Constructing the Uzbek State (Contemporary Central Asia: Societies, Politics, and Cultures) by Marlene Laruelle

Author:Marlene Laruelle [Laruelle, Marlene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2017-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Managing Educational Institutions, Teachers, and Students

The Space of Teaching: Madrasas and Higher Institutions

Religious schools enjoy notable popularity in the Muslim world. They compete with secular schools for students, sometimes from kindergarten onward, as we see in Black Africa or Asia. In Indonesia, close to one-quarter of children of primary and secondary school age attend Quranic schools (pesantrens).42 In Morocco, a large number of students left the public education system in the 1980s and began attending religious schools instead.

Quranic schools offer, first and foremost, an alternative method of education that meets pious and religious standards.43 For many parents, these schools provide their children with a religious focus that is often absent from the national school curriculum. Beyond the appeal of Islamic education, these schools are often shaped by the shortcomings of public schools, as well as by the relative scarcity of public schools in rural areas.44 The religious school also presents a possible answer to household poverty and exclusion45: in Morocco, despite improvement to the primary school system, Quranic education has nevertheless continued its gradual rise. It can become essential for households in economic crisis, as their children may have been barred from secular institutions due to poor performance.46 Religious schools, lastly, provide access to an education that is unavailable in state schools: in Tatarstan, some students attend them to learn Arabic and undergo complementary religious education.47

Despite the antireligious repression in Uzbekistan and the country’s official atheism until the last years of perestroika, there were two religious schools in operation under the Soviet regime: the madrasa Mir i Arab, which closed in the late 1920s but reopened in 1945, and the Imam al-Boukhari Institute, which opened in Tashkent in 1971.48 These original Muslim schools, bolstered by the opening of many others in the late 1980s, fueled the religious revival that a section of the population aspires to today. The development of Islamic teaching establishments can be advantageous if the government is able to supervise it. As Hefner and Zaman have shown,49 the growth of a network of madrasas dating to medieval times contributed to recentralizing and homogenizing Islamic knowledge and authority.

As such, the Uzbek government, claiming to base itself on the experience of the Muslim world, has very strictly supervised the organization of religious schools in order to avoid three possible pitfalls tied to their development.50 In many Muslim states, Quranic schools have proven difficult to keep under control: such Quranic schools have an oral tradition, no entry requirements, and are often ad hoc institutions in that they do not answer to the state or a specific administration, but are organized by teachers, the local community, or members of the local ulema.51 They are unstable and may expire along with the master-teacher who heads them, but they are also flexible and able to create themselves anew elsewhere. This potential nomadism of religious teaching has the capacity to escape the control of the Uzbek authorities. Further, in contrast with secular education establishments, the madrasa enjoy an inherent legitimacy owing to their religious foundations.

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