Comeback: How Islam Got Its Groove Back in Russia

Rebecca M. Miller

April 13, 2015 

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/comeback-how-islam-got-its-groove-back-russia-12609

Russian state attitudes toward religion changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What did this mean for Islam?

Vladimir Putin has made religion a central part of his public image, using Orthodoxy as a way to bolster for his political agendas. But Orthodoxy is not the only religion that experienced a revival in the post–Cold War period; among other religions, Islam, once shunned by the Soviet state, has increasingly been embraced by the Russian state.

This was a major theme of an April 7 presentation at George Washington University’s Elliott School by Bulat Akhmetkarimov, a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). At the event, titled “Islam and the Dynamics of Ethno-Confessional Regimes in Russia, 1990-2012,” Akhmetkarimov discussed the Russian state’s attitudes toward religion and how attitudes toward Islam have evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

As the largest religious minority in Russia, Muslims make up roughly 11 percent of Russia’s total population. Based on statistics provided by Pew Research Center, this percentage is predicted to increase to roughly 13 percent by 2030 and nearly 17 percent percent by 2050, with about twenty million Muslims in Russia.