Spread of Islam - By Region - Inner Asia and Eastern Europe

Inner Asia and Eastern Europe

One of the earliest introductions of Islam into Eastern Europe was through the work of an early 11th century Muslim prisoner who was captured by the Byzantines during their war against Muslims. The Muslim prisoner was brought into the territory of the Pechenegs where he taught and converted individuals to Islam. Little is known about the timeline of the Islamization of Inner Asia and the Turkic peoples who lay beyond the bounds of the caliphate. Around 7th century and 8th century, there were some states of Turkic peoples like Turkic Khazar Khaganate (See Khazar-Arab Wars) and Turkic Turgesh Khaganete who fought against the caliphate in order to stop Arabization and Islamization in Asia. From the 9th century onwards, the Turks (at least individually, if not yet through adoption by their states) began to convert to Islam. Histories merely note the fact of pre-Mongol Central Asia's Islamization. The Bulgars of the Volga are noted to have adopted Islam by the 10th century under Almış, to whom the modern Volga Tatars trace their Islamic roots. When the Friar William of Rubruck visited the encampment of Batu Khan of the Golden Horde, who had recently completed the Mongol invasion of Volga Bulgaria, he noted "I wonder what devil carried the law of Machomet there".

Another contemporary known to have been Muslim, was the Qarakhanid dynasty of the Kara-Khanid Khanate which lay much further east, and which was established by Karluks who were Islamizated after Battle of Talas. However, the modern day history of the Islamization of the region - or rather a conscious affiliation with Islam - dates to the reign of the ulus of the son of Genghis Khan, Jochi, who founded the Golden Horde. Kazakhs, Uzbeks and some Muslim populations of the Russian Federation trace their Islamic roots to the Golden Horde and while Berke Khan was the first Mongol monarch to officially adopt Islam and even oppose his kinsman Hulagu Khan in the defense of Jerusalem at the Battle of Ain Jalut, it was only much later that the change became pivotal and the Mongols converted en masse when a century later Uzbeg Khan converted - reportedly at the hands of the Sufi Saint Baba Tukles.

Some of the Mongolian tribes became Islamized. Following the brutal Mongol invasion of Central Asia under Hulagu Khan and after the Battle of Baghdad (1258) Mongol rule extended across the breadth of almost all Muslim lands in Asia, and the caliphate was destroyed and Islam was persecuted by the Mongols and replaced by Buddhism as the official religion of the land. In 1295 however, the new Khan of the Ilkhanate, Ghazan converted to Islam and two decades later the Golden Horde followed suit. The Mongols had been religiously and culturally conquered, this absorption ushered in a new age of Mongol-Islamic synthesis that shaped the further spread of Islam in central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

In the 1330s the Mongol ruler of the Chagatai Khanate converted to Islam, causing the eastern part of his realm called Moghulistan to rebel. However during the next three centuries these Buddhist, Shamanistic and Christian Turkic and Mongol nomads of the Kazakh Steppe and Xinjiang would also convert at the hands of competing Sufi orders from both east and west of the Pamirs. The Naqshbandi's are the most prominent of these orders, especially in Kashgaria where the western Chagatai Khan was also a disciple of the order.