Кашаф Шамиль Равильевич

Islamic education in Chechnya has its own historical-political and spiritual-cultural factors of formation, dating back to the period of the adoption of Islam by the Chechens, associated with the socio-political structure of their society, beliefs, Arab conquests, the construction of mosques, during which primary Muslim schools were always created, also madrasah secondary schools. These schools existed in the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and Central Asia; they had a Kadimist (or Bukhara) system of training children. At the dawn of Soviet power, all Islamic educational institutions, with rare exceptions located in Uzbekistan, were liquidated for political reasons. Islamic education in the USSR was generally interrupted as a phenomenon alien to progressive Soviet society. Religious education, including Islamic, in the post-Soviet period in Russia and its regions, is being revived, acquiring a new status and receiving tangible development. The purpose of the article is to consider the experience of the development of Islamic education in Chechnya, including modern ones, in the context of the tasks of strengthening the state unity and integrity of the Russian Federation, preserving the ethnocultural identity of its peoples, ensuring the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens, harmonizing public and state interests. It is concluded that the modernization of Islamic education carried out in the Chechen Republic is becoming a significant factor in the religious and national security of the region and Russia as a whole. A unified and viable system of continuous Islamic education and science has been created in the republic, represented by three levels of spiritual education.

The article deals with an acute problem regarding the building up and the subsequent enhancing of the Russian national identity among the students of religious Islamic institutions in the Russian Federation. The problem encompasses a wide range of aspects, not at least that of the better integration of the Russian Muslim community into the modern social structure of the Russian State. The research is based upon a critical review of the relevant works, which deal with this problem. The results of this review are analyzed from the point of view expressed in the Governmental normative acts as well as curricula of Islamic universities, results obtained from various focus group studies. In the latter were taking an active part the undergraduates from the Bulgarian Islamic Academy. The conclusion stresses the necessity of detailed methodological works regarding the actual process of building up the sociocultural and political identity of the Muslim youth in Russia. This stratum of Russian society still does not possess a clearly structured model of self-identification. As a matter of fact, it becomes an obvious target group for the bodies involved in contradictory ideological discourses, which nowadays exist in the Russian Federation. Among them are those dealing with the All-Russian State identity, the Western liberal identity, ethno-regional identity, and International Muslim identity.

One of the characteristics of modern society, more and more susceptible to increasing secularization, is a process of social integration of the two most important institutions: religion serving the needs of people in order to solve their spiritual problems, and education designed to satisfy human givens of knowledge and competency. This article deals with the existing experience of organizing Islamic education (the cases of Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and others Central Asian countries), including collaboration be-tween Muslim religious organizations and various institutions of the secular state. The author makes a conclusion that the efforts in disseminating the experience of organizing Islamic education in countries with large Muslim population may serve the purposes of the secular state, reinforce spiritual sovereignty of the state and its national security in cooperation with socially important religious organizations; on the other hand, it has a destructive potential, capable of creating a threat through the system of education to spiritual and political unity of multi-religious society.

The article deals with the problem of the participation of religious institutions in Russian nation-building, in the strengthening of spiritual sovereignty and national security of Russia. Participating in the process of the construction of national identity, the state and political elites make attempts (not always unsuccessful) to employ the resource capabilities of religious institutions, including those related to the Muslim community, in order to convert their transcendent assets into symbolic ones. The conclusion is made that under the current circumstances the modern Russian state and religious organizations may and should direct the legitimization of inter-institutional cooperation of religious organizations and public authorities towards the benefit of the emerging Russian nation.

The strategy of national state policy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025 involves the formation of a political (civil) nation, while maintaining the diversity of the nation's ethnic and religious belonging of the population. However, the construction of national identity in Muslim regions takes place in the conditions of radical struggle in which ethnic and religious identities compete with each other as discursive constructs for group identity of the community and its constituent individuals. And this seriously removes the prospects for successful implementation of the nation-building project in the country.

Formation of civic identity in multi-ethnic and multi-religious Russia is an extremely timely and urgent topic. Switching the discourse of national identity in the dispositions of the activists of the Muslim community adds to the construction of a civic nation politically loaded connotations associated with the “struggle for identity” in the Muslim areas.