[BRIEF NOTE] The Muslims of Ukraine
Mar. 24th, 2005 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldLast month, I was interested to come across the article "Eastern Europe Muslims Crave for Attention: Activist", which gave specific figures for Muslim populations in eastern Europe: "Russia comes first with 21 million Muslims, followed by Bulgaria with 2.6 million, Albania with 2.4 million, Bosnia with 2.2 million and Ukraine with 2 million Muslims." A related online chat gave more detail to the region.
Islam Online, like other religious advocacy sites, has a tendency to maximize the numbers of the faithful, out of an understandable desire to maximize the numbers of the faithful that, alas, doesn't exactly conform to accepted statistics. For instance, as I noted tangentially in a previous posting, only one-tenth of Bulgaria's nearly eight million people are Muslims, while the figure of a quarter-million Slovenian Muslims quoted in the chat is a five-fold overstatement.
Even so, there is abundant evidence that suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, if not perhaps up to the quoted figure of two million. The Religious Information Service of Ukraine's website suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, and not limited only to the quarter-million Crimean Tatars. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, since Ukraine was and remains relatively more prosperous than the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the massive emigration from the South Caucasus has been directed towards Russia, and while Ukraine is still poorer than Russia, it makes some sense to assume that at least some of these migrants have made it to Ukraine.
How many Ukrainian Muslims are there? I don't know; I can't find any reliable data sources on the Internet or elsewhere. Even if you estimate a moderate figure of one million Muslims, though, that's still a relatively high proportion: Compare the half-million Muslims living in a Spain of 43 million, or the one million or so Muslims in an Italy of 58 million. If anyone has any firm data, please share it with me; I'm really quite curious to find out more details.
Islam Online, like other religious advocacy sites, has a tendency to maximize the numbers of the faithful, out of an understandable desire to maximize the numbers of the faithful that, alas, doesn't exactly conform to accepted statistics. For instance, as I noted tangentially in a previous posting, only one-tenth of Bulgaria's nearly eight million people are Muslims, while the figure of a quarter-million Slovenian Muslims quoted in the chat is a five-fold overstatement.
Even so, there is abundant evidence that suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, if not perhaps up to the quoted figure of two million. The Religious Information Service of Ukraine's website suggests that Ukraine's Muslim population is quite large, and not limited only to the quarter-million Crimean Tatars. This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, since Ukraine was and remains relatively more prosperous than the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the massive emigration from the South Caucasus has been directed towards Russia, and while Ukraine is still poorer than Russia, it makes some sense to assume that at least some of these migrants have made it to Ukraine.
How many Ukrainian Muslims are there? I don't know; I can't find any reliable data sources on the Internet or elsewhere. Even if you estimate a moderate figure of one million Muslims, though, that's still a relatively high proportion: Compare the half-million Muslims living in a Spain of 43 million, or the one million or so Muslims in an Italy of 58 million. If anyone has any firm data, please share it with me; I'm really quite curious to find out more details.
