BISHKEK (TCA) — The largest Islamic training institute in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is training religious staff with the correct political stance and excellent moral traits to uphold social stability and ethnic unity in the region that is home to a large Muslim community, Russia’s Sputnik news agency reported with reference to an article published in the Global Times.
To achieve that goal, the institute attaches great importance to both political and anti-extremist education.
“These include lectures on laws, the report of the 19th National Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Elijan Anayit, head of the CPC committee of the Islamic Institute in Xinjiang, told the Global Times.
Located in Urumqi, the Islamic Institute in Xinjiang started recruiting students from 1987 and has helped train religious staff, including imams for mosques.
The Global Times reporter saw banners with phrases from Xi’s speeches, including “Cherish ethnic unity as if it was our eyes” in the institute.
Students need to take courses on religious doctrines and Putonghua in the institute, and after five years of study, they need to pass a final exam before being deployed to mosques in other regions in Xinjiang, Elijan said.
Courses on religious doctrine emphasize peace and solidarity, and reveal that extremism distorts Islam doctrines and is anti-humane and anti-society, he said.
Aside from educating religious staff, the institute helps foreigners learn about China’s ethnic and religious policies.
Olimjon Tashanov, a senior editor from Uzbekistan who visited the Institute, told the Global Times that he had the opportunity to learn about China’s religious policies and was touched to see students learning religious doctrine in class.
Pavel Zlobin, deputy editor-in-chief of Kazakhstan Komsomolskaya Pravda, said he was impressed with the facilities in the Institute. What he saw in the Institute shows that people from any ethnic group with any religious belief can live a good life.
