Moscow Times:
The 22 men bowed down before Allah and pressed their arms and shoulders together and chanted. They closed their eyes. They melded into a single body.
And in their unity, they seemed unfazed by the ultranationalists who days earlier had firebombed this city’s only mosque for the second time in a week.
Outside the mosque, the scars of the attacks were fading but visible: the spray-painted swastika, the white paint slopped over racist graffiti, the ugly rant scrawled on a rear gate — “Death to blacks! Glory to Russia! Forward Slavs!”
But as the worshipers rose from their prayers, slipped on their shoes and headed out into the night, they voiced few fears about lurking thugs. There were no guards posted in the courtyard, no locks on the front gate.
“We’re a part of this society,” explained Rustam Batrov, 28, the Yaroslavl Mosque’s imam. “This is our motherland. We’ve been here for 500 years. We aren’t immigrants.”
Here.