What is a Russian Muslim?

There is great difficulty in counting or even estimating the number of Muslims in Russia. To begin with, there are an estimated 20 million Russians (about 13%) who are often defined as “ethnic Muslims”—meaning people whose parents or ancestors were adherents of Islam.

But, of course, Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. And there are no official statistics on the number of Muslim believers. The Russian Orthodox Church has estimated the number of Russian Muslims at 3-4% of the population, while some Muslim leaders put the figure as high as 15-20%.

Aleksei Malashenko, an expert at the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow, said counting “ethnic Muslims” is preferable to estimating actual believers. “There has been a lot of fuss about whether to count ‘ethnic Muslims’ or practicing Muslims,” he said. “I prefer to operate with the 20 million ethnic Muslims figure. Because if you start counting Muslims who really observe the Koran, you should also count only the Orthodox who really practice. And that is very subjective and very difficult to determine. The important thing is where the person feels he belongs. The majority of ‘ethnic Muslims’ probably feel some connection to their roots.”