Prospects for Higher Shia Religious Education in Post-Soviet Countries

Abstract

The opportunity to receive religious education plays an important role in the formation of the religious elite of society. It forms the Muslim clergy, which, in turn, represents this community in front of other members of society. Their statements directly affect the attitude of non-Muslims towards the members of this community, which is very important, especially in the cases where Muslims are a minority, and Shi’ites, in turn, are a minority in all post-Soviet countries except Azerbaijan. The Shia communities of the post-Soviet region are little studied in general. Analysing their specifics, one can see that almost all the clerics of these communities received religious education in Iran and/or Iraq, while the Sunni clerics of the same countries most often studied in their homeland. This problem in the aspect of comparing Sunni and Shia education, as well as the past (starting from the USSR times), the present and the future of Shia higher religious education were studied in this paper.