Greek Muslims

Reasons for conversion to Islam

Devşirme (blood tax) was one of the organized practices by which the Ottomans took boys from their Christian families, who were later converted to Islam with the aim of selecting and training the ablest of them for leading positions in the Ottoman society. As a rule, the Ottomans did not require the Greeks to become Muslims, although a minority did so in order to avert the socioeconomic hardships of Ottoman rule, take advantage of greater employment prospects and possibilities of advancement in the Ottoman government bureaucracy and military. Subsequently, these people became part of the Muslim community of the millet system, which was closely linked to Islamic religious rules. At that time people were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than to their ethnic origins. Muslim communities prospered under the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman law did not recognize such notions as ethnicity and the Muslims of any ethnic background enjoyed precisely the same rights and privileges. Another major reason for converting to Islam was the well-organized taxation system based on religion. Major taxes were the Defter and İspençe and the more severe haraç whereby a document was issued which stated that "the holder of this certificate is able to keep his head on the shoulders since he paid the Χαράτσι tax for this year..." All these of course were waived if the person would convert and become Muslim,. During the Greek War of Independence, Ottoman Egyptian troops under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt ravaged the island of Crete and the Greek countryside of the Morea where the Muslim Egyptian soldiers enslaved vast numbers of Christian Greek children and women. Ibrahim arranged for the enslaved Greek children to be forcefully converted to Islam en masse. The enslaved Greeks were subsequently transferred to Egypt where they were sold as slaves. Several decades later in 1843, the English traveler and writer Sir John Gardner Wilkinson described the state of enslaved Greeks who had converted to Islam in Egypt:

White Slaves — In Egypt there are white slaves and slaves of colour. [...] There are [for example] some Greeks who were taken in the War of Independence. […] In Egypt, the officers of rank are for the most part enfranchised slaves. I have seen in the bazars of Cairo Greek slaves who had been torn from their country, at the time it was about to obtain its liberty; I have seen them afterwards holding nearly all the most important civil and military grades; and one might be almost tempted to think that their servitude was not a misfortune, if one could forget the grief of their parents on seeing them carried off, at a time when they hoped to bequeath to them a religion free from persecution, and a regenerated country. (Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, 1843)

Greek Muslims of Pontus and the Caucasus

Muslims of Pontic Greek origins, speakers of Pontic Greek (named Ρωμαίικα Roméika, not Ποντιακά Pontiaká as it is in Greece), is spoken by sizable numbers along communities spread out near the southern Black Sea coast. Grecophone Pontian Muslims are found within Trabzon province and inhabit the following areas: Pontic is spoken in the town of Tonya and in 6 villages of Tonya district. It is spoken in 6 villages of the municipal entity of Beşköy in the central and Köprübaşı districts of Sürmene. Grecophone Muslims are also located in 9 villages of the Galyana valley in Maçka district. They were resettled there in former abandoned Greek Orthodox Pontian dwellings from the area of Beşköy after a devastating flood in 1929. The largest cluster of Pontian speakers is found in the Of valley. There are 23 Grecophone Muslim villages in Çaykara district, though due to migration these numbers have fluctuated and according to native speakers of the area there were around 80 Grecophone Muslim villages in Çaykara district. 12 Grecophone Muslim villages are also located in the Dernekpazarı district. Over the years, heavy emigration from the Trabzon region to other parts of Turkey to places such as Istanbul, Sakarya, Zonguldak, Bursa and Adapazarı has occurred. While emigration to places outside Turkey has also transpired when people left for Germany as invited workers during the 1960s. Sizable numbers of Grecophone Muslims in Pontus have retained knowledge and or are fluent in Greek and it is a mother tongue for many and even the young. Males are usually bilingual in both Turkish and Pontic Greek, while there are many women who are monolingual only in Pontic Greek. Grecophone Muslim Pontians can also be found in other settlements such as Rize (with a large concentration in İkizdere district), Erzincan, Gümüşhane, parts of Erzerum province, and the former Russian Empire's province of Kars Oblast (see Caucasus Greeks) and Georgia (see Islam in Georgia). Today these Greek speaking Muslims regard themselves and identify as Turks. In Turkey, their communities are sometimes referred to as Rum, although as with the word Yunan meaning Greek in Turkish or Greek in the English language, the term Rum is perceived within Turkey to be associated with Greece and or Christianity and they refuse to be identified as such. Grecophone Muslim Pontians when speaking their language refer to it as Romeyka, whereas when conversing in Turkish they call it Rumca or Rumcika. Rumca is the name used in Turkish to call all Greek dialects spoken in Turkey, a term akin to Romeyka derived from the word ρωμαίικα or Roman with Byzantine origins. Current day Greeks refer to their language as ελληνικά or Greek, an appellation that replaced the previous term Romeiika during the early nineteenth century. In Turkey standard modern Greek is referred to as Yunanca, whereas the ancient Greek language is called Eski Yunanca or Grekçe. According to Heath W. Lowry's great work about Ottoman tax books (Tahrir Defteri) with Halil İnalcık, it is claimed that most Turks of Trebizond and the Pontic Alps region in northeastern Anatolia are of Pontic Greek origin. Grecophone Pontian Muslims are known in Turkey for their conservative adherence of Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school and are renowned for producing many Koranic teachers. Sufi orders such as Qadiri and Naqshbandi have a great impact.

Cretan Muslims

The term Cretan Turks (Turkish: Girit Türkleri, Greek: Τουρκοκρητικοί) or Cretan Muslims (Turkish: Girit Müslümanları) covers Greek speaking Muslims who arrived in Turkey after or slightly before the start of the Greek rule in Crete in 1908 and especially in the framework of the 1923 agreement for the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations and have settled on the coastline stretching from the Çanakkale to İskenderun. Prior to their resettlement to Turkey, deteriorating communal relations between Cretan Greek Christians and Grecophone Cretan Muslims had made the latter identify with Ottoman and later Turkish identity. Some Grecophone Muslims of Crete also composed literature for their community in the Greek language such as songs and wrote it in the Arabic alphabet, although little of it has been studied. Today in various settlements along the Aegean coast elderly Grecophone Cretan Muslims are still conversant in Cretan Greek. Amongst younger generations of Cretan Grecophone Muslims, many are fluent in the Greek language. Often members from the Muslim Cretan community are unaware that the language they speak is Greek. They often name the language as Cretan (Kritika (Κρητικά) or Giritçe) instead of Greek. The Grecophone Cretan Muslims are Sunnis of the (Hanafi) rite with a highly influential Bektashi minority that helped shape the folk Islam and religious tolerance of the entire community. Significant numbers of Cretan Muslims were re-settled in other Ottoman controlled areas around the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottomans following the establishment of the autonomous Cretan State in 1898. Most ended up in coastal Syria and Lebanon, particularly the town of Al-Hamidiyah, in Syria, (named after the Ottoman sultan who settled them there), and Tripoli in Lebanon where many continue to speak Greek as their mother tongue. Others were resettled in Ottoman Tripolitania especially in the east side cities like Susa and Benghazi, where they are distinguishable by their Greek surnames. Many of the older members of this community still speak Cretan Greek in their homes. A small community of Grecophone Cretan Muslims still resides in Greece in the Dodecanese Islands of Rhodes and Kos. These communities were formed prior to the area becoming part of Greece in 1948 when their ancestors migrated there from Crete and are integrated into the local Muslim population as Turks today.

Epirote Muslims

Muslims from the region of Epirus, known collectively as Yanyalılar (Yanyalı in singular, meaning "person from Ioannina") in Turkish and Τουρκογιαννιώτες Turkoyanyótes in Greek (Τουρκογιαννιώτης Turkoyanyótis in singular, meaning "Turk from Ioannina"), who had arrived in Turkey in two waves of migration in 1912 and after 1923. After the exchange of populations, Grecophone Epirote Muslims resettled themselves in the Anatolian section of Istanbul, especially the districts from Erenköy to Kartal which were previously populated by wealthy Orthodox Greeks. Although the majority of the Epirote Muslim population was of Albanian origin, Grecophone Muslim communities existed in the towns of Souli, Margariti (both majority-Muslim), Ioannina, Preveza, Louros, Paramythia, Konitsa, and elsewhere in the Pindus mountain region. Regarding their identity, the Greek speaking Muslim populations who were a majority in Ioannina and Paramythia and with sizable numbers residing in Parga and possibly Preveza, "shared the same route of identity construction, with no evident differentiation between them and their Albanian speaking cohabitants". Hoca Es'ad Efendi, a Greek-speaking Muslim from Ioannina who lived in the eighteenth century, was the first translator of Aristotle into Turkish. Some Grecophone Muslims of Ioannina also composed literature for their community in the Greek language such as poems and wrote it in the Arabic alphabet. The community now is fully integrated into Turkish culture. Those Muslims from Epirus of mainly Albanian rather than Greek convert origin are usually described as Cham Albanians.

Macedonian Greek Muslims

Greek speaking Muslims lived in the Haliacmon of western Macedonia. They were known collectively as Vallahades and had probably converted to Islam en masse in the late 1700s. Although the Vallahades had retained much of their Greek culture and language, unlike most Muslim converts from Greek Macedonia and elsewhere in the southern Balkans who generally adopted the Turkish language and identity. In contrast, most Grecophone Muslims from Epirus, Thrace, and other parts of Macedonia who converted to Islam in the earlier Ottoman period, generally also adopted Turkish and more speedily and thoroughly assimilated into the Ottoman ruling elite. According to Todor Simovski's assessment (1972), in 1912 in the region of Macedonia in Greece there were 13,753 Muslim Greeks.

In the twentieth century, the Vallahades were considered by other Greeks to have become Turkish and were not exempt from the 1922-1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which was based on religious affiliation (Christian Orthodox and Muslim) rather than language and ethnicity. The Vallahades were resettled in western Asia Minor, in such towns as Kumburgaz, Büyükçekmece, and Çatalca or in villages like Honaz near Denizli. Many Vallahades still continue to speak the Greek language, which they call Romeïka and have become completely assimilated into the Turkish Muslim mainstream as Turks.

Cypriot Muslims

In 1878 the Muslim inhabitants of Cyprus (constituting about 1/3 of the island's population, which then numbered 40,000 inhabitants) were classified as being either Turkish or "neo-Muslim." The latter were of Greek origin, Islamised but speaking Greek, and similar in character to the local Christians. The last of such groups was reported to arrive at Antalya in 1936. These communities are thought to have abandoned Greek in the course of integration. During the 1950s, there were still four Greek speaking Muslim settlements in Cyprus: Lapithou, Platanisso, Ayios Simeon and Galinoporni that identified themselves as Turks.

Crimea

In the Middle Ages the Greek population of Crimea traditionally adhered to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, even despite undergoing linguistic assimilation by the local Crimean Tatars. In 1777–1778, when Catherine the Great of Russia conquered the peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, the local Orthodox population was forcibly deported and settled north of the Azov Sea. In order to avoid deportation, some Greeks chose to convert to Islam. Crimean Tatar-speaking Muslims of the village of Kermenchik (renamed to Vysokoe in 1945) kept their Greek identity and were practising Christianity in secret for a while. In the nineteenth century the lower half of Kermenchik was populated with Christian Greeks from Turkey, whereas the upper remained Muslim. By the time of the Stalinist deportation of 1944, the Muslims of Kermenchik had already been identified as Crimean Tatars, and were forcibly expelled to Central Asia together with the rest of Crimea's ethnic minorities.

Lebanon and Syria

There are about 7,000 Greek speaking Muslims living in Tripoli, Lebanon and about 8,000 in Al Hamidiyah, Syria. The majority of them are Muslims of Cretan origin. Records suggest that the community left Crete between 1866 and 1897, on the outbreak of the last Cretan uprising against the Ottoman Empire, which ended the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Sultan Abdul Hamid II provided Cretan Muslim families who fled the island with refuge on the Levantine coast. The new settlement was named Hamidiye after the sultan.

Many Grecophone Muslims of Lebanon somewhat managed to preserve their Cretan Muslim identity and Greek language Unlike neighbouring communities, they are monogamous and consider divorce a disgrace. Until the Lebanese Civil War, their community was close-knit and entirely endogamous. However many of them left Lebanon during the 15 years of the war.

Greek speaking Muslims constitute 60% of Al Hamidiyah's population. The percentage may be higher but is not conclusive because of hybrid relationship in families. The community is very much concerned with maintaining its culture. The knowledge of the spoken Greek language is remarkably good and their contact with their historical homeland has been possible by means of satellite television and relatives. They are also known to be monogamous. Today, Grecophone Hamidiyah residents identify themselves as Cretan Muslims, while some others as Cretan Turks.

By 1988, many Grecophone Muslims from both Lebanon and Syria had reported being subject to discrimination by the Greek embassy because of their religious affiliation. The community members would be regarded with indifference and even hostility, and would be denied visas and opportunities to improve their Greek through trips to Greece.

Central Asia

In the Middle Ages, after the Seljuq victory over the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV, many Byzantine Greeks were taken as slaves to Central Asia. The most famous among them was Al-Khazini, a Byzantine Greek slave taken to Merv, then in the Khorasan province of Persia but now in Turkmenistan, who was later freed and became a famous Muslim scientist.

Other Greek Muslims

Muslims of partial Greek descent (non-conversions)

Muslims of Greek descent (non-conversions)

Greek converts to Islam