Tajik schools start teaching Islam

KHUJAND – Radical Islam has Tajikistan’s educators worried.

To shield their youth from radicals who distort the teachings of Islam, educators have decided to improve religious education in the country’s schools and teach a moderate strain of Islam.

Beginning with the new school year, secondary school students in Tajikistan will begin studying Islam from textbooks that scholars expressly wrote for this purpose.

The new subject, Islamic Culture (Marifati islom), will account for 34 academic hours per year.

“The new subject is intended to protect the younger generation from outside ideas of terrorism and extremism (promoted by) extremist religious movements”, said Bibihavo Sharopova, head of the Ministry of Education’s Office of Preschool and School General Education.

Schools have taught Marifati islom this year but without authorised textbooks or study guides, said Mahfirat Azimova, a high school teacher in Khujand, Sogd Oblast. That lack of course materials forced teachers to select their own for the subject, guided by the Ministry of Education’s publication, “The Guide for Teachers of ‘Islamic Culture’”.

The ministry cites an inflow of radicals bent on establishing a caliphate in Central Asia as the reason it needed a new textbook on Islam.

“Extremist religious organisations intensifying their activities in Central Asia can instantly fill any gap in ideological education”, Sharopova said.

Until 2009, Tajikistan’s public schools taught ‘The History of Religions’ — a course developed in Soviet times. Many of its provisions were outdated and conflicted with the constitution, which guarantees the freedom of conscience and religion.

“Over the past two decades the world has changed so much that scholars have not kept pace in adding to and changing the humanities”, said Tajik National Academy of Sciences member Jurabek Nazriev.

“The global socialist system collapsed, and all sorts of extremist religious movements entered the political arena, promoting their ideas under the banner of Islam”, Nazriev said. “Such circumstances confuse not only the young but also modern politicians”.

Extremist views encouraged by an improper interpretation of Islam lead to repression in Central Asia, he said.

“In order to somehow change the situation, it is necessary to have a … boundary between traditional Islam and the teachings that have emerged as a result of attempts to restore the Muslim religion”, Nazriev added. "Unfortunately, the country’s Ministry of Education does not have any idea (how to create this boundary). And the proposed course of study of Islam is just the response to the head of state’s instructions”.

Nadzhmiddin Shohinbod, a journalist with the weekly newspaper Sugd, said the new course is an improvement on the old one. However, he argued that one class per week is insufficient to protect youth from reactionary trends.

“We are not talking about pitting believers against nonbelievers but about eliminating from (their) minds such concepts as ‘jihad’, ‘infidel’ and everything that finds new interpretation in the mouths of reactionary clergy and now resonates with terror”, Shohinbod said.

Holikjon Rahmonov, the director of the only Kyrgyz-language school in Sogd Oblast in the village of Dzhikdalik, Kanibadam Region, doesn’t see anything wrong with the study of Islam.

“Mostly Muslims live in the territory of Central Asia. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are peoples of one faith, and they are required to have at least a general idea about their religion”, he said.

The head of the Russian Cultural Centre in Chkalov, which is home to more than 20 ethnic minorities, says it is necessary to study the history of all religions.

“It would have been fair to introduce ‘The History of Religions’ as a subject in Russian schools and to give equal class time to Islam and Christianity. The compilers of the textbook need to be especially delicate in their approach to this issue, not forgetting the freedom of conscience prescribed in the country’s constitution”.

One of the authors of the new textbook, Said Ahmadov, Ph.D., said that introducing ‘Islamic Culture’ as a subject in Kyrgyz and Uzbek schools shouldn’t cause problems in terms of compliance with legislation or protection of the country’s Kyrgyz and Uzbek minorities.

“The only question is how soon we will manage to translate the textbook into the languages of these people, who are also adherents of Islam”, Ahmadov said. “It is another matter with Russian-language schools, where there is a contingent of students who adhere to other religions”.

At this early stage, the Ministry of Education has decided to introduce the courses only in the upper grades of Tajik-language schools. However, in the future it plans to introduce the subject into Uzbek-, Kyrgyz- and Russian-language schools as well.