Mobile Actors in the Islamic Education of Post-Soviet Tatarstan (original) (raw)
2021, Mobile Actors in the Islamic Education of Post-Soviet Tatarstan In Cultures of Islam: Vernacular Traditions and Revisionist Interpretations Across Russia, Ed. by Marlene Laruelle, Jesko Shmoller. – Washington DC: George Washington University, 2021. – Pp. 21-37.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islamic education in the Russian Federation had to evolve practically from scratch. The first madrasas opened in 1989. During the 1990s, an increasing number of Islamic educational institutions of different levels were registered in the Russian regions, ranging from mosque schools-designed to educate children and the elderly on the basics of Islamto Islamic institutions of higher education. Even before the Islamic education system had time to mature, it became a battleground for various forces, chief among them federal and local officials. 25 Writing in 1996, Arjun Appadurai explored global dynamics: "State plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows, and the nation-state is threatened by revolt …, too little, and the state exits the international stage, as Burma, Albania, and North Korea in various ways have done." 26 In the early 1990s, Russia declared itself an open society and allowed foreign missionaries to establish new churches and spread new religious ideas among the population. Along with multiple Protestant denominations, numerous Islamic movements and groups were allowed to preach, especially in the country's Muslim regions. This open-door policy on the presence of foreign groups in Russia was revised with the First Chechen War (1994-1996), the radicalization of Islam in the North Caucasus, and then the Second Chechen War (1999-2009). As Appadurai aptly put it, "There is always a fear of cultural absorption