Window on Eurasia: How Many Ethnic Russians are Muslims?
Staunton, January 8 – Few issues are more explosive than the question of how many ethnic Russians are Muslims, because such converts are often thought to be especially inclined to and useful for terrorist activities and because such conversions challenge assumptions about links between Russianness and Orthodoxy and highlight weaknesses in Russian national identity.
And because there are no reliable data available – the Russian census does not ask about religious affiliations and at least some who have converted are understandably unwilling to run the risks of declaring this to the state – estimates vary widely from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand, with no on in a position to say exactly what the number is.