The religious sphere of Kazakhstan is very politicised and always causes a lot of discussions in public space. Highly qualified staff is needed to shape adequate policy solutions in such a sensitive sphere as religion, which, in turn, depends on the education provided by universities teaching future religious scholars.
Being a former instructor of the department of religious studies at the Eurasian National University, I am aware first-hand of the condition of religious studies as a science in Kazakhstan and of training of researchers. Some problems in this sphere have rather philosophical and methodological nature, like separation of religious studies from theology. Other problems are practical ones.
How to separate different subject matters?
The problem of watershed between the two disciplines remains unsolved even in western academic communities with the fairly richer history of evolution of these disciplines. However, the situation is much worse in the science of Kazakhstan: educational programmes on religious studies, Islamic studies, theology are similar and copy each other, with no clear distinction between the subjects that are taught in the bachelor’s and doctorate programmes.
An Islamic scholar here calls oneself a religious scholar, while a religious scholar calls oneself a theologian, and a theologian calls oneself an Islamic scholar. Without going into detail of definitions, a religious scholar is a scholar who studies religions as a phenomenon of the society/psychology/culture. An Islamic scholar is a researcher who studies Islam. A theologian is a person who follows the same religion he/she studies, so we can say that he/she studies a particular religion ‘from the inside’.
In western universities, an Islamic scholar can be either secular, or a Christian, in short, anyone who is interested in Islam as a cultural phenomenon. But in Kazakhstan, these are usually religious Muslims who are deeply drowned in religion and following its prescriptions. It is neither good nor bad per se.
Problems arise when Islamic scholars start teaching religious subjects. Let me specify here, an Islamic scholar may work at the department of religious studies, but when it comes to teaching of such purely religious subjects as phenomenology of religion, we face the problem of subjectivity and lack of qualification.
In other words, currently Islamic studies as a science in Kazakhstan encounters a vexed problem of secular, scientific approach to the study of Islam. Since many Islamic scholars work at departments of religious studies, it affects the education of future religious scholars. I do not want to belittle the significance of Islamic studies as it is an important science for our society, but the educational programmes for Islamic studies need to contain more secular and scientific subjects.
View from the department
Moreover, I would like to raise practical issues of religious studies in the country. I am not going to raise general issues like overload of the academic teaching staff with administrative work (going to performances, concerts, conferences, filling up piles of unnecessary papers, reviews, etc.). I’ll focus on the moments that directly concern the educational process.
First. All applicants must take a creativity test upon admission to the bachelor of religious studies programme. I think it’s a fatal error to introduce a creativity test instead of the UNT (Unified National Testing) score. Despite the arguments of supporters of the test like ‘you can see immediately who you are going to accept, their knowledge and diligence’, I see more drawbacks here.
First, it is unclear how religious studies became one of the specialties that require creative training such as musical studies, conducting, choreography, fine arts, and so forth.
Second, it creates an unhealthy competition among universities. Currently, school leavers in Kazakhstan take the UNT to be admitted to universities. The UNT consists of five subjects: three mandatory and two profession-oriented (relevant to the future profession). Applicants who want to be admitted to the religious studies programme should take two creativity tests instead of profession-oriented subjects. In other words, the scores earned in two profession-oriented subjects of the UNT, are not recognised by universities offering programmes in religious studies. And we have the following overall picture.
The applicants who earn low scores in five subjects apply for religious studies because they can ‘improve’ their results by creativity tests and get a government grant. Every university sets the maximum score in creativity tests to attract more students who ‘draw on’ government grants to the university. Thus, applicants are being selected not on the basis of their professional suitability.
Second. There is a major problem of priority study of Islam as part of religious studies. It is good for Islamic studies and even theology, yet it is bad for the domestic religious studies. In general, global religious studies is a relatively new science that does not even have its own scientific methods (they have been borrowed from related sciences), and in our country it gets worse by the shortage of subjects teaching the fundamentals of scientific methodology and of scientific approach to the study of religion. However, it is the basis of religious studies.
Thus, over a quarter of studied subjects in the major of ‘Religious studies’ pertain to the Islam in a range of universities. Some of these subjects are purely theologian in nature, namely the study of the Quranic exegesis methods (explanation of the Quran), study of hadiths, fundamentals of kalam (explanation of the Islamic doctrine), principles of Islamic worship. Such an uneven distribution has a direct impact on religious studies as a science, and on future specialists who are unaware of the basics of scientific approaches to the study of a particular phenomenon in the religious sphere.
Third. Upon admission to the doctorate programme, there is no mandatory requirement to the writing of a research proposal. However, research proposal is a critical thing in all contemporary universities. The competition for scholarships among applicants must not be based on admission tests, which is the level of the bachelor’s or master’s programme, at the most. In the doctorate programme, scholarships, in my opinion, must be granted only to relevant topics and projects that will contribute to the development of science in Kazakhstan, which, in turn, will help the society develop. It sounds ridiculous sometimes but students who have been admitted to the doctorate programme do not know what they would research and what would they write about, and make their mind at random during the first semester.
Because of these (and not only these) problems, according to my personal observations, the general quality of education in religious studies goes bad every year. However, there are positive moments. Being the instructor of the department, I have observed a very interesting and heart-warming trend: Kazakh-speaking groups have had higher level of knowledge and more willingness to study compared to Russian-speaking groups. When I was a student, I thought it was otherwise. Moreover, Kazakh-speaking students still have additional obstacles like the shortage of books in their native language: almost all internet resources in religious studies are provided in Russian or English, etc. I wish we could get rid of the ‘Islamic focus’ among Kazakh-speaking instructors and pay more attention to the scientific and methodological component!
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