Turkey is often considered the heartland of Islam. With over 90% of Turks identifying as Muslim Islam shapes much of Turkish culture and society. But how did Turks come to embrace Islam so fully? The path was a winding one filled with conquest, power struggles, and the rising and falling of empires.
Nomads Conquered and Converted
The early Turkic people were nomadic tribes without a unified religion. They originated from central Asia and were known for their impressive horsemanship and military skills. In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks, a faction of the Oghuz Turks, invaded Persia and adopted the local religion – Islam.
As Muslims, the Seljuks continued their expansion, eventually reaching eastern and central Anatolia. The Great Seljuk Empire soon emerged as a major power in the Muslim world. Islam provided the diverse Turkic tribes with a common identity and belief system.
The Ottoman Caliphate
The Seljuk empire declined in the late 12th century, giving rise to smaller Turkish principalities. One of these principalities led by Osman I would eventually unite Anatolia and become the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans embraced their Muslim identity. Sultan Selim I revived the title of caliph, positioning the Ottoman sultan as the spiritual leader of Islam. The ulema, religious scholars and bureaucrats, wielded immense influence over education, law and social affairs. Sufi orders and schools of Sunni Islam flourished under Ottoman rule.
By the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire controlled much of southeast Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. At its peak nearly 1 in 4 Muslims worldwide lived under Ottoman administration. This cemented the strong association between the Turkish people and Islam.
Secularization in the Republic
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War One led to sweeping reforms under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As part of a drive to modernize Turkey into a secular nation-state, Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924. Ottoman religious institutions were dismantled or put under state control.
These secularization policies provoked strong resistance. By the 1950s, Islam reemerged into Turkish politics and society. Religious schools were established and Sufi orders reappeared publicly. Today, Islam and secularism remain uneasy bedfellows in Turkish society. While Turkey has a secular constitution, Islam constantly challenges the boundaries of the public sphere.
Legacy of Historical Forces
The Turks embraced Islam through conquest and in seeking legitimacy as Muslim rulers. Islam became embedded in Turkish identity through centuries of Ottoman rule at the helm of the Islamic world. Ataturk’s secular reforms could repress but not erase this history. These powerful historical forces help explain why Islam continues to shape modern Turkey.
The Conversion of the Turks to Islam
The Turks first encountered Islam as the religion of a conqueror who slowly moved in on traditionally Turk-controlled regions and threatened Turk economic and political interests. Considering that the Turkic peoples had always been open to religious influences of foreign origin, their initial resistance in the face of the Muslim conquest may be regarded as serving the defence of their sources of revenue rather than that of their freedom of faith. The territory of the Western Türk Qaganate stretched from the Eastern Karatau Mountains to Jungaria, and Central Asia’s Iranian oasis city-states were also within its sphere of influence. It was there that Türk authority was first challenged by the advancing forces of Islam towards the end of the seventh century. During the first decade of the eighth century, Umayyad Commander Qutayba ibn Muslim forces consolidated Islamic rule in lower Tukháristán and conquered most of Soghdiana. By 715 the Turkic and Soghdian peoples of Central Asia had been forced to submit to Umayyad authority, and Transoxania came under Muslim rule. The Khazars were compelled to move their capital to Etil on the lower Volga in order to distance themselves from Muslim authority. Long-term resistance to Islam, however, was not possible, and the Khazar qagan converted to Islam for the first time in 737. Even though this opportunistic conversion did not last, by the late tenth century Khazaria had been permanently drawn into the Muslim sphere of influence and duly Islamised. Following the conversion of the Iranian peoples, Arabo-Iranian forces conducted joint expeditions into Turk territories and carried off large numbers of Turkic tribesmen to use them as slave soldiers in the Muslim armies. These slave soldiers (ghuláms or mamlúks) eventually rose to high positions in the Muslim military hierarchy, and some of them founded their own ruling dynasties, such as the Túlúnid (868-905) and Ikhshídid (935-969) dynasties in Egypt, the Ghaznavids of Afghanistan and Punjab (962-1186), and the Mamlúks of Egypt and Syria (1250-1517).
Islam and the Turkish State
The cAbbásid Caliphate, direct successor of the Umayyad State and the first four, so-called Rightly Guided, Orthodox Caliphs who had been managing the affairs of the Muslim community since the Prophet’s death in 632, was practically destroyed by the Mongol invasion and the conquest of its capital, Baghdad, in 1258. Even though the cAbbásid caliphs ruled in name from their Egyptian exile, their days of power were over. There was, therefore an apparent need for a Muslim ruler who could take upon himself the duties of the true head of the Islamic state. This role was claimed by the Ottoman sultan, and fulfilled by him until the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924.
At the same time, the Turkic peoples played a very significant role in the collapse of the Arab caliphate, whose political and religious inheritance they later claimed. First of all, Turk tribesmen formed the majority of the population in the Mongol empire where the Mongols themselves were but a minority, albeit an élite one. This phenomenon was the result of the Mongol policy of incorporating nomadic or semi-nomadic tribesmen of conquered regions into the Mongol army. As large Mongol-conquered areas were inhabited by Turks, more and more Turk fighting units were deployed in the Mongol campaigns. By the time the Golden Horde reached Russia, Poland and Hungary, the Turkic element was so strong that the Mongol invaders were called Tatars, the name of one of their Turkic units. Some Turkic groups played a role even more important than that of the warriors. Chief among them are the Uygurs who lent their writing system to the Mongols and provided advisers to Mongol rulers, including Chinghis Khan himself. In this context it can be established that some Turkic elements actively participated in destroying the Arab caliphate and created a kind of void in the Muslim world. By doing so they made it possible for other, Islamised, Turks to take over the political and religious leadership from the Arabs and recreate the Islamic empire with its new centre, Istanbul.
Some Muslim scholars believed that the Turks attained universal supremacy as a result of God’s growing concern about the state of Islam and the Muslims in the hands of the Arabs. During the cAbbásid era the Muslim Caliphate started down the road of political decline, became militarily weak, and was no longer able to defend the lands of Islam from non-Muslim invaders (such as the Mongols). Therefore God, ever wise and benevolent, took the reins out of the hands of the Arabs and appointed another people, the Turks, as the new custodians of Muslim traditions and the saviours of Islam. His choice was believed to have been based on the qualities of the semi-nomadic Turkic tribesmen who, unspoilt and virtuous, were not altogether unlike the Arabs who had first been chosen to receive the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad. The Turks went on to restore the unity of the Muslims, to revive the power of Islam, and to restore to the Muslim state its lost dignity and glory.2
When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 they became even more ardent in their desire to wipe out infidelity in the world and to carry the cause of Islam to universal victory. Mehmet II the Conqueror (1444-1446 & 1451-1481) saw himself as the inheritor of the Roman and Byzantine imperial tradition as well as the natural successor of the Arab Muslim caliphs and through them that of Prophet Muhammad. It was these imperial ambitions, fuelled by religious fervour, that drove Mehmet II and his successors to wage a holy war against Europe and other lands inhabited by disbelievers. As a result, the Ottoman Empire, apart from conquering the Balkans and Central Europe, expanded eastwards, where it subsumed the Arab provinces of the Middle East, and swept down to the south to conquer North Africa and the holy places of Arabia. Damascus, the former Umayyad capital, Cairo, the cultural centre of Islam, and Mecca and Medina, which cradled Islam in its early days, all came under Ottoman rule. It was then that the Sultan assumed the titles of ‘Servitor of the Two Holy Sanctuaries’ and ‘Defender of the Sharíca’.
When the Turks took over the leadership in the Islamic state, they changed both the form and the functions of government as had been known in the days of the Caliphate. They reinforced the government’s political power and the state became more stable and more enduring. Dynasties no longer came and went within the span of one century as had often happened before. A strong, centralised government became the distinguishing feature of the Ottoman Sultanate. The power of the state rested on well-established and well-organised institutions which were far better defined than those of the Arab Caliphate. Distinctive social classes appeared, the army, the bureaucracy, the men of religion and the judiciary all had their well-circumscribed powers and functions, as well as a clear system of regular recruitment and rules of promotion. Probably also building on what they had learnt over the centuries through contact with Chinese, Mongol, Byzantine and other governments, the Turks greatly improved the organisation of the Islamic state.
Islam was the traditional basis of the Ottoman state. In this Muslim community that constituted the state, it was Islam that created the framework of authority and provided the principle of political and social cohesion, and inspired loyalty in the subjects. The polity was seen as the Community of the Muslims, and its head was dedicated to the maintenance of the Islamic faith and to the extension of its realm. From a religious point of view, the sultan was the executor of the Sharíca (Islamic law), and his authority as head of state derived from this fact. In the Islamic theory of government, he was answerable to Islamic law, while his subjects were responsible to him. Any government was regarded legitimate only if and when it recognised the sovereignty of the Sharíca and respected the basic rights of the Muslim community guaranteed by it. Ottoman Turkey itself was conceived of as the leader and defender of all Muslims. It was, therefore, responsible for a greater Islamic unity that extended beyond the Turk-inhabited regions. In this realm all Muslims were equal, at least theoretically, irrespective of their origins. In the interest of preserving unity, the government dominated the state not only through precise organisation but also through force and through the control of people’s minds.
The newly established educational institutions and the Muslim scholars working in them inevitably brought the fruits of high Islamic culture into the midst of hitherto uneducated, mostly illiterate Turks. The first Ottoman medrese (school) set up in Iznik in 1331 was to be followed by hundreds of others throughout the empire. Here Turkish students of all backgrounds were familiarised with the Arabic language, the language of the Qur’án, and through it not only with the Islamic religious sciences but also the treasures of Greek and Persian philosophy, theoretical rational sciences (such as mathematics and natural sciences), practical rational sciences (such as ethics and political science), and many others.
How the Turks became Muslim
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