Where in the world is ...

Take a look at the photograph of the mosque below:

Source

Also look at the photo below of the same mosque, from a different angle, with the overflow crowd of Muslims praying:

Source

It is a huge mosque that can accommodate about 10,000 people.

Now for the question: Where is this mosque located?

If you didn't know, chances are that you would use your critical thinking skills. 

You would immediately notice that the buildings around look modern and are well spaced.  Your mind thinks about the photos of mosques in countries with large Muslim populations, like Indonesia, Nigeria, India, or Pakistan.  In those countries, you would expect to see evidence of the dense and crowded human settlements all around such a mosque.  Here, there is no such evidence of a crowded settlement.

You are now left wondering where this mosque could be located.

You look again at the photo with worshipers all around the structure.  You look beyond them.  The buildings perhaps look like what you would expect in a country that is more affluent than Indonesia, Nigeria, India, or Pakistan.  Could it be Iran, you wonder.  But there is something about the red building in the first photo that makes you ditch Iran as the location.

Because the blogger lives in the US, you entertain the possibility that the huge mosque is somewhere in America.  Like in Detroit or Minneapolis or Houston which have large Muslim populations.  But then you notice that the mosque has no huge parking lots and parking structures nearby.  It then occurs to you that there is no way 10,000 people in America, whatever their religion, walk or take public transit to a place of worship.

You scratch your head.  All that does is remind you to shampoo your hair, and you have no idea where this magnificent mosque is located.

Your jaw drops when you read that this mosque is in Moscow, Russia.

It is a new mosque that was built on the same site as an older mosque that was demolished.  In 2015, Moscow's Cathedral Mosque was opened by, hold your breath, Putin.

Flanked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, President Vladimir V. Putin used his speech at the inauguration of the mosque, which he called the biggest mosque in Europe, to emphasize that Russia would develop its own system of religious education and training to counter extremism. ...

“Finally, Moscow, which lays claim to the title of the biggest Muslim city in Europe, has a big mosque,” said Aleksei Malashenko, an expert on Islam at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It shows that the center of Islamic life in the Russian Federation is in Moscow.”

Yes, Putin was there at the inauguration.  And maybe you are shocked about Moscow with "the title of the biggest Muslim city in Europe."

I am with you; as I wrote in this post in 2009, I would never have correctly guessed Russia's Muslim population.

The number of Muslims in Russia is mostly an educated guess because the government's data on this is suspect.  A recent US State Department report suggests that "there were 25 million Muslims in 2018, approximately 18 percent of the population." 

In case you are now wondering whether there are Muslims in Ukraine, the answer is yes, of course.

When we think of the diffusion of Islam, we often forget that Mongols went west too and took Islam with them.  The Ottoman Empire was also an important player in the geopolitics of the region and in spreading Islam.  In fact, Crimea, which is where Putin's Ukrainian invasion began, has a long history with Muslims:

From the mid-1400s it existed as the Crimean Khanate, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, during which time it became the center of a roaring slave trade. 

The modern name "Crimea" seems to have come from the language of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group that emerged during the Crimean Khanate. The Tatars called the peninsula "Qırım." While Russia, which annexed the state in 1783, officially tried to change the name back to Taurica, Crimea was still used informally and eventually reappeared officially in 1917.

All I want to do here is remind ourselves that the world is one complicated place, and that it takes a lot of work to understand it.

(A simple question popped up inside me.  "It is Ramadan now.  I wonder how it is being observed in Russia."  That, in turn, led me to wonder about mosques in Moscow.  This post was the result!)