2 million ethnic Muslims adopted baptism in Russia

One can only pray
According Silantyev, the converts are predominantly Muslims by birth, while ‘those who really confess Islamic values and attend mosque on a regular basis rarely change their faith’.

‘The assimilation of ethnic and religious minorities is an inevitable process in any society. In Russia it is accelerated due to extremist activities’, the Islamic researcher believes.

For instance, he says, as a result of what happened in Beslan, the proportion of Muslims in North Ossetia has decreased at least by 30%, while in Beslan itself, where Muslims had comprised from 30 to 40% of the population, their number has decreased at least by half.

Tip of the gimme cap to Mark Shea for this article. Like him, I hope it’s true, but I would like to see some independent confirmation. In the first place, although Interfax is a relatively reliable source, the post-Soviet Russian press seems to publish even more nonsense than ours does. Secondly, it violates Mike’s Law of News Bulletins, which states that the likelihood of a news event being true is inversely proportional to how much one would like it to be true.