The spread of Islam in Siberia, a historical and geographical area within the Asian part of Russia, is considered by researchers as a long process that is not reducible to a single event or historical episode. The arrival of the first Islamic missionaries from Central Asia to the banks of the Irtysh River in the late XIV century, the policy of Genghis Khan’s descendants, Tokhtamysh and Kuchum, in the XV century, as well as contacts with the Nogai Horde and the Kazan Khanate – all these factors contributed to the movement of Islam “to the very edge of the world”.
The influence of religion on the culture and education of the Siberian Tatars, one of the three major ethnic groups that practiced Sunni Islam in Siberia in the XV-XVI centuries, along with newcomers from the Volga-Ural Tatars and Kazakhs, is unequivocal. With the adoption of Islam Arabic culture began to spread, the runic script of the Siberian Tatars was replaced by the more progressive Arabic language, and the strengthening of ties with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia played a major role in raising the literacy rate among local Muslims.
The Bukharans, representatives of various ethnic groups (predominantly Uzbeks and Tajiks), who came from Central Asia, are associated with the spread of books in the Siberian region. Grigory Potanin, a Russian researcher, in his work on the conquest of Siberia, notes that in the XVII century a special and privileged class of Bukharans was more educated than Russian aliens, being the only people in the region with a book in their hands.
The discovery of the book culture of Siberian Muslims in the XVIII century is impressive: libraries of books and scrolls in Arabic, kept in village houses in the middle of the remote Siberian taiga, were carefully handed down from generation to generation. These collections, including handwritten and old-printed copies of the Quran, theological textbooks, and Siberian-Tatar works that present their own version of the emergence of Islam in Siberia, are to this day an important element of the cultural and religious self-identity of local “indigenous” Muslims.
Since the annexation of Siberia, particularly its western region, to the Russian Empire, active interaction between Russians and the Muslim population began. In the XIX century, the sphere of education became the object of disagreement between the Russian government, seeking to consolidate its own power, and the progressive strata of Muslim society, preoccupied with training the national intelligentsia. The state regarded schools as a tool of political and ideological influence.
There has always been a desire for literacy among Muslim communities, especially Tatars. The Tatar education system included two types of educational institutions: mekteb and madrasah. The first type of educational institutions was opened at mosques and in the villages of Western Siberia, corresponding to the Russian church literacy school. Madrasahs had a more complex program of study than mekteb, and were considered secondary and higher level educational institutions, where secular sciences were also studied.
Throughout the XIX and early XX centuries, the imperial government sought to establish control over the national entity, subordinating the entire system to state interests. The government paid special attention to the Tatar population of Western Siberia, bordering the Kirghiz steppe subject to Russia. It was believed that the Tatars contributed to the education of religious fanaticism in the Kirghiz. Undoubtedly, this attitude of the Tatar population towards the imperial authorities was due to a reaction to the russification policy of the tsarist government.
Despite all the efforts of the authorities, the reform of Muslim education did not yield the expected results. The positions of Muslim educational institutions, due to the peculiarities of religious consciousness and national traditions, remained quite strong. It is noteworthy that mektebs and madrasahs were almost entirely maintained at the expense of the Muslim population itself.
The February Revolution of 1917, followed by the Civil War, brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, who at first favored Muslims, seeing them as the most oppressed national minorities by the tsarist autocracy. Despite the atheistic Soviet government’s ban on teaching religion to children, Muslim schools were allowed in some regions in 1923. In Siberia, group religious instruction was allowed in mosques and at home to persons who had graduated from a Soviet school or had reached the age of majority under Sharia.
The consolidation of Soviet power, including in the Muslim autonomies, made it possible to launch an offensive against Islam in the late 1920s and to eradicate it in the course of the Cultural Revolution. The twofold change of the alphabet in the Tatar and Bashkir languages – in 1926 from the Arabic script to the Latin script, and in 1936 from the Latin script to the Cyrillic alphabet – led to the almost complete loss of Muslim education.
During the years of the Great Patriotic War, many officials of the Soviet state realized the importance of building state-Muslim relations in a positive way. The softening of the religious policy in the USSR prompted Muslims to make numerous requests to open madrasahs in different regions. However in 1956 the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European part of the USSR and Siberia received complaints from Siberian cities about the lack of mullahs. While the available experts of religious worship, due to their elderly age, often do not perform rituals.
Since the second part of the 1960s, in the course of atheist propaganda, Islamic religious life largely moved into the domestic sphere. The phenomenon of domestic religiosity included the proliferation of home mosques and madrasahs, as well as the presence of unofficial spiritual guides in families. Manuscript books with ancient texts, once hidden from Soviet anti-religious activities and carefully handed down by Siberian Muslim from generation to generation, in a sense symbolized the revival of Islam in the region. Some of the books are unreadable today, but continue to serve as an indicator of connection to the rest of the Islamic world.
The post-Soviet period was a time of religious enthusiasm and uplift: after several decades of proclaimed atheism, the first Islamic educational institutions emerged in the 1980-1990s. But in the first decade of the XXI century, the intellectual potential of the Siberian region still consisted of indigenous Siberians who had learnt Arabic and the basics of religious knowledge on their own at an advanced age. Meanwhile, there were still few owners of systematic knowledge of Islam and skillful preachers.
Today, Muslims in the region are eagerly awaiting the completion of the first madrasah in Siberia, located in Novosibirsk. On the basis of the planned madrasah students for the Bolgarian Islamic Academy have been training since 2015. The future higher educational institution will train Muslims to serve in mosques throughout the Russian Federation – valuable personnel for the country. Their work can help in socializing migrants from the Central Asian region and countering extremist ideologies.
In 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting with the heads of muftiates in Kazan, clearly outlined the vectors for the development of Islamic education and enlightenment work among young people. ‘Without any doubt, traditional Islam is the important part of the Russian cultural code, and the Muslim ummah is undoubtedly an important part of the Russian multinational people. Before the 1917 revolution, our Russian Muslim theologians were recognized all over the world as highly respected people, and their opinions were highly valued. Of course, during the years of Soviet rule much, if not all, was lost. We need to recreate our school,’ Vladimir Putin noted.
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