Russian President Vladimir Putin was seen kissing the Holy Quran during his visit to a mosque in Chechnya this week in a video that has gone viral on social media.
According to the Daily ExpressThe gold-encrusted Holy Quran was a gift to the 71-year-old Russian president from the “Prophet Jesus” mosque in Grozny, Chechnya, when he visited the region for the first time in 13 years.
Putin also met with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, with whom he visited the newly built mosque in the capital, which is intended to be an important religious site for Muslims in the region.
In the video, Putin can be seen receiving the Holy Quran and kissing it as soon as he held it as an act of showing respect for the Islamic faith.
The video also shows him posing for photographs with Kadyrov while holding the Holy Quran.
However, this is not the first time that Putin has received the Holy Quran as a gift.
Last year, during his visit to a historic mosque in Derbent in the Autonomous Republic of Dagestan of the Russian Federation, the Russian leader met with Muslim representatives and received a copy of the Holy Quran as a gift in celebration of Eid ul Adha.
At the time, Putin said that while desecration of the Holy Quran is not considered a crime in some countries, in Russia it is criminalized.
“In our country this is a crime both under the Constitution and under the penal code,” he said.
“The Quran is sacred to Muslims and should be sacred to others,” he said, thanking the representatives for the gift. “We will always abide by these rules.”
His comments came after Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban the Holy Quran in Sweden, desecrated the Muslim holy book repeatedly outside Stockholm's Central Mosque, as Muslims in Stockholm were celebrating Eid ul Adha.
