Introduction

So it is easy to forget that some 15 to 20 million Russians are Muslims, over ten per cent of the population, and that Islam is Russia’s second most professed religion. Islam is a topic of obvious central importance in global and European politics today. The growth of Muslim communities across Europe raised questions of representation, integration, cultural adaptation and exclusion well before 9/11 brought the spectre of ‘radicalized’ political Islam to the fore. Yet Russia represents an often-neglected but critical dimension in this debate.