Hawzah News Agency (Qom, Iran) - Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani offered some suggestions to enhance the quality of Islamic Seminary’s international propagation programs via specialized training courses in which clerics are trained in focused fields of religious studies in order be able to respond to the growing needs and inquiries of the Foreign affairs department at the Islamic Seminaries.

Here are some questions answered by Ayatollah Sobhani:

In your opinion what programs need to be incorporated in the seminaries’ educational curriculum in order to give the clerics an international overview on subjects such as jurisprudence, philosophy, etc.?

 In order to do this, a special center must be established under the supervision of Seminaries’ department of international relations, and then they must choose 10 clerics from every specialized seminary schools and later put them through specific trainings.

The seminary students who are studying in those specialized courses are at the beginning of their journey and need some considerable amount of time to accomplish their goals. We must design our programs in a way that every year at least 40 highly educated and specialized clerics are trained in our new curriculum. In these new courses seminary students must deal with recently-raised inquiries and questions regarding economic issues, jurisprudential questions or philosophical misgivings, such inquiries need to be observed thoroughly on the part of clerics and later answered comprehensively. This would be the first step in this program; if this design of study proves to be successful then it can be developed. This project should begin basic so if it fails, the losses are insignificant and if it succeeds, it can be developed to higher standards and scales.

How the foreign languages should be taught in Islamic seminaries?

There are two issues to be considered here; first, the issue of training missionaries and it needs to be done through proper education, the second issues is to answer religious inquiries and misgiving; If we wish to teach foreign languages to all seminary students it would take a lot of time, therefore we will miss out on our primary goal which was to train knowledgeable religious missionaries and preachers. Teaching foreign languages to clerics must be treated as the secondary objective of such program.

How can we start a translation movement to publish the works of clerics in other languages?

As a matter of fact, we do need a translation center in the Islamic seminary. This center must research about other countries’ needs in terms of religious materials and accordingly begin translating texts to meet those needs. If the native speakers of each country translate such books it would be more beneficial for the people in those countries, but if we wish to translate the books to other languages in Iran, we’re going to need to have a native speaker review and modify the books in case they find it necessary.

End.