Historical roots of religious education in Uzbekistan

A madrasa has been an educational institution in the Muslim world since the Middle Ages, and in many cases besides religious knowledge secular sciences (mathematics, astronomy, logic, literature) were also taught; so the textbook says madrasas in their time performed the function of secondary specialised and higher education. In the territory of Uzbekistan Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Tashkent were large centres of learning in the 15th–19th centuries; for example, madrasas were built at the order of Mirzo Ulugh Beg in Bukhara in 1417 and later in Samarkand and Ghijduvan, the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara in the 16th century (according to the textbook, in 1530–1536) and Kukeldash in Tashkent in 1569–1570. After the Russian conquest the activity of madrasas weakened; according to the textbook, at the end of the 19th century 336 madrasas were registered in the Emirate of Bukhara, 132 in the Khanate of Khiva and 348 in the Turkestan region. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century the Jadid movement opened “new-method” (usul-i jadid) schools: the first was opened in 1884 in Crimea by Ismail Bey Gasprinski, and in Turkestan in early 1917 over 4,000 pupils studied in about 100 such schools, where besides the foundations of religion, foreign languages, physics, chemistry, mathematics, hygiene and economics were taught. In the Soviet period the state pursued an atheistic policy and madrasas were closed; after attitudes eased somewhat during the Second World War, a religious board of Muslims was formed in Tashkent in 1943, the Mir-i Arab was reopened in Bukhara in 1945, and in 1971 the Imam al-Bukhari Islamic Institute began work in Tashkent; until 1990 there were no Islamic educational institutions on former Soviet territory other than these two.