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Entry: Let's Sit Out World War IV Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/lets_sit_out_world_war_iv#8716 Post contents: The article by pseudonymous "Spengler" cited unspecified UN data to support the projection that "Muslims will compose a majority of citizens of the Russian Federation by as early as 2040". That's just sloppy, for many reasons. For one thing, those demographic projections were based on an extraordinary, and very short, transitional period in Russia's history, the interregnal "Time of Troubles" of the 1990s. It cited the decline of Russian life expectancy in the 1990s. But statistical life expectancy declined by, what, around 50 percent during WWII, then rapidly recovered in the 1950s-60s. It will do so again as Russia's recovery continues. Then there's the problem of defining "Muslims" in Russia. At least until the 1990s (I don't know if this has changed), all Russians were categorised according to "nationality" on their internal ID cards (internal passports, a misnomer), and those identities overlapped with religious background. EG, to be "Jewish" was considered a "nationality", not a religion, and many or most Russian Jews were non-practicing (Boris Pasternak was one.) Similarly, many Russian minorities of originally Muslim background are non-practicing Muslims, but this is not reflected in the demographic data which is based on old Soviet ways of categorising national minorities. Just because the Soviet, and later Russian governments classified people as "Tatars" didn't mean those people practiced Islam; it's an ethnic, not a religious category. And even as ethnic/national categories, they're very sloppy due to the assimilation of Tatars and other Muslim ethnicities into the White/European Russian population over the centuries. In the Urals I once met a Tatar - officially designated as a Tatar - who had blonde hair and blue eyes and was culturally 100 percent Russian and fiercely patriotic in the traditional Russian way; he just happened to descend from Tatars, centuries ago. In other words, there are very few real Muslims in Russia, except in the margins like Chechnya. Sent at: 2008 09 06