by Giulio Meotti
Canadian director Denys Arcand’s film “The Decline of the American” Empire opens with a professor, played by Rémy Girard, telling his students: “Three things are important in history: numbers, numbers, and numbers again”.
Khomeini knew about numbers and in 1989 he wrote a letter to Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in which the ayatollah invited the Soviet leader to embrace Islam to “fill the void in your system.”
The Soviet Union fell, Khomeini and Gorbachev died, but that letter seems to have found its way thanks to numbers.
There are 25 million Muslims in Russia, or 17 percent of the total population. They are the majority in 7 of the 21 republics of the Federation. Not only does Russia have a far greater percentage of Muslims than any other European country (almost double that of the UK), but China and the Islamic Ummah have only to watch the war in Ukraine and alternately root for both sides while waiting for a historical phenomenon ignored by Western newspapers to run its course.
The Telegraph reveals that “Rybar”, alias Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former Russian officer with 1.3 million followers and founder of one of the most followed Telegram channels “Z”, blacklisted by the European Union and the Kiev government, has just published a scathing analysis of demographic changes in Russia, using the Moscow suburb of Kotelniki to illustrate the point: “In schools, only 50 percent are Russian”.
Responding to Rybar, Ria Katyusha, another nationalist channel, compared the situation in Kotelniki to “similar stories about Paris, Hamburg or British cities”. Boris Rozhin, a blogger with over 850,000 subscribers, says Moscow’s transformation is reminiscent of “minority-dominated neighborhoods in Marseille and Paris.”
St. Petersburg in recent days: 150,000 Muslims gathered for prayers at the walls of the central mosque, near the Gorkovskaya metro station. The mosque could not accommodate everyone who wanted to come, streets were closed, changes were made to the operation of public transport, and tram service was suspended.
Political scientist Yuriy Podorozhniy says: “The Muslim population of Russia is growing. In a certain period, the share of Slavic and Muslim populations will change. Russia will naturally turn into a Muslim country. That is why Putin is negotiating with them, this will be a significant topic in the future.”
Sergey Mironov of the Duma said in December that Russia’s demographic rates were driving the country to “extinction.” Extinction.
By the middle of this century, Russia could have a Muslim majority.
According to Paul Goble, a leading analyst of Russian affairs, Moscow will be Islamic in 20 years.
Last year, more than 8.5 million migrants arrived in Russia, including more than a million from Tajikistan. And that’s not counting the growing number of Russians who have converted to Islam.
Russia imported 11 million migrants between 1991 and 2023 (officially, 11 more are needed million by 2040), while the population of the federation has shrunk by 16.7 million.
The Atlantic Council, a US think tank, said: “Vladimir Putin’s war has virtually guaranteed that for generations to come, Russia’s population will not only be smaller, but also older, frailer and less educated. It will certainly be less ethnically Russian and more religiously diverse.”
In 1991, 120 mosques. In twenty years, they have built 8,000. The largest mosque in Europe is in Moscow.
And the imam of the Great Mosque of Moscow, Ildar Alyautdinov, said: “Muslims have a great demographic mission: because of the high birth rate, to make Russia a Muslim majority country.”
A Jamestown Foundation report, “How Islam Will Change Russia,” explained what is to come: “Given demographic changes, Muslims will represent between a third (according to the most conservative estimates) and half (according to the most ‘alarmist’ assessments) of the Russian population by 2050”.
A third of Moscow will be Islamic by 2035, said the mufti. Sometimes the sensation caused by particular events plays a role, such as the Muslim prayer meetings that filled a large Moscow street, Olimpiyskiy Prospekt, giving the impression of an apocalyptic prophecy for the future of Russia.
Russian essayist Sasha Lensky writes in the Spectator: “In Moscow, the Muslim population has increased fivefold since the late 1990s. In St. Petersburg, in 2022, Eid, the Muslim holiday, was celebrated by 160,000 people; in 2023, the number doubled. Even if Muslims do not constitute 30 percent of the population by the end of this decade, as the Mufti has claimed, there will be enough of them to change the ‘Russian way of life.’ If things continue on this path, my children may see radical changes – in schools, legislation, dress codes and so on – and my grandchildren may study the Koran, rather than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.”
It almost sounds like Aleksei Navalny’s prophecy.
“There is no prison in Russia where you can’t hear a Muslim praying on the other side of the wall,” Navalny said in a video link from the Siberian penal colony where he would die a month later. He was speaking to the Supreme Court against the ban on keeping more than one book in solitary confinement, a restriction originally imposed to ban the Koran and Islamic texts from prisons: “The system considers any element related to Islam to be a threat.”
Putin says that “Russia is a multinational and multiconfessional.” The European Union argues the same thing. The difference between the two cultural goulashes is that only in Europe do we see Ramadan in churches. But from Marseille to Moscow, the “multi” will always eventually give way to a single “uni.” Or, more precisely, a single ummah.
And as Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman writes in a paper for the Israeli Begin Center, “the influence of radical Islam, with its anti-Western and anti-Semitic tendencies, could spread throughout Russia and begin to influence federal government policy. This could pose significant threats to Europe and Israel.”
Numbers, numbers and more numbers. And in the long run, all Europe is condemning itself.