The khans of the Golden Horde professed Islam, Christianity or Buddhism. At the same time, it was the mass rooting of Islam that saved the Turkic population from slavery. This was told by Kazakh historian Zhaksylyk Sabitov. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
According to him, the traditional beliefs that existed in the Golden Horde in its early stages had Mongolian, not Turkic, origins. However, in the end, Islam won in the state.
"The first key moment is when Uzbek Khan adopted Islam. The second is that under Khan Zhanibek, the sale of Turks into slavery completely stopped, because Muslims cannot be taken into slavery. This directly indicates that Islam was already completely dominant among the majority of the population of the Golden Horde," the historian noted.
Sabitov emphasized that by the time of the formation of the Kazakh Khanate, Tengrism had completely disappeared. And the modern interest in this religion, the historian called artificially reconstructed.
"Modern Tengrism, which began to be activated in Kazakhstan at the end of the 20th century, is essentially the same kind of new invention as Rodnovery, where they believe in Perun and Odin. This is an attempt to revive a dead tradition, about which very little real historical data has been preserved," Sabitov concluded.
Recall that earlier the expert noted that ideas about Tengrism as a single ancient faith of the Turks are not supported by facts due to the absence of canonical texts. This faith existed only in the era of the Turkic Khaganates, after which the nomads began to adopt Manichaeism, Nestorianism and other religions.
Due to the scarcity of sources, the expert compared the attempts of modern scholars to recreate Tengrism to the attempt of blind men to describe an elephant by its individual body parts.
Zhaksylyk Sabitov also stated that rewriting the history of Kazakhstan is a normal and necessary process, because new discoveries help to understand the country's past more deeply.