I’ll be honest, I’ve never really seen this argument made by anyone well-versed in Turkic or Islamic history. It usually comes from a handful of individuals who are extremely nationalistic and not particularly well-read on the subject.

Why do some Turks believe they were forcibly converted to Islam? Literally nothing they appeal to makes sense when you look at the historical timeline.

The Turks largely Islamized under Iranian-ruled states(Samanids), not under Arab rule.

How many of them even know that the main targets of the Umayyad conquest of Central Asia were the Sogdian kingdoms and principalities? Even Talkan, at the time, was inhabited by Sogdians rather than Turks.

How does it make any sense to claim that Qutayba was responsible for the Islamization of the Turks when they weren’t even the primary targets of his conquests? The major waves of Turkic Islamization began roughly 200 years after his death, under entirely different political and historical circumstances.

The timeline alone makes that argument extremely difficult to defend.

And what’s crazy to me is that some of these people essentially recycling the same false historical narratives used by Balkan nationalists, except this time they’re applying them to themselves.

The Ummayeds who did not even care to forcibly convert the populations of their own heartlands in the Levant and Egypt, somehow went out of their way to forcibly Islamize the Turks? Lol