MUSLIM RUSSIA RISING

In the late summer of 2005, Russia’s most prominent Muslim weighed in on the national debate taking place over the country’s dismal demographics. In an address to the European Union of Muslims, Ravil Gaynutdin, Russia’s chief mufti, said, “The number of people professing Islam in Russia is constantly growing.” In fact, according to Gaynutdin, there were as many as twenty-three million Russian Muslims—nearly ten million more than the 14.5 million officially tallied by the country’s census that year. ¹

Predictably, Gaynutdin’s comments touched off a firestorm of controversy, with detractors insisting that the cleric’s figures were grossly inflated. Perhaps they were: Russia’s 2002 census had contained a much more modest official estimate, pegging the number of Muslims at approximately fifteen million, or 10 percent of the population. ²Notably, though, the Russian Orthodox Church—which has a vested interest in tracking the number of Muslims in Russia—had given its own estimate not long prior. At twenty million, it was much closer to Gaynutdin’s projections than to those of the Kremlin. ³

Regardless of which estimate is correct, the incident cast light on how quickly Islam has gained ground in Russia. While Russia’s Slavic population is constricting, Russia’s Muslims are faring a good deal better. In fact, Islam can be said to be experiencing a major—and sustained—revival there.

A POST-SOVIET RENAISSANCE

While Muslims have lived on what is now Russian territory for centuries (mostly concentrated in the Volga and North Caucasus regions), the rise of what can be called “Muslim Russia” has taken place mostly during the post-Soviet era.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the overall Soviet population of nearly 287 million. ⁴But the Soviet Union was formally atheist, which meant that Islam, like all other organized religions, was closely regulated and tightly controlled by the state. (Mass deportations and forcible relocations of Chechen, Ingush, and Crimean Muslims during Stalin’s reign contributed to the overall repression.) ⁵

With the breakup of the USSR, the number of Muslims in Russia initially fell sharply—only around ten million remained in post-Soviet Russia (accounting for 7 percent of the country’s then-148-million-person population). ⁶But relatively robust birth rates since then have swelled the ranks of Russia’s Muslims relative to their Slavic counterparts.

According to Russia’s 2002 census, the country’s overall Muslim population grew by 20 percent between 1989 and 2002. ⁷During the same period, the country’s Slavic population declined by nearly 4 percent. ⁸And this trajectory is continuing—United Nations estimates put Russia’s overall fertility rate at much lower than Russian Muslims’ fertility rate of 2.3. ⁹Other estimates have placed the fertility rate among Russia’s Muslims at higher still: between six and ten children per woman, depending on where in the Russian Federation they live. ¹⁰Whatever the actual number, it is clear—as a 2005 study commissioned by the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Strategic and International Studies put it—that “Russia’s Muslims . . . have significantly more babies, suffer less premature death, and live longer than do Russia’s Slavs.” ¹¹

The disparity is easy to explain. Studies have found that Muslim women in Russia are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and less likely to have abortions than non-Muslim women in Russia. ¹²Between 1991 and 2011, the number of Russian Muslims nearly tripled, and now rests at a median estimate of about twenty-one million—or roughly 15 percent of the country’s total population. ¹³

80 percent of Russia’s Muslims reside in the North Caucasus and Middle Volga regions. ¹⁴In the republic of Chechnya (in the North Caucasus), the population is expected to grow 47 percent, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, by 2030. ¹⁵The neighboring North Caucasus republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia are also predicted to grow rapidly in the years ahead. ¹⁶Most of the rest of Russia, by contrast, will not.

Russia’s indigenous Muslim population has been bolstered by an influx of three to four million Muslim migrants from former Soviet states such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan who have entered Russia in search of employment. ¹⁷

As the number of Russian Muslims has grown, so has their public presence. In 1991, there were hundreds of mosques in Russia. Today there are at least eight thousand, with much of the new construction being paid for by funds from the Middle East. ¹⁸Similarly, in 1991 just forty-one Russians made the hajjpilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia—a religious duty that must be carried out by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so at least once in his or her lifetime. In 2009, an estimated forty thousand did. ¹⁹And Moscow, Russia’s capital, is now home to an estimated 2.5 million Muslims—more than any other European city except for Istanbul, Turkey. ²⁰

The implications of Islam’s ascendance in Russia are hard to overstate. “Russia is going through a religious transformation that will be of even greater consequence for the international community than the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Paul Goble, a leading expert on Russia’s Muslims, has said. ²¹

Russia’s religious transformation is still unfolding. At their current rate of growth, Muslims will make up one-fifth of Russia’s population by 2020. ²²And by the middle of this century, officials in Moscow predict that the Russian Federation might become majority Muslim. ²³

But the effects of this change could be felt much sooner. “[T]he growing number of people of Muslim background in Russia will have a profound impact on Russian foreign policy,” Goble maintains. “The assumption in Western Europe or the United States that Moscow is part of the European concert of powers is no longer valid.” ²⁴

LEFT BEHIND

Islam’s revival in Russia would be seen as a neutral—perhaps even a beneficial—development if Muslims were fully integrated into Russian culture and society. But they are not. Indeed, by most socioeconomic measures, Muslims are faring much more poorly than other Russians. As scholar Gordon Hahn has noted, “Russia’s poorest regions are most often those heavily populated with Muslims.” ²⁵

The disparities are most striking in the Muslim-dominated republics of the North Caucasus. In 2011, more than half of the population of Ingushetia was jobless, as was 42 percent of Russians in Chechnya and Dagestan, and 17 percent living in Kabardino-Balkaria. ²⁶(By way of comparison, the national unemployment rate in Russia in 2011 was approximately 7 percent.) ²⁷So, while the North Caucasus “is only home to one in fifteen inhabitants of the Russian Federation,” a 2011 study on Russian demographics by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development pointed out, “it is home to one in seven of the unemployed.” ²⁸

Crippling poverty is also pervasive among the areas of Russia dominated by Muslims. In 2005, the Russian government estimated that more than 90 percent of Chechnya’s population was living below the poverty line, earning less than seventy-two euros (approximately $100) a month. ²⁹Today, the situation is only marginally better. Despite years of aid disbursements from Moscow and financial contributions from concerned countries in Europe, Chechnya’s poverty rate still stands at 80 percent. ³⁰Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria post similarly bleak statistics—a symptom of a prosperity gap between the North Caucasus and the rest of Russia that is widening despite improvements to the country’s overall economy.