Moscow sociologist Dmitry Oparin highlights a general trend in Moscow that is also taking place in the West: “Muslim migrants become more religious after arriving in Moscow.”
A main reason for this is that immigrant groups experience culture shock, and thus, integration and adaptation challenges. Members of these groups thus gravitate to each other for a sense of community. As Oparin points out:
Many of the new arrivals turn to the mosque or the prayer hall not for religious reasons but as a community center and mutual assistance organization. However, over time, many are drawn into religious services and activities.
Here is where a threat arises: Islamic law is incompatible with Western values, so when Muslims gravitate to mosques and Islamic community centers, religious indoctrination becomes problematic. A high percentage of leaders in mosques are teaching that Westerners are “racist,” “Islamophobic,” imperialist and colonialist, and are out to oppress Muslims. Such preachers view the West as the House of War, and teach sharia doctrine.
It is also no secret that Wahhabi ideology is spread globally via Saudi-funded mosques. In 2015, a large mosque with a capacity for a congregation of 10,000 was built in Moscow with Saudi funding. “Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were the guests of honour at the unveiling of the 20,000-square-metre mosque.”
The new wave of Muslim immigrants and refugees who have suffered the ravages of war and oppression under Islamic regimes then hear teachings in these mosques that are supremacist and rage-inducing, perpetuating the us-versus-them, victimology narrative.
Adding to the problem in Moscow (and in the West):
Many unofficial leaders in the prayer rooms are students and immigrants from the Middle East who know Arabic and themselves identify as Muslims rather than as members of particular nations.
“Muslim Migrants Become More Religious After Arriving in Moscow,” by Paul Goble, Jamestown Foundation, March 22, 2018 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
The Muslim population of the Russian capital has grown dramatically in recent years, with the arrival in the 1990s of North Caucasians fleeing from violence in their home areas and of Central Asians and Azerbaijanis in the 2000s seeking work. Some estimate the total number of Muslims in the capital and its suburbs at as many as three million people, or nearly one in every three—up from 60,000 at the end of Soviet times. This has both frightened and angered many ethnic Russians, who view this as a threat to the Russianness of Moscow (see EDM, October 17, 2013). But it has also transformed those who are part of this Islamic community, leading many of its members to become more committed Muslims than they were before arriving (Fergana News, March 14).
Indeed, according to Dmitry Oparin, a sociologist at the Higher School of Economics who specializes in this community, for many in this larger group “it is easier to be a Muslim in Moscow than in Central Asia.” Although, he pointed out, the meaning of “being a Muslim” varies widely from being a follower of the faith to a broader identification, often far more important than ethnicity or citizenship. In an interview with Fergana News journalist Yekaterina Ivashenko, he discussed the history of this community and its current state, one that he suggests will play a major role in defining what it means to be a Muslim in Russia and the former Soviet space more generally (Fergana News, March 14).
Muslims have resided in Moscow since the time of the Golden Horde. But at the end of the imperial period, they were still a small community, with only two mosques, dominated almost exclusively by highly educated and often wealthy Tatars from Gorky and Ryazan rather than Kazan, Oparin said. After the revolution, this community was nearly wiped out. “In the 1930s, the mosque on Bolshaya Tatarskaya was closed and its imam shot; and the remaining Sobornaya mosque was called by the Muslims of the city ‘the Tatar home,’ ” because it provided far more than religious instruction to the Tatars living in the city, Oparin noted. It was a social and community center, and its traditions have despite all the changes continued to inform Muslim religious life there.
After World War II, the influx of people from Central Asia and Azerbaijan, most of whom were students or members of the national intellectual elites, challenged the dominance of the Tatars in the Moscow Muslim community; but it did not end it, the Moscow scholar said. Some of the new arrivals were alienated by the Tatar mullahs, and it is likely that more of them shifted their identities away from Islam than might otherwise have become the case. But after 1991, the massive arrival of Muslims from the North Caucasus and then Central Asia and Azerbaijan succeeded in undermining Tatar dominance.
On the one hand, the mosques, although the mullahs were still mostly Tatar in background, began using Russian as the language in their services, thus unifying the umma (Muslim community) under that international language. And on the other, Oparin continued, many of the members of these diasporas opened dozens of prayer rooms and converted nominally public facilities like restaurants and clubs into centers of Muslim instruction. This trend especially picked up as the Muslim diasporas began to form residential ghettos. It was further fueled by the Russian authorities’ refusal to increase the number of officially registered mosques in the city—there are still only five in the capital.
As a result, the researcher said, “many migrants from abroad became more religious” than they had been at home and came to understand Islam more broadly than their national communities had permitted. Some of them became radicals, but many simply shifted their dominant identities away from Soviet-imposed ethnic divisions into new and broader religious ones. That has happened not only because “many Moscow imams are well-educated people and represent so-called intellectual Islam,” but also because many unofficial leaders in the prayer rooms are students and immigrants from the Middle East who know Arabic and themselves identify as Muslims rather than as members of particular nations…..
Roland says
Sure they do, they are nothing more than religious fanatics for a cause. Stupid, stupid, westerners never seem to want to understand this!
ahem says
Plus, there’s also an Islamic Revival going on.
christianblood says
Russia is spiritually alive and have religious spine to stand up to islamists. The problem of Islamism in the West has real spiritual roots but the average Westerner doesn’t understand because he/she is deeply secularized and Anti-Christianized and they DON’T UNDERSTAND IT AND CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT!
Remember:
(…The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit….) 1 Corinthians 2:14
Please watch the short video clip below as this Western journalist explains the difference nature of the problem of islamism in the West and in Russia:
http://katehon.com/video/main-problem-west-spiritual
LeftisruiningCanada says
Good video. She’s making all the right distinctions between people and politics, and between a workable multiculturalism and permissive, weak, empty, relativism.
christianblood says
LeftisruiningCanada
Exactly! Iben is superb, I follow her on Twitter!
gravenimage says
Christianblood, I have never understood why you are not concerned about Jihad in Russia. *I* care about Russian people falling victim to ravening Muslims.
LeftisruiningCanada says
Same here GI.
It just seems like so much cheering for the home team, with no admission that the home team has problems of it’s own.
It’s a great thing to love your country and support it, no doubt, but if it blinds you to your own faults it has ceased being useful.
christianblood says
gravenimage posted
(…Christianblood, I have never understood why you are not concerned about Jihad in Russia. *I* care about Russian people falling victim to ravening Muslims…)
Because I know, unlike the anti-Christ West, the roots of Christ are deep in Russia and neither islam nor Western postmodernism will touch Russia, ever! That I am sure for as long as Russia remains in its immutable Orthodox Christianity!
LeftisruiningCanada says
Hope you are right CB, we would all be glad for a Russia free of jihad and islam.
christianblood says
LeftisruiningCanada
(..Hope you are right CB, we would all be glad for a Russia free of jihad and islam..)
Truest me: The greatest danger to Russia is NOT Islam at the moment, the greatest threat to Russia is Western, anti-Christian liberal postmodernism. If Russia can keep defeating that Western satanistic liberalism it will definitely stay safe from islamic problems as well. Do you know the West really, really hates Russia for being a conservative Christian nation which will NOT legalize gay marriage and gay parade marches??? Watch it below:
https://www.facebook.com/thedurancom/videos/516832111981707/
gravenimage says
Christianblood wrote:
Truest me: The greatest danger to Russia is NOT Islam at the moment, the greatest threat to Russia is Western, anti-Christian liberal postmodernism. If Russia can keep defeating that Western satanistic liberalism it will definitely stay safe from islamic problems as well. Do you know the West really, really hates Russia for being a conservative Christian nation which will NOT legalize gay marriage and gay parade marches??
…………………..
The idea–which Christianblood has expressed here many times–that gay parades are evil but that Muslims slaughtering Russians–including children–in bloody Jihad terror attacks are of no concern–is simply insane.
LeftisruiningCanada says
In a way CB, many people here agree with you.
It is often said that the greatest problem we have here in the West is the Leftist/Globalist agenda. That is the THE main (political) reason that islam is making such headway in our lands.
If you guys can keep that at bay, and yes, i do believe that the homosexual agenda is a part of it, then you may well have a stronger political and spiritual immunity and defense against attempts by islam to encroach.
We know how much Hungary and other Eastern European nations are being villianized because of their admittedly Christian stance against the forced immigration quotas, for example.
The main thing that sets people here, who would likely otherwise be quite on-side with you, is the unfortunate tone taken against “America”, as if that word is so easily generalized as being one thing. “America” isn’t so many of the things it has sadly become known for. When you condemn “America” in no uncertain terms, what many hear is the condemnation of everything they themselves stand for, which is quite different.
Imagine, 30 years ago, if you would have to put up with people condemning “Russia” for all of the Communist stuff that happened there, which i suspect you would say was not really “Russia” at all.
Mac-101 says
So the big question is what is the Muslim population of Moscow and Russia? I’ve seen numbers ranging from 5 to 25% including the Russian Confederation. Moscow’s 300 thousand to a million and a half. Some even claim up to 35% of the Russian Confederation forces have a Muslim background.
.
If any of this is true, are the Globalist downplaying the Islamic Threat to Russia and playing up the Orthodox Christian power? So in the end Russia becomes Islamic an no one sees it, thinkin that Russia is a bulwark against Islamic Fundamentalism?
.
Why do the Globalist Scum want the world to be Islamic? For their father Satan?
Save Europe says
In regards to those in the military – that will have been one of my posts which you read. Yep, it’s true dude.
Mac-101 says
So is Putin’s Familia worth between 4 to 40 Billion and 10 out of the original 14 Russian Oligarchs still in power controlling the vast amount of the wealth of the ole Soviet Union with their extensive city of London connections? Could Putin really be Controlled Opposition? Is Trump also Controlled Opposition? THEY have a history of ownin BOTH sides and controlling them so THEY always win!
mortimer says
Russia has the largest percentage of Muslim population of all Western countries, and thus, a huge and very dangerous internal jihad threat.
Russia’s secret police should develop curricula for deprogramming Muslims right out of Islam, starting with its prison population. Advanced academic curricula should be developed to completely remove Islamic faith.
Save Europe says
Glad Robert has posted a piece on Russia’s problems. Too many in the West, erroneously, think Russis is some panacea in regards to dealing with the Muslim problem. It isn’t.
Ibrahim itace muhammed says
Russia with highest muslim population and its strategyo location to muslim is not hostile to muslims that confers to it economic advantage .it reconstructed chychenia with vast mineral deposits and now having military and economic relations with progressing muslim nations like Iran, Turkey and Pakistan and for that Its economy is now booming unlike that of apartheid evil united states now running into recesssion then to dépression.
Mac-101 says
And the scorpion WILL sting the frog, it’s in it’s nature!
Westman says
Two wars with Chechnya and a Russian jet shot down by Turkey does not make friends for Muslims among Russians.
No observant, thinking person believes Russia would be unwilling to eject all Muslims if they became too troublesome. Nor would it hesitate to invade Chechnya if any more terrorist attacks come from it. Russia operates under pragmatism, not, political correctness.
gravenimage says
I see that the foul Ibrahim itace muhammed is thrilled that Putin has allowed “chychenia” to become a brutal Shari’ah state. *Ugh*.
And his implication that backward crapholes like Iran, Trukey, and Pakistan are doing well while the US is struggling is just fanciful.
The per capita annual GDP of the United States is almost $60,000. Iran–even with its unearned oil wealth–is less than a tenth of that. Pakistan is even more pathetic, at just $1,468.
What Ibrahim itace muhammed is really hoping for is that soon Muslims will be able to enslave Westerners.
Westman says
Graven, it might be time to simply ignore Irahim’s posts. He doesn’t take time to check the validity of what he writes. Some time ago, he was just cut and pasting remarks from other Muslims. Now he seems to be copying popular emotional myths from muslims and not fact checking them.
Until I read something with reasonable grammar and accuracy, I’m ignoring his posts.
gravenimage says
Hi, Westman. As I have mentioned before, I am not directly addressing this vicious Jihadist–just parsing his ugly claptrap for any interested Infidels reading here.
don vito says
itace, got it. -51.002
Ray Jarman says
Maybe Putin will be the West’s avenging angel. It was in Chechnya that Putin made himself into the savior of Mother Russia. He took no prisoners when the radical islamists in Chechnya began their jihad against the Christian Russian people led by Akhmed Zakayev, the Russians responded by killing as many as 50,000 muslims. If I were a muslim in Moscow, I certainly not push my luck as history has illuminated, jihad in Russia does not turn out so well. Sedition has not been tolerated since the times of Ivan The Terrible and I don’t see this happening now.
gravenimage says
Ray, how is letting Chechnya become a Shari’ah state–as Putin has done–a *good* thing?
Ray Jarman says
GI, Chechnya has been muslim for a long time; it was muslim like many of the Caucasus regions that were already infested with the cult a very long time ago. Putin smashed the Islamic uprising in Chechnya very ruthlessly.
gravenimage says
With all respect, Ray, I consider allowing Chechnya to become a Shari’ah state–*on Russian soil*–to be very dangerous.
St. Manuel II Palailogos says
Russia needs to tell them to convert to the Church or leave. Screw human rights law.
christianblood says
St. Manuel II Palailogos
Well-said!
Rosewood11 says
Quote: “…Westerners are “racist,” “Islamophobic,” imperialist and colonialist, and are out to oppress Muslims….”
Soooo…What’s your point!?!
Quote: “Some estimate the total number of Muslims in [Moscow]t and its suburbs at as many as three million people, or nearly one in every three—up from 60,000 at the end of Soviet times.”
And so, islam ruins another country just like it’s ruined every one it’s ever entered. Poor Russia. I hope they have the moxie to do what the West should have done long ago–get rid of them!!!
Manos says
Stupid Putin allowing mosques in Moscow. It’s like allowing the nazis in Stalingrad. Islam is the cancer of the human race. I hope trump takes a tougher line, but after the military deal to sell arm to Saudi, I doubt it. Maybe John Bolton to replace trump as president. I think Bolton takes a tougher stance towards Muslims.
gravenimage says
Yes–Putin recently opened the largest Mosque in Europe in Moscow alongside Erdogan and Abbas. Suicidal insanity.
Chand says
Islam is not yet a banned religion, officially, anywhere. How can mosque building be banned? Populations keep growing, including Muslims. Religious people need places to pray in, including Muslims.
Mosque building is separate from committing Jihadi terror, although some mosques might have radical preachers or might give shelter to jihadis. But those would be criminal issues, needing investigation and conviction. The jihadis have hijacked the religion and try to use it to their advantage whenever possible.
Even then, fighting Jihadi terrorism doesn’t mean targeting all Muslims and their fundamental rights to their religious practice.
gravenimage says
The idea that Putin or *any* Infidel leader should be opening Mosques is suicidal insanity.
And is Muslim apologist Chand *really* still flogging the claptrap that “the jihadis have hijacked the religion and try to use it to their advantage whenever possible”?
Doesn’t he realize that pretty much everyone here is well aware that Islam teaches violent Jihad, that the Qur’an and Hadith preach violent Jihad, and that the “Prophet” himself was a violent Jihadist, and that his actions are considered a model for all time?
And it is not just “radical” Mosques that teach Jihad, but any that preach orthodox Islam.
Ibrahim itace muhammed says
Oh, manos, you have forgotten so soon that your pagan mithraist god the Satan you Call holy spirit inspired you to commit the worst atrocities known to humanity, from genocidal killings during crusade wars, colonisation and deprivations of other nations, holocaust, transatlantic slave trade where more than 17million Africans thrown into deep sea water and eatened by sharks and exploitation of weak naťions through dubious economic relations. christianity is, therefore, the most deadly cancer and disaster to humanity. wicked pagans !!
gravenimage says
Ibrahim itace muhammed wrote:L
Oh, manos, you have forgotten so soon that your pagan mithraist god the Satan you Call holy spirit inspired you to commit the worst atrocities known to humanity, from genocidal killings during crusade wars, colonisation and deprivations of other nations, holocaust, transatlantic slave trade where more than 17million Africans thrown into deep sea water and eatened by sharks and exploitation of weak naťions through dubious economic relations. christianity is, therefore, the most deadly cancer and disaster to humanity. wicked pagans !!
……………………
What a load of projection. The Crusades were mostly defensive wars against *Muslim* aggression. Muslims started the African slave trade, which much preceded the Atlantic slave trade. Then, it was the West that *abolished* the hideous practice of slavery.
But not only has it never ended in the Muslim world, Ibrahim itace muhammed *himself* has said that Muslims can enslave Infidels and use them as slaves and sex slaves.
He has also claimed that Westerners are “exploiting” Islamic nations by not allowing themselves to be conquered and enslaved by Muslims.
don vito says
itace, you don’t know of your religion’ slave past…or present? -50,102s
gravenimage says
Oh, he knows, He has said that it is fine for Muslims to enslave Infidels.
Chand says
Humans of all denominations have committed the most horrible of crimes against humanity and it goes on.
Religions are only illusory, man-made divisions.
Basically they are all struggles amongst biological organisms for genetic advantage. Automatic robots go about their business of destroying others and promoting self. By conquering territory and massacring the Other. We are basically stupid machines, programmed by our genes.
And we use everything available for that purpose, including invoking God, Heaven, Sin, Holy Book, Racial superiority, Divine right, etc.
gravenimage says
Oh, good grief–where to start?
The idea that all faiths teach violence as does Islam is ridiculous.
Also grotesque is the idea that no humans have moral values. Thank goodness, this is quite false.
LeftisruiningCanada says
What you have noticed, Chand, is the common human nature that all of us share.
It is what Christians call “fallan” – we are all inclined towards “sin”, the breaking of the universal moral Law based upon the character and nature of the creator, God.
You are right to notice that we humans have used whatever excuse we have available in order to justify the unleashing of our sinful desires.
The problem is, from a Christian perspective, that islam not only gives such excuses by the cartload, but it says that unleashing ones sinful desires is a good thing. A very good thing.
This is why islam is evil.
New life in Christ is our best and only chance to escape our sinful nature, and the judgment it so desperately deserves.
gravenimage says
Trend: Muslim migrants becoming more religious after arriving in Moscow
..,………………..
Very disturbing–but we have sen proof of this with the number of Jihad terror attacks in Moscow.
gravenimage says
seen
Jayell says
This is surely a classic defensive aversion-reaction to an environment that is pereived as ‘unsuitable’. The decent thing to do is to leave and find a more suitable environment. However, since when does one expect muslims to ‘do the decent thing’ when their ‘faith’ teaches against decency?
MBR says
Such a reaction as you propose? To a degree, yes.
FWIW I interviewed an Iranian academic in Amsterdam in 2004 (some months before the van Gogh murder) and she discussed the results of her recently completed doctoral thesis based on matched groups of Iranian women (many of them Leftist-inclined) who had fled Khomeini’s regime and were then living in California or in The Netherlands. She then measured their observance of Islam after a period following their.arrival.
Long-short, the women in Holland became more observant while the American sample became less.
She put this down to the native Dutch being more reluctant to welcome the Iranian women, while the other group were made to feel more welcome in California.
Incidentally, she offered to a arrange a meeting later in the week with a good friend, one Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but I was leaving the country the following day and had to decline. (how stupid of me in hindsight).
Her CV is briefly outlined at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halleh_Ghorashi
gravenimage says
With all respect, this is blaming Jihad on the victims. No, the civilized Netherlands is not responsible for violent Jihad against her.
I’m sorry you did not have a chance to meet Ayaan Hirsi Ali, though (notice that *she* did not become a Jihadist living in the Netherlands–just the opposite).
I did meet her briefly at a book signing in San Francisco.
Eric jones says
Since Christianity has been revived in Russia is it possible that Muslims in Russia will convert to Christianity? Would Russia allow such converts to be killed under the apostasy law or protect those who convert to Christianity?
Eric
gravenimage says
Eric, Russia has allowed Shari’ah and blasphemy laws in Chechnya.