In an interview featured in Itogi on Oct. 31, Roman Silantyev, executive secretary of the Inter-Religious Council of Russia and author of "The Recent History of the Islamic Community in Russia," added that their number was increasing and that "in certain regions, they already form a majority of the population."

At the same time, Silantyev insisted that the total number of Muslims in the Russian Federation was only 10 million, a number far lower than those offered by others including President Vladimir Putin, and that it was not increasing relative to the population of the country as a whole.

According to his research, Silantyev said, the Russian nation was still a powerful assimilator of other groups, with 80 percent of the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians becoming Christian. Such conversions, he added, had only increased as a result of the actions of extremists.

Every time there was a terrorist act, he continued, "thousands and perhaps even tens of thousands of people from among ethnic Muslims are baptized" -- although Silantyev stressed that these were exclusively "ethnic Muslims" who were born into historically Islamic communities rather than practicing Muslims, "who rarely change their faith."

As a result of these processes, he said, there were now some two million Christians among the members of historically Islamic peoples, a number many times larger than the 2,500 ethnic Russians who had converted to Islam and about whom so much has been written in recent years.

In other comments, Silantyev said that "to link the growth of terrorism to the living standards of the population" and to suggest that providing more funds to those in areas affected by extremist attacks represents "a serious strategic error," thus implicitly criticizing what has been a central tenet of Moscow's recent rhetoric on the subject.

Increasing federal aid to these regions, he argued, "will only worsen the situation because it will be viewed by the Wahhabis in the North Caucasus as tribute by a cowed opponent," one that is demonstrating weakness and against whom Muslim radicals should push even harder.

And Silantyev added that those who blamed terrorism on everyone but the terrorist -- "corrupt officials, the MVD (Interior Ministry), disorder and poverty, the Orthodox Church, and the mass media" -- were also making a huge mistake. The terrorists, who Silantyev said, "are recruited by sects which dream of world rule" must be held personally accountable.

Were it possible to cure them, that would be best thing, he said, but "to the extent that a war is going on and such an opportunity typically does not appear, the state does not have any other choice besides destroying them. No one has yet come up with a better idea."

Silantyev said that Christians and other opponents should not despair about the future, as did the author of the notorious anti-utopia "The Mosque of Notre Dame de Paris." Instead, they should recognize that the evolving situation was "unfavorable for Islam from a strategic point of view" both in the world at large and in Russia itself.

"With each new terrorist act -- be it in New York, London or with us -- the number of people who consider that human rights are more important than anything else is becoming ever smaller," he said. "And at a certain moment after the Nth such act, a turning point will occur in Western society, and the Islamic world won't survive it."

Therefore, Silantyev continued, "those who are pushing [the Muslim world] into a clash with Christian civilization in fact are leading it to destruction." And the Moscow analyst suggested that "the very same trend is taking place in [the Russian Federation] as well."

Of course, for Orthodox Christians, Silantyev added, "such apocalyptic scenarios are unacceptable. The Russian Orthodox Church does not view Islam as an antagonistic religion and considers that it is possible to live with it in peace. And," he insisted, " those are not empty words: the two have lived together many hundreds of years.

"But members of the Orthodox Church can coexist normally only with traditional Muslims who do not consider [Orthodox] Christians to be pagans and do not call for their destruction. If at some point, radicals come to power in the Russian Islamic community, this will be a catastrophe and the end of inter-confessional peace."

That is why the Russian Orthodox Church supports providing more funds to the Muslim Spiritual Directorates not so much to build mosques or send people on the Hajj, but rather for "the preparation of literate imams who would be able to enter into debate with the Wahhabis and when possible return fire."

Silantyev's comments are certain to be controversial, something that the journalist at Itogi clearly recognized. On the one hand, he suggested that many might see the ideas Silantyev presented as reflecting the views of the Russian Orthodox Church whose employee he is, rather than as the product of scholarly research.

In response, Silantyev insisted that he was not speaking for the Church but as a scholar. He further suggested that those who exaggerate the number of Muslims are to blame for the rising tide of xenophobia in Russia and not those who like himself who say that the numbers of Muslims are in fact smaller than many have put forward.

And, on the other hand, the newspaper invited Geidar Dzhemal, the chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia, to comment on what Silantyev had said. Not surprisingly, Dzhemal dismissed most of Silantyev's statistics and the arguments he advanced.

But Dzhemal did say that he did agree that the traditional Muslim structures grouped in the Muslim Spiritual Directorates could play an important role but only if they were thoroughly reformed and filled with new people rather than "careerists and conformists" more interested in their ties with the government than in their faith.

Until those changes take place, the Muslim leader said, young people outraged by the actions of local officials and failing to get spiritual sustenance from the "traditional" Muslim leadership would turn either to other faiths or to those within Islam calling for fundamental change.

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