UFA, September 22 (Itar-Tass) —— Bashkiria has all the necessary conditions for creating an Islam teaching centre in Russia, the republic’s President Rustam Khamitov said.
“We have historical traditions in teaching and studying Islam,” he said at a meeting with the heads of Muslim Boards of the Volga Federal District.
“Next year we will mark the 225th anniversary of the Muhamaddan Board in Ufa created by Catherine II’s order. At one point we talked about creating a religious academy in Bashkortostan. It’s going to be a specialised educational institution. We are ready to host it in Ufa. We have all prerequisites for making Ufa one of the centres for teaching Islam in the Russian Federation,” the president said.
The participants in the meeting observed a minute of science in memory of Valiulla Yakupov, a prominent theologian and head of a department in Tatarstan’s Moslem Board, who had been killed in a terrorist act.
The Russian president’s envoy to the Volga Federal District, Mikhail Babich, who also attended the meeting, stressed that the tragic events in Kazan had highlighted problems not only in the republic but also in Russia in general.
In parallel to the investigation, work is underway to study the prerequisites of the crimes in order to change approaches in relations with confessions, he said.
“It will be hard to succeed without a common position and a consolidated approach in fighting the spread of these phenomena,” Babich said.