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Abstract
In this paper, based on fieldwork in a small town in post-Soviet Tatarstan, Russia, I explore the dynamics of religious life in a rural community, highlighting the ways religious and secular education interact with and reinforce each other, contributing to the processes of religious revival in this community. Soviet ideas and practices of moral education as well as post-Soviet concerns about morality constitute the common ground that brings secular and religious together. Adhering to the Soviet idea that society is responsible for the moral education of its young people, local schoolteachers use Islam as a source of moral values and disciplining practices to bring up the younger generation, affected by post-Soviet transformations. Teachers increasingly rely on Islamic ethics in the moral upbringing of schoolchildren that effectively challenges the separation between secular and religious education. Religion acquires growing significance as a process of moral edification and discipline.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Mathijs Pelkmans and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Notes
1. Works addressing desecularisation ‘from below’, especially from anthropological perspectives, include Luehrmann (Citation2005, Citation2011) and Kormina (Citation2010).
2. I use the term ‘educator’ to refer to the teachers and other educational personnel in secular state educational institutions as well as in the religious institutions.
3. At the madrasa, I interviewed the director and half the female teaching staff. In the state schools (the Russian-language and Tatar-language schools), my sample of teachers was around 12 in each school, teaching various subjects. I conducted in-depth interviews with madrasa and school teachers either at their workplace or at their homes; I recorded the interviews and coded them during the stage of analysis. I observed classes three times a week at the madrasa and every day at school. I did not experience any particular difficulties during data collection, except for the initial stage when I had to negotiate my entry into the school and madrasa to do the research. My parallel affiliation with an academic institution in Kazan’ facilitated the process of gaining access to the field.
4. The primary school syllabus published by the Ministry of Education of Italy in 1955 emphasises that ‘religious instruction must enable the child to acquire basic habits of morality, civic and social behaviour and hygiene at home, at school and in society; and give the child a sense of personal responsibility and membership of a group’. For historical and present use of religion in the American educational system, see Spring (Citation1990) and Apple (Citation2006). For the use of religion as an instrument of moral and social development in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, see, for example, Vincent (Citation1989).
5. Many aspects of communism, as Berdyayev has claimed, are deeply based on Christian values (Berdiaev Citation1960).
6. The origins of the concept of vospitaniye are to be found in the writings of the nineteenth-century Russian pedagogue Konstantin Ushinsky. Equivalents are ‘character education’ in the USA and Erziehung in Germany (Bronfenbrenner Citation1962).
7. For this purpose the so-called class tutor (klassny rukovoditel’) (in the USA the equivalent would be the ‘homeroom teacher’) was expected to be the foremost person of trust whom children should address with any personal or school-related problems.
8. For a detailed overview and history of this cooperation, see Lisovskaya and Karpov (Citation2010) and Papkova (Citation2009).
9. This information is taken from the official website of the course: http://www.prosv.ru/umk/ork/info.aspx?ob_no=20402.
10. The course can be taken in six forms: basics of Orthodox culture, basics of Muslim culture, basics of Buddhist culture, basics of Jewish culture, basics of world religious cultures and basics of secular ethics. Formally, it is ‘up to the participants in the education process’ (schools and parents) to decide which of the subject forms to choose. In many cases, however, decisions have been taken by the local education officials. In Tatarstan, according to the Ministry of Education, most parents have chosen the courses on basics of world religious cultures (61.3%) and basics of secular ethics (38.7%) (V Tatarstane vybrali… Citation2012).
11. See, for example, the discussion of ‘Western’ values and human rights by Metropolitan Kirill in 2006 at the World Council of Russian People (Mite Citation2006).
12. According to the 2010 Russian census, around 53% of the population of the republic are Tatars, 39% are Russians and remaining 8% are other ethnic groups: Udmurts, Chuvash, Mari, Ukrainians and others.
13. For similar phenomena in Central Asia and Egypt, see Stephan (Citation2010) and Starrett (Citation1998), respectively.
14. These are often called morally-educative (nravstvenno-vospitatel’ny) and sport-recreational (sportivno-ozdorovitel’ny) camps.
15. According to the mainstream version in Tatarstan, the Kryashen are the descendants of Tatars Christianised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some Kryashen, however, claim a different story: that they were Christian Tatar-speaking people long before the conquest of the Kazan’ Khanate.
16. In line with this policy of ‘multiculturalism’, the local administration has build a new Orthodox cathedral for the Christian part of the population.
17. This is the official organisation which oversees religious life in the republic and mediates between religious organisations and the state. All Islamic educational institutions in Tatarstan are structural subunits of the Spiritual Directorate, which works out compulsory educational standards for madrasas (Usmanova, Minullin, and Mukhametshin Citation2010; Matsuzato Citation2007).
18. These are mostly for Tatar migrants from the former USSR, for Russian, Udmurt or Mari converts (mostly women), and for Tatars who received their school education in Russian and are not fluent in Tatar.
19. These include Arabic writing (garäp yazue in Tatar), Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh), Muslim prayers (doga-hafiz), basics of Islamic doctrine (gakiyda), morals (äkhlaq), rules for Quran reading (täjvid), the life history of the Prophet Muhammad (sira), reading the Quran (tilävät), Quranic interpretation (täfsir) and some other subjects.
20. In an amendment to the 2008 law on education of the Russian Federation, religious educational institutions received the right to issue state-accredited diplomas of professional religious education if their curriculum complies with federal education standards (http://www.lexed.ru/comments/izm/?obr.html).
21. Discussions about ‘traditional’ Tatar Islam and what constitutes it are high on the agenda of academic and public debates in Tatarstan. This is not, however, the main topic of this paper: for further discussion, see Mukhametshin (Citation2006) and Khurmatullin (Citation2010).
22. Some people from local villages in the district told me that in one village mosque the imam had censured as non-Islamic the widespread Tatar tradition of commemorating the dead on the third, seventh and 40th day after death and had discouraged people from the practice.
23. These institutions are contrasted with the religious educational institutions in the south-east of the republic such as those in Almet’yevsk or Naberezhnye Chelny where nontraditional Islamic tendencies were (until recently) more evident (Khurmatullin Citation2010). Controversial madrasas there have since been shut down.
24. Not every school in the town, however, has allowed madrasa teachers to organise meetings with pupils.
25. As well as special ‘cadet schools’ (which were often reorganised from normal schools) there are ‘cadet classes’ in normal schools. The directives to reorganise normal schools into cadet schools or to open cadet classes usually come from the local education departments which in turn receive these directives from the Ministry of Education.
26. After a similar case, the regional court in Stavropol’ krai ruled that pupils in the krai were forbidden to wear headscarves at schools; the ruling was endorsed by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
27. There is currently a federal regulation on the way that would set state standards for school uniform, which should have a ‘secular’ character and should be in line with health and safety standards. Headscarves arguably meet neither requirement. Tatarstan, however, is planning to adopt its own provision that would regard headscarves as an allowed ‘accessory’ to the school uniform (Petrova and Smirnov 2013).
28. Various regional courts in the Russian Federation have started to include religious literature, mostly Islamic, on lists of extremist literature (Kozlov Citation2012). Most recently, one of the Russian translations of the Quran was included on such a list by the court in Novorossiisk (http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/662637/).
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Dilyara Suleymanova
Dilyara Suleymanova is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich. She has an MA in history from Kazan’ State University and MA in nationalism studies from the Central European University. She received her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Zurich with the thesis Schooling the Sense of Belonging: Identity Politics and Educational Change in Post-Soviet Tatarstan. Her research interests include educational politics, anthropology of education, post-Soviet Islam, identity politics and ethnicity in post-Soviet Russia (especially Tatarstan). She has published on Islamic education and young people, on language debates in Tatarstan and on the use of social media by Tatar young people.