The continuing protests that used the removing of a mosque’s minaret inside the town of Chela in Georgiaa€™s southern Samtskhe-Javakheti region on August 26 has offered to focus interest of the apprehensive coexistence within Georgia of an Orthodox Church as far back as the 4th millennium and a heterogeneous Muslim people, which within the last 20 years has come progressively consuming proselytizing clerics from Turkey and Iran.

During the 2002 census, 433,784 folks, or 9.9 percent for the Georgian society, determined on their own as Muslims, as stated in a monograph placed on the internet site kavpolit in December 2012.

Yet the forerunners of Muslim people determine your newest number is much large, over to 800,000 anyone. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili not too long ago offered the volume of Muslims in Georgia as a number of hundred thousand, and that of Muslim Georgians in the arena as „many million.“

A great number of Georgiaa€™s Muslims aren’t ethnic Georgians, however.

The most significant solitary group are generally Azerbaijanis, who happen to live compactly in three districts of southwest Georgia bordering on Azerbaijan, and just who designated 284,761 individuals 2002. A number of them are Shi’a, while other people continue with the Hanafi Sunni rite.

There are also very much smaller towns of Chechens and Avars in the east and northeast of the nation.

Georgian Muslims is split up into two main people.Continue reading→