 All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, today's video is out of self-interest. I want to understand how the Turks became Muslim. This video has been uploaded by the channel Umar of the Orient. If this is the first time for you seeing my face, I'm a recent revert to Islam. I come from Orthodox Christianity. My parents are from the Balkan and the Balkan has been occupied by the Ottoman Empire for over 500 years and therefore we on the Balkan always thought that Islam is the Turks religion. We always thought that Turks have always been Muslim and it is their religion that they are trying to spread. On the Balkan, little people are aware that Islam comes from Arabia. They truly believe that Islam is Turkish and so did I. Therefore, I'm extremely curious to find out how the Turks became Muslim in the first place. Guys, before we start the video, as always, leave me a thumbs up if you like the content. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and support the channel via the links in the description box below. And now with no further ado, let's have a look. Did you know that more than half of all the Muslim countries in the world have at one point in history been ruled by the Turks? You see, most people know the Turks as the people who live in Turkey, a country that sits right between Europe and the Middle East. Many of them have blue eyes and blonde hair and if it weren't for the fact that they were Muslim, you could have confused them for being just another European Mediterranean nation. But in reality, the Turks come from a very far away land that's part of a bunch of countries that were once all part of the same family somewhere in the flat grassy deserts of Central Asia in a place called the Great Steppe. In the 400s, the Turks were a bunch of small nomadic tribes migrating from place to place and warring with other tribes in an actually quite similar way to the Arabs before Islam. And it was around this time that the Mongols were starting to unite and pose a serious threat to the other nations in the region. And so by the 500s, Turks had packed their bags and started migrating west. Now, the thing about the Great Steppe is that it's wide, flat and not a whole lot of people live there. So when the Turks moved west, they were able to expand into huge swaths of land with very little resistance and eventually they consolidated their new land into the first Turkic Empire. Fast forward a couple hundred years and the Muslims have expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula and now they're on the edge of the Turkic Empire. And at the same time, China was swallowing up land in the east and was headed right for the Muslims and the Turks were caught in the middle. A small group of Turkish soldiers decided to join the Muslims in the Battle of Talas, an immensely important battle and the rivalry between the Muslims and the Chinese. And that's when they first heard the message of Islam. The Muslims managed to defeat the Chinese and some of the Turks even converted after the battle and this moment in history was the starting point for the rest of the Turks to eventually embrace Islam. A couple hundred years later, a merchant from Bukhara, which is where Imam Bukhari is from by the way, was traveling through Central Asia to do business. He asked one of the local Turkish rulers if he could build a masjid there since Muslims were now using the trade route a lot and they needed somewhere to pray. The ruler granted him permission and even gave him some money to build it. Eventually the masjid was built and the Muslim caravans used to stop by and pray and rest. And one 12 year old boy by the name of Satuk Bukhara Khan saw this and became curious. He entered the masjid and saw Muslims there praying five times a day and began asking questions. Soon after he decided to become Muslim himself but he kept his Islam a secret from his family. You see the young boy was the nephew of the ruler and he was next in line and he did not want to jeopardize his chance to bring his people to Islam. Eventually Satuk took the throne becoming the first Muslim Turkish Sultan. And by the way his capital was in Qashgar which is one of the main cities where the Uyghurs live in China and the Uyghurs are Muslim Turks. It's all coming together now. So in the year 934 I didn't know that they were Muslim Turks. I thought they are Chinese people that are Muslim. Burned his entire empire from Tengriism to Islam. And as the Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan put it, 200,000 tents became Muslim. Which has got to be reached. There's a cool movie with Antonio Banderas. Half a million people if not more considering each tent is a family. It was called the Karakhanid Empire and it was the first Muslim Turkish nation and their descendants would become the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, the Uyghurs in China and the Khazaras in Afghanistan. And it just so happens that one of the enemies of the Karakhanids. I'm trying to piece together how the Turkic people that you now find in Uzbekistan etc and the Anatolian people became Turkis. So if anybody knows please let me know in the comment section. Pete them ended up making another Turkic tribe. You see the Samanids were a Persian tribe that lived nearby and they were fighting over this land here. And the Samanids they had been Muslim for a while now and they were spreading the message of Islam in Central Asia. And it was great that the Karakhanids had become Muslim but they still had a land dispute from before. The Samanid Sultan Ismail Samani decided that the best way to solve this dispute was to ally with other Turks in the region. He solidified an alliance with another powerful chieftain by marrying his daughter to him. Ismail quickly became influential over them and eventually the entire Turkic tribe embraced Islam. They were called the Awuz Turks and their descendants would become the Turkmen of Turkmenistan the other areas of Azerbaijan. See all of this is happening outside of modern day Turkey. So those are the Turkic people and the way that I understood it is that the Anatolian people live in what we nowadays know as Turkey. Again correct me if I'm wrong. On the Qashqai in Iran and of course the modern Anatolian Turks of Turkey. But that still leaves the biggest Turkic country Kazakhstan. You see the Kazakhs were originally called Kipchaks and they created their own empire just north of the Black Sea. It was a huge empire and it stretched from Hungary to Mongolia until once again the Mongols showed up and they just got smashed. The Mongols took over their lands and now ruled over the Kipchaks. Subhanallah wouldn't you know it. These Mongols became Muslim too. This part of the Mongol Empire was called the Golden Horde and in 1313 Uzbekhan became its Sultan. And then a very similar story to Satuk Burakhon who was that Sultan of that first Turkic nation we talked about. Uzbek became Muslim at a young age and waited for his turn to be Sultan. Once he rose to power he immediately began preaching Islam to his people. Soon enough the entire Golden Horde accepted Islam both the Mongols and the Turks within it. The Kipchak Turks would later become the Kazakhs of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz of Kyrgyzistan and the Tatars of Russia and Eastern Europe. The Mongols on the other hand would go on to mix in with other Turkish nations which supports the idea that Uzbeks got their name from Uzbekhan. They may actually be a Turkic Mongol mix after all. And what's interesting is that these different Turkic and Mongolian tribes went on to build some of the most powerful and longest lasting empires in Muslim history. The Ottomans, the Seljuks, and the Zengids who Slah-e-Din was the general under by the way all came from the Oghuz Turks. The Memluks and the Khwarezmiyan and the Nogai Horde all came from the Kipchak. And the Muslim Turkic Mongols went on to create the Mughal Empire, the Togoluk dynasty, and the Crimean Khanate. The Turks have contributed immensely to the Umma and have spread Islam in lands as far away as Mongolia, to Ukraine, to India, and to Bosnia. Even think about the Lipka Tatars who are Muslim Turks in Poland who built the first Masjid in New York City. Or think about Kucum Khan and his army of Turks who spread Islam to the people in the middle of Siberia while at the same time fighting a war with the Russians. The Turks are a massive group of people with hundreds of not thousands of little tribes and nations scattered across the earth, each with their own language and culture and history, tracing their roots back to a similar origin, and yet somehow they all became Muslim in different ways. And Alhamdulillah that they became our brothers in Islam. And if you liked this video and find it at all interesting, please give it a thumbs up, share it with your friends, and subscribe if you want more videos about Muslim history and culture from around the world. But how did that happen? How did that immigration from the Turkic people into the Anatolian land happen? And how did the Anatolian people then become Turks, became the Ottomans later on? This would be extremely interesting for me to find out, so please let me know in the comment section if you know anything about this, or you can post videos about this subject as well. Moreover, what is super fascinating to me here is that Anatolian people, they did not speak a Turkic language as far as I know, prior to the immigration of those Turkic people. So therefore, how did that happen? As you see, I have plenty of questions here myself. I'm really curious about this subject, because as I said, growing up with Balkan parents, the Muslims, the Turks, it was synonymous. We always thought that Turks are Muslim, and they are bringing their religion onto the Balkan, and they want to take over our lands, and they hate us, and we are supposed to hate them. Yadi, yadi, yada. All right, guys, please let me know in the comment section. This is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to support this channel, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support, guys. And as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.