Abstract
Along with local cultural activists and educators, who in many ways reproduce essentialist Soviet discourses on ethnicity and patriotism, an increasingly important role is played by religious agents, who promote religious pedagogies and subjectivities. They are the subject of this chapter, where I explore, in particular, the Islamic religious school, madrasa, operating in the town, which is popular with many locals from the elderly to youths. Two agents who seek to give young people a social upbringing and to exercise a moral influence—secular and religious educators—are entangled in various ways. This chapter will demonstrate how visions of Islam as a source of moral values and moral upbringing infiltrate into secular school classrooms.
There is a saying by Gayaz Iskhaki: ‘first, morality will wane, then religion and then the nation. So, in order to save the nation, we need to save religion, and in order to save religion we need to save morality’
—From a conversation with a history teacher in the town’s school
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
DUM RT—Dukhovnoe upravlenie musulman Respubliki Tatarstan.
- 2.
For example, the scandal concerning the madrasa “Yoldyz” in Naberezhnye Chelny, which in 1999 was accused of spreading radical Islamic ideas (Khurmatullin, 2010).
- 3.
See Chap. 1.
- 4.
According to the principal of the madrasa, these groups are mostly for Tatar migrants from the former USSR, for Russian, Udmurt or Mari converts and for Tatars who received their education in Russian and are not fluent in Tatar.
- 5.
These include Arabic writing (garäp yazue in Tatar), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Islamic prayers (doga-hafiz), the basics of Islamic doctrine (gakiyda), morals (äkhlaq), rules for reading the Quran (täjvid), the biography of the Prophet Muhammad (sira), reading the Quran (tilävät), Quranic interpretation (täfsir) and some other subjects.
- 6.
In an amendment to the 2008 law on education of the Russian Federation, religious educational institutions received the right to issue state-accredited diplomas in professional religious education, on the condition that their curriculum complies with federal education standards. See: http://www.lexed.ru/comments/izm/?obr.html, last accessed 15 June 2019.
- 7.
These institutions are contrasted with the religious educational institutions in the southeast of the republic, such as those in Almet’yevsk and Naberezhnyye Chelny where non-traditional Islamic tendencies were (until recently) allegedly more widespread (Khurmatullin, 2010). Meanwhile, controversial madrasas in these areas have been shut down.
- 8.
As Luehrmann suggests, “recycling, then, offers a metaphor for what people do with ways of thinking and acting that no longer quite work, and with the remains of an infrastructure that is no longer maintained” (Luehrmann, 2005, p. 37).
- 9.
These are often called “moral-educational” (nravstvenno-vospitatel’nyi) and “sport-recreational” (sportivno-ozdorovitel’nyi) camps.
- 10.
Which is evident in the rising number of books of this type available in bookshops and mosques.
- 11.
Rizaetdin Fakhretdin (1859–1936), Tatar religious thinker and educator.
- 12.
One of the publicly known cases concerns one of the schools in Nizhnekamsk, where, in one of the classes, a majority of the female pupils were wearing headscarves. Local education officials, as well as the general prosecutor’s office, have found this practice to violate the “secular character of schools”: “V Tatarstane golovnoi ubor priznali narusheniyem sanitarnykh pravil” [In Tatarstan Wearing Headscarves Judged to Infringe Health Rules]. 2013. Islam News, 4 April. http://www.islamnews.ru/news-139078.html, last accessed on 27 March 2019.
- 13.
There is currently no federal regulation that would standardize school uniforms. The regions have a certain degree of autonomy with respect to this issue. For example, in Stavropolskiy kray, where the controversy about headscarves sparked off in 2013, the regional court, endorsed by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, decided that pupils in this region were forbidden from wearing headscarves at school. In case federal regulations are adopted, Tatarstan has announced to create its own provision that would regard headscarves as a permitted “accessory” to the school uniform (Petrova, 2013).
- 14.
Various regional courts in the Russian Federation have started to include religious literature, mostly Islamic, on lists of extremist literature (Kozlov, 2012). Most recently, one of the Russian translations of the Quran was included on such a list by the court in Novorossiysk. See http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/662637/, last accessed on 15 June 2019.
References
Almazova, L. (2012). Musul’manskoe obrazovanie v Tatarstane: Istoriya, sovremennoe sostoyanie i innovatsionnye protsessy. Kazan: Iman.
Avis, G. (1987). The making of the Soviet citizen: Character formation and civic training in Soviet education. London/New York: Routledge.
Bilz-Leonhardt, M. (2007). Islam as a secular discourse: The case of Tatarstan. Religion, State and Society, 35(3), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637490701458668
Bowen, J. R. (2006). Why the French don’t like headscarves: Islam, the state, and public space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1962). Soviet methods of character education: Some implications for research. American Psychologist, 17(8), 550–564.
DeYoung, A. J. (2007). The erosion of vospitaniye (social upbringing) in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan: Voices from the schools. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 40(2), 239–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2007.03.005
Di Puppo, L., & Schmoller, J. (2019). Here or elsewhere: Sufism and traditional Islam in Russia’s Volga-Ural region. Contemporary Islam, 1, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-00434-3
Durkheim, É. (1973). Moral education: A study in the theory and application of the sociology of education. New York: Free Press.
Eickelman, D. F. (1992). Mass higher education and the religious imagination in contemporary Arab societies. American Ethnologist, 19(4), 643–655. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1992.19.4.02a00010
Fazlyev, J. (2009). Jälil khäzrät däresläre. Kazan: Iman.
Garaev, D. (2017). Islamic teaching institutions in the Russian Federation: The case of Tatarstan. In Y. Sarikaya & F.-J. Bäumer (Eds.), Aufbruch zu neuen Ufern. Aufgaben, Problemlagen und Profile einer Islamischen Religionspädagogik im europäischen Kontext (pp. 197–206). Münster, Germany: Waxmann.
Glanzer, P. L. (2002). Quest for Russia’s soul, the: Evangelicals and moral education in post-Communist Russia. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Glanzer, P. L. (2005). Postsoviet moral education in Russia’s state schools: God, country and controversy. Religion, State and Society, 33(3), 207–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637490500224972
Halstead, M. (1994). Moral and spiritual education in Russia. Cambridge Journal of Education, 24(3), 423–438.
Kharisova, L. (2008). Pedagogicheskii potentsial Islama. Tatarskiy Mir, 12.
Khurmatullin, A. (2010). Tatarstan: Islam entwined with nationalism. In R. Dannreuther & L. March (Eds.), Russia and Islam: State, society and radicalism (pp. 103–121). London: Routledge.
Kozlov, V. (2012, July 20). Eto provokatsiya protiv musul’man [this is provocation against Muslims]. Gazeta.Ru. Retrieved from http://www.gazeta.ru/social/2012/06/20/4633769.shtml
Lisovskaya, E., & Karpov, V. (2010). Orthodoxy, Islam, and the desecularization of Russia’s state schools. Politics and Religion, 3(Special Issue 02), 276–302. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048310000040
Luehrmann, S. (2005). Recycling cultural construction: Desecularisation in Postsoviet Mari El. Religion, State and Society, 33(1), 35–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/0963749042000330857
Luehrmann, S. (2011). Secularism Soviet style: Teaching atheism and religion in a Volga Republic. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Müller, D. (2019). Appropriating and contesting “traditional Islam”. Central Asian students at the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan. Central Asian Survey, 38(3), 400–416.
Musina, R. N. (2001). Musul’manskaya identichnost’ kak forma ‘“religioznogo natsionalizma”’ tatar v kontekste etnosotsial’nykh protsessov i etnopoliticheskoi situatsii v Tatarstane. In M. Iordan, R. Kuzeyev, & Chervonnaya (Eds.), Islam v Yevrazii: sovremennyye etnicheskiye i esteticheskiye kontseptsii sunnitskogo Islama, ikh transformatsiya v massovom soznanii i vyrazheniye v iskusstve musul’manskikh narodov Rossii (pp. 291–303). Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya.
Petrova, P. (2013, July 16). Hijab otnesli k akssesuaram. Kommersant. Retrieved from http://kommersant.ru/doc/2234706
Schmoller, J. (2018). The unfolding of the tulip: From ethnic to religious identification among Volga Tatars. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 27(1), 109–114. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2018.270117
Starrett, G. (1998). Putting Islam to work education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stephan, M. (2010). Education, youth and Islam: The growing popularity of private religious lessons in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Central Asian Survey, 29(4), 469–483. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2010.538283
Suleymanova, D. (2015). Islam as moral education: Madrasa courses and contestation of the secular in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. Religion, State and Society, 43(2), 150–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2015.1056639
Usmanova, D., Minullin, I., & Mukhametshin, R. (2010). Islamic education in Soviet and post-Soviet Tatarstan. In M. Kemper, R. Motika, & S. Reichmuth (Eds.), Islamic education in the Soviet Union and its successor states (pp. 21–66). London/New York: Routledge.
Yusupova, G. (2016). The Islamic representation of Tatarstan as an answer to the equalization of the Russian regions. Nationalities Papers, 44(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2015.1061983
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Suleymanova, D. (2020). Pedagogy of Islam: Madrasa Education and Moral Upbringing. In: Pedagogies of Culture. Anthropological Studies of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27245-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27245-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27244-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27245-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)