Islam in Hungary

[3] Yaqut writes in his famous geographical dictionary, "Mu'ajam al-Buldan",[4] about his meeting with a Hungarian Muslim youth in Syria who was studying Islam there and brought some details of the history and life of their people in Hungary.

These laws subdued Islam by coercing Muslims to eat pork, go to Church, intermarry, and to forbid them from celebrating Friday.

Hungarian royal coins from between the 12 and 13th centuries were found to have Arabic inscriptions (whilst this does not directly imply a connection with Islam, Arabic-speaking populations were predominantly Muslim).

Jenő Szűcs states that prior to the Mongol invasion, "the country was pretty much strewn with military and merchant colonies of Muslim religious groups".

Among them, the most important were the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Kanijeli Siyavuş Pasha (from Nagykanizsa) who held the function three times between 1582 and 1593, the Ottoman historian İbrahim Peçevi (Ibrahim of Pécs), and the famous Mevlevian dervish Pecsevi Árifi Ahmed Dede, also a Turk native of Pécs.

[9] The Ottoman period left behind a legacy of Turkish architecture such as mosques, türbes, and public baths (hamams), as well as changes in the local cuisine, such as the popularization of coffeehouses and the introduction of paprika, an essential spice in Hungarian dishes.

In the 19th century, after the collapse of the revolution of 1848-9, more than 6,000 emigrated Poles and Hungarians followed General Józef Bem (Murat Paşa) into Turkish exile.

[citation needed] Guyon is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "the first Christian to obtain the rank of pasha and a Turkish military command without being obliged to change his religion", a sign of modernizing meritocracy under the 19th-century Ottomans.

[15] In Hungary people can declare more than one ethnicity (which explains why the sum of these percentages is greater than 100%),[16] Data from 2011 does not show the Turkish population (which was 1,565 in the 2001 census).