Photo Gallery Msocow's Mosque Problem
Fireworks over the Akhmad Kadyrov mosque in Grozny, Chechnya, in 2009. Up to 20 million Muslims live in Russia today.
Moscow doesn't have enough mosques for the 1.5 million Muslims living there. Here worshippers queue to get into one of them last week. There are plans to build a new mosque which would only be the fifth in Moscow, even though this metropolis of 10.5 million has more than 1.5 million Muslim residents. In comparison, Berlin, which has a proportion of Muslims amounting to less than a sixth of Moscow's, has at least six large mosques.
Recently tens of thousands of believers could not get into the city's largest mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Many simply unrolled prayer carpets on the street in front of the mosque. The Moscow council of muftis says the city should have up to 40 mosques.
Islamic extremists were also behind the suicide attacks on public transport that shook the Russian capital this March and resulted in 40 deaths. Two female suicide bombers detonated explosives on two packed Moscow metro trains during the morning rush hour. The photo shows people gathered outside Park Kultury metro station, where one of the attacks happened on March 29.
