Time magazine's Moscow correspondent Simon Shuster has published an article headlined "Underground Islam" devoted to the life of the Muslim community in the Russian capital, Moscow.
According to the author, Muslims in Moscow live in an atmosphere of xenophobia and existential woe.
"The local government does not do much to ease that enmity, and in some ways official policy exacerbates it," Shuster writes. "Moscow has 2 million Muslim residents and up to 2 million more Muslim migrant workers. Because of what amounts to state discrimination, the city has permitted the existence of only four mosques, none of which can fit more than 10,000 people."
"In the past week, the latent tensions started to erupt once again, sparked this time by a man from the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan who cracked open the skull of a police officer at a Moscow bazaar on July 27. Police have responded with raids to "decriminalize" outdoor markets across the city, arresting around 3,000 migrant workers, many of them Muslims. A makeshift internment camp of tents and port-o-potties was even set up in the north of the Russian capital to house all of the detainees. Neo-Nazi groups in St. Petersburg have meanwhile taken the police raids as an excuse to launch their own attacks, using baseball bats to smash the fruit stands of migrant workers. They promise to do the same in Moscow," the author writes.
Shuster believes that such am inhospitable environment forces Muslims to turn to a more radical version of their religion, which may lead to severe social problems in future.
"The problem, of course, is that Moscow’s Muslims have no safe enclave, nowhere to retreat. And as long as they have to come to their nation's capital to find work or to study, Muslims—and especially Salafis—will be forced to practice their religion at underground mosques. These are usually called "prayer rooms," and although no official count is possible there are estimated to be hundreds of them around the city. More radical interpretations of Islam are common there, and a lot of them lean toward Salafism, which is effectively banned in Russia," he writes.
