Образы исламского образования: нарративы скрытого потенциала

Abstract

The foundation of the image-of-the-future concept goes back to Fred Polak, a Dutch founding father of futures studies. He defined such an image as a fantasy about the future, considered “the Other”, the world fundamentally different from the real one. Evaluating the images of the future (hereafter ‘the images’) as an object of research, Polak also considered it as a statement of the problem. Study-ing the images allows us to trace the values and anticipations of individual social groups and society as a whole and see the emerging priorities for its further development. Also, the images are the bear-ers of weak signals, which are essential for successfully building the process of medium- and long-term plans. Therefore, the paper presents the results of the research, whose main objective was to study images of Islamic education in Kazakhstan among young imams studying at a specialized Islamic educational institution. Firstly, the author describes the methodology of futures studies that was applied and included, among other things, the reconstruction of the present image that served as a starting point for the next step. After that, the results and the gallery of the chosen images with their original descriptions is presented. And finally, the author identifies those weak signals that can play a critical role in strategy building of further development of Islamic education in the Republic.