The mass adoption of Islam in the Golden Horde saved the Turkic population from slavery, Kazakh historian Zhaksylyk Sabitov said, according to infohub.kz.
According to the researcher, the khans of the Golden Horde practiced Islam, Christianity or Buddhism. The traditional beliefs that existed in the state in its early stages were of Mongol, not Turkic, origin. In the end, however, it was Islam that prevailed in the Golden Horde.
"The first key moment was when Uzbek Khan adopted Islam. The second was under Khan Janibek, when the sale of Turks into slavery stopped completely, because Muslims cannot be taken into slavery. This directly indicates that Islam already fully dominated among the majority of the Golden Horde's population," the historian noted.
Sabitov stressed that by the time the Kazakh Khanate was formed, Tengrism had completely disappeared. He called the modern interest in this religion an artificially reconstructed phenomenon.
"Modern Tengrism, which began to be promoted in Kazakhstan at the end of the 20th century, is essentially just as much a modern invention as Rodnovery, with its belief in Perun and Odin. It is an attempt to revive a dead tradition about which very little real historical data has survived," Sabitov concluded.
Earlier, the expert noted that ideas of Tengrism as a single ancient faith of the Turks are not supported by facts because of the absence of canonical texts. This faith existed only in the era of the Turkic khanates, after which the nomads began to adopt Manichaeism, Nestorianism and other religions.
Because of the shortage of sources, the expert compared attempts by modern scholars to recreate Tengrism to blind men describing an elephant by its individual body parts.
Zhaksylyk Sabitov has also said that rewriting the history of Kazakhstan is a normal and necessary process, because new discoveries help to understand the country's past more deeply.