The influence of these people, the spread of imported interpretations of Islam, and the inability of the imams to counter these ideas worried (and continues to worry) the leaders of the traditional Islamic confessions and state authorities. Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a meeting with leading Russian Muftis in Ufa, said:
“Some political forces use Islam, or more specifically its radical movements; which by the way, are not historically representative of Russian Muslims, for the purpose of weakening our state; to establish a zone of conflicts on Russian territory but controlled from outside to cause schisms between the various ethnic groups and within the Muslim community itself and to fan regional separatist tendencies.”[4]
As stated above, there is concern that domestic imams are not adequately prepared to stand up to these radical movements. Maksim Shevchenko, Journalist and Director of the Center of Strategic Religious and Political Studies of the Modern World explained:
“There is reason to believe that a large portion of imams are entirely not prepared to polemicize with extremists or with people who have fallen under the influence of extremist ideologies. If we make people imams, then we need to select people who can preach, who can engage in intellectual discourse, who are scholars.”[5]
One no less problematic issue is that in the modern world, when Muslims, especially the young, meet with various interpretations of Islam on the Internet, in their travels abroad, or at home; they turn to their spiritual leaders for explanation. If the imam cannot compete with these sources, his disciples will fall under the influence of the more eloquent people or movements. As Mukaddas Bibarsov, Mufti of the Saratov Region explained in April 2014:
“We live in an age of information technologies, when topics, which formerly were discussed in narrow circles among academics, have become accessible to all. However, not everywhere, including in the Caucasus have we been able to use [these technologies] appropriately. Discussions, quarrels, and dissentions have sprung up leading to the tragic events we see in the region.”[6]
In order to understand the impact of these new ideas and of the imams’ inability to compete with them, one must also understand the imam’s role in Muslim society. Since Islam is hierarchically decentralized, the imams play a central role in the lives of the congregational members. Some of their main responsibilities include:
- Leading prayers;
- Performing religious ordinances;
- Mediating family relations;
- Dividing up inheritance;
- Clarifying the fundamentals of Islam and the dictates of Islamic law;
- Counseling the members of the congregation with important life questions.[7]
In order to fulfill these tasks, especially the latter, the imam must have more than an understanding of the Koran and religious doctrine. He must have a broad general education. During the International Scholarly Applications Conference on the Formation of a Theological Space in Modern Russia held May 31 through June 1, 2012, the Rector of the Moscow Islamic University Damir Khajhetdinov said:
“Today Russian Muslims need not only madrassas but also elite universities, which cultivate better qualified academic cadres and give them a ticket to a successful career…for our overriding goal to create a highly professional Russian Muslim elite possessing both a religious and secular education!”[8]
Furthermore, President Vladimir Putin said:
“One of our most important tasks is the creation of our own Islamic theological school providing sovereignty in the Russian spiritual space and most importantly, being recognized by most of the world’s Islamic scholars. This school must give answers to the most pressing issues in Russia and the world in general, giving opinions that will be understood and authoritative for the believers.”[9]
The State and the Russian Council of Muftis have invested resources and effort in establishing and improving the Russian Islamic educational system. A large number of madrassas and more than eight Islamic universities are operating in Russia today.[10]
These institutions teach and graduate a large number of students educated in religious and secular professions. However, as President Putin and Damir Khajretdinov insist, the level of instruction still does not meet international standards and therefore is not yet competitive with foreign institutions. In fact, Damir Khajretdinov suggests that despite financial investments, the quality of theological education has declined since the 1990s. He explains:
“The number of graduates from the institutes during that period [1990s] who became imams was over 50%. However, this indicator has fallen with each passing year. We no longer see students with fire in their eyes, ready to move to distant regions to begin their ministry from nothing: to enlighten, to establish relationships, establish congregations, build mosques, to give sermons.”[11]
In establishing a quality and internationally competitive system of higher Islamic education, Russia comes up against several problems. As long as these problems remain unresolved, Russia will be reliant on other countries to fulfill its obligations to support its own Islamic population religiously.
First, the education system must answer the needs of life in modern Russian society and at the same time preserve its Islamic spirituality and identity.[12] The complicating factor in this is balance. The imams and educated Muslims must combine a deep spiritual foundation with a broad secular education. This requires close cooperation between the government and religious leaders. Russia has still not found this balance and some, including Damir Khajretdinov; feel that because of Islam’s movement toward decentralization in Russia, the situation has worsened. He explains that this is the result of the diminished role of the Islamic religious leadership in the faith’s universities and their falling under the influence of “third-party external organizations often beholden to local requirements.”[13] The problem is that the Islamic education system remains decentralized and unstandardized.
The second problem touches on the fruits of an effective education system – research and literature. One of the main functions of a healthy educational system is the dissemination of knowledge beyond the walls of the institution through academic publications. In a developed theological-academic community, the scholars study not only the history, traditions, scriptures, and the teachings of their religious fathers but also study the problems and questions that are relevant to their fellow citizens. They publish their research in journals, books, textbooks, and the Internet in articles and video clips. Unfortunately, in Russian Islam the spiritual-academic community is still in the developmental stages, therefore, Russia still imports the majority of its Islamic literature from abroad. Indigenous Russian literature is rare. Consequently, Russians, and Russian Muslims in particular, searching for literature with Islamic answers to questions on life or simply desiring information on Islam frequently cannot find materials that meet their needs and the realities of their life.
In March 2012, during a meeting of the rectors of the Islamic universities in Moscow, the Chairman of the Russian Council of Muftis Sheik Ravil Gajnutdin described the third and main issue. He “expressed his concern that after years of labor, a unified concept for Islamic education in Russia has still not been created.”[14]
Although the Committee on Islamic Education has been established and is functioning, this body has yet to establish a standardized system of Islamic education. Furthermore, it has not been able to establish effective cooperation between its member institutions.
One of the main ingredients of an effective higher education system is an open and interconnected academic and administrative space, which nurtures the effective use of resources and the exchange of ideas and knowledge. Whereas no one institution has all the resources it needs, cooperation can, and in the author’s opinion, should include institutions of other confessions in areas of common interest to all. This will not only conserve resources of individual universities, but can also increase understanding and tolerance between the future spiritual leaders of the various sects.
Throughout history, religion has played a role in instigating and resolving conflicts. Since they are especially susceptible to radical ideas, the poorly educated often become pawns in these struggles. Their first line of defense is a competent spiritual leader. A well-informed priest, educated not only in church doctrines and ceremonies but also in secular intellectual disciplines, is the best defense against radical religious ideas. Mufti Mukaddas Bibarsov clearly described this concept. He said, “I would like to urge my readers to obtain knowledge because without knowledge, there is no way forward. Life shows that it is not quantity, but quality that counts. Muslims must be educated in all spheres, becoming an example for those around them.”[15] Education is the most important investment a country can make is in its rising generation. In order to become a prosperous country, Russia must resolve these issues, which impact the rising generation of its most vulnerable ethnic communities. As recent events in Russia and around the world involving Islamists from Russia show, her future and indeed the future of our world depend on it.
Bejlin, Boris. VestiFM.
27 September 2013. Accessed 10 August
2014. <http://radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/107732>. Translation
by author
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