Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States

Michael Kemper, Raoul Motika, Michael Kemper, Raoul Motika, Stefan Reichmuth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134207305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación comparada

This book provides a comparative history of Islamic education in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries. Case studies on Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan and on two regions of the Russian Federation, Tatarstan and Daghestan, highlight the importance which Muslim communities in all parts of the Soviet Union attached to their formal and informal institutions of Islamic instruction. New light is shed on the continuity of pre-revolutionary educational traditions – including Jadidist ethics and teaching methods – throughout the New Economic Policy period (1921-1928), on Muslim efforts to maintain their religious schools under Stalinist repression, and on the complete institutional breakdown of the Islamic educational sector by the late 1930s. A second focus of the book is on the remarkable boom of Islamic education in the post-Soviet republics after 1991. Contrary to general assumptions on the overwhelming influence of foreign missionary activities on this revival, this study stresses the primary role of the Soviet Islamic institutions which were developed during and after the Second World War, and of the persisting regional and even international networks of Islamic teachers and muftis. Throughout the book, special attention is paid to the specific regional traditions of Islamic learning and to the teachers' affiliations with Islamic legal schools and Sufi brotherhoods. The book thus testifies to the astounding dynamics of Islamic education under rapidly changing and oftentimes extremely harsh political conditions.

1
Islamic education in Soviet and post-Soviet Tatarstan

Dilyara Usmanova, Ilnur Minnullin and Rafik Mukhametshin (Kazan)

Islam and religious education in the 1920–1930s

Islam and the Islamic religious elite in the first decade of Soviet rule

During the first decade of Soviet rule, the organizational structure of religion remained very much unchanged. The Islamic mahallas (communities, congregations) with their individual directorates (sg. mutawalliyat) were combined into regional muhtasibats. Communities and muhtasibats were administered by the Spiritual Directorate in Ufa (since 1923: Tsentral’noe dukhovnoe upravlenie musul’man, TsDUM).¹ The Directorate was headed by a mufti with several qadis as his assistants. Subordinate structures of the TsDUM were the Council of ‘ulama’ (Sovet ulemov) and the Muhtasibat Directorate. The Spiritual Directorate united approximately 13,000 mahallas in the whole of the Union. During the 1930s, in Tatarstan alone, the TsDUM was in charge of 26 muhtasibats which included more than 2,000 mahallas and more than 4,000 representatives of the Islamic clergy. In the Russian context, the term “Islamic clergy” (Russ. dukhovenstvo) usually refers to mullas/imams (leaders of the congregation in prayer), imam-khatibs (those leading the Friday sermon), mu'adhdhins (muezzins, those who call for prayer), but also to Islamic scholars (‘ulama’, sg. ‘alim) and experts of Islamic law (faqih, qadi). It were the imams and ‘ulama’ who used to provide Islamic education in their communities; their schools were called maktabs (primarily referring to Qur’an courses in the mosques) and madrasas (seminaries for higher students, who were called shakirds). Before the revolution, it was not possible to draw a clear line between scholars and representatives of Sufi Islam, for many imams of the cities and towns (and even some muftis) were traditionally linked to Sufi brotherhoods, especially to the Naqshbandiyya mujaddidiyya and, since the late nineteenth century, to the Naqshbandiyya khalidiyya.² In addition, there were various Sufi centres in the villages of the Volga-Ural region, the spiritual heads of which were called ishans. In their rural lodges (khanaqas), the Sufis provided not only mystical but also ethical education to their followers.

In 1917, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Russian Empire probably approved of the end of Monarchy and agreed with the newly established “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Political changes raised their hopes that this might lead to a change in the traditional religious policy and bring an end to the official discrimination against Muslims. The Soviet government wanted to ensure that Islamic organizations were loyal to the revolutionary restructuring. Particularly in the regions with large Muslim populations, a special approach towards Islam had to be formulated. The Appeal to all Working Class Muslims in Russia and the East (December 1917) reflected the Bolsheviks’ strategy to draw the Muslims into their camp. In this appeal, the Communists declared that the Soviet state would guarantee the freedom of Islamic faith as well as the existence of its ethnic and cultural institutions. Subsequently, the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) Council of the People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh komissarov, SNK) passed a number of symbolic laws which determined that the famous Qur’an of Osman (kept in Petrograd/St. Petersburg), the Karavan-Saray of Orenburg, and the Suiumbika Tower in Kazan were to be returned to the Tatar Muslim community.

The Bolsheviks’ pointed loyalty towards Islam, however, contradicted their atheistic attitude. Religion had to be removed from public life as well as from the Soviet citizen’s world view. The implementation of communist religious policy made it necessary to elaborate appropriate legal frameworks. In December 1917, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vserossiiskii tsentral’nyi ispol’nitel’nyi komitet, VTsIK) and the RSFSR SNK passed the decrees On divorce and On civil marriage. As far as marriage and family matters were concerned, religion lost its traditional role, and church weddings as well as weddings conducted by an imam became a private affair without legal force.

On 23 January 1918, the RSFSR SNK adopted the decree On the separation of church and state and of school and church. Religious organizations were banned from participation in state affairs, and religious oaths, rituals and ceremonies were excluded from state institutions. This alone may not have affected the rights of Muslims very much. Other measures, however, expelled religion from public life. The communists now launched an attack on all those social spheres within the Islamic umma which had been granted autonomous rights before the revolution. Soviet executive bodies were put in charge of the civil registry offices, properties of religious organizations were nationalized,³ and the organizations themselves were deprived of their legal status. As a result, the role of religion in public life became weaker and the clergy’s influence diminished. The legal separation of school and church was a terrible blow to the Islamic communities. Yet, when the Soviets attempted to implement this decree it became clear how complicated the relationships between state and religion had been.⁴

During the civil war (1918–1921) several representatives of both the Russian Orthodox clergy and the Islamic religious elite took part in the struggle against Communist rule. Other religious functionaries demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. Whereas the Soviets had liquidated almost all national (for instance, cultural and financial) structures already in spring 1918, they maintained the official religious administration (at that time the Spiritual Directorate for Turkic-Tatar Muslims in Central Russia and Siberia, Dukhovnoe upravlenie musul’man tiurko-tatar vnutrennoi Rossii i Sibirii) on the condition that the Islamic clerics would not interfere with state affairs and guarantee their absolute loyalty to the Soviet regime.

In situations when it became necessary to ensure the support of the religious institutions, the authorities decided to leave them more room for activities. When the Ural and Central Volga region, for example, were struck by the enormous famine of 1921–1922, the Spiritual Islamic Directorate was allowed to set up a special commission, which organized support for the starving population.

The government’s initially flexible relationship towards the religious elites made the implementation of wide parts of the aforementioned laws possible. The relationship towards Islam was appropriately moderate. In contrast to state actions against the Christian clergy, e.g. the closing of monasteries and the confiscation of enormous church properties, Soviet authorities hardly touched the Muslim possessions. There are no documents mentioning an “Islamic question” until 1922, neither in the files of the Tatar oblast’ Committee of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Rossiiskaia kommunisticheskaia partiia bol’shevikov, RKP[B]) nor in records of the local department of the Political State Administration (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, GPU).

However, the relationship between Islam and Communism was heatedly debated in party circles. The Volga Tatar Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (1892–1939), deputy and the president of the Muslim Committee (Muskom) at the People’s Commissariat for National Affairs (Narkomnats) held the view that the decree should not generally be applied to the Muslim populations. He was convinced that Communist and Islamic ideologies have much in common, and that the Islamic views of the socio-economic and political systems were not in contradiction to Marxist conceptions. Sultan-Galiev wrote that “more than in any other religion does this religion [i.e. Islam] contain civil and political elements, while in other religions it is the spiritual and ethical that prevails.”⁵ He pointed out that the Islamic ideology was characterized by positive elements such as the necessity of obtaining education, the obligation to work, the possibility of civil marriages and restrictions on the private ownership of land, water, and forests – elements that have their analogies in Communism.

Without arguing against antireligious propaganda in principle, Sultan-Galiev opted for its moderate implementation, and held that for each group of Muslim people different methods should be applied. In August 1918 the Central Muslim Commissariat which he headed suggested that the decree on the separation of state and church not be applied to the Muslim population; however the leading committee (Kollegiia) of the Narkomnats disapproved of this idea.⁶

In a meeting of the Narkomnats leading committee in January 1923 Sultan-Galiev pointed out that the Soviet policy with regard to religious education was carried out differently in the various regions; while in some places the teaching of Islam was prohibited even in private homes, in other regions it was allowed even in Soviet schools. As he said, “there are places where there are no secular state-run schools for the lack of funding, and where the community promises to cover the budget of such schools if the teaching of religion was allowed.”⁷ He suggested taking into account the specific conditions of the regions and proposed that religious education should be allowed where it was inevitable. However, his efforts to criticize the national and religious policy of the centre led to his dismissal from all duties and his first arrest in 1923.⁸

In general, the years 1922–1925 signalled a period of serious transitions; tactical policies were given up and replaced by a policy of pressure on Islam in the Central Russian regions. After the end of the civil war, the Soviet government had stabilized and was in a position to turn to domestic problems. In particular, this meant driving all religious organizations out of public life. Any activities of Islamic and Orthodox clerics convinced the government that the time had come to finally put the religious elites under total state control.

In autumn 1922, almost every account on religious affairs rendered by the Tatar Department of the GPU was focusing on activities of the mullas and ‘ulama’. The Islamic clergy was reported to be involved in so-called “conspiracies”. The Tatar oblast’ Committee recorded that there was a high demand for religious (Islamic) education at schools, and observed that people began to establish religious schools. To counteract these activities, the party mobilized its instructors and Communist youth activists to intervene and to do away with any form of religious instruction at schools. On 10 October 1922, the oblast’ Committee stipulated that it was illegal to use secular schools for religious educational purposes.

Confrontations followed in quick succession. Whatever activities the Islamic clerics or the bourgeois Islamic representatives undertook, they provoked the immediate reaction of party functionaries and state officials. Some researchers hold the opinion that Moscow’s drive to put all Islamic organizations under total state control was instigated by armed anti-Soviet rebellions of Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus as well by the government’s tra...