Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition

Devin DeWeese's Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde is a scholarly study, published by Pennsylvania State University Press, of how Islam was received, narrated and remembered on the Turkic steppe of the Golden Horde, centered on the legendary figure Baba Tukles and on the later hagiographical and epic traditions that grew up around the conversion story. DeWeese is a recognized specialist in Central Asian and Islamic history, and the book's particular contribution is its methodological caution about reading late hagiographical sources back onto the early historical figures they claim to describe, treating the legend's development as itself a historical object of study. Its limit is the specific case it examines, the Golden Horde conversion narrative, so a claim about Islamization elsewhere in the Turkic or Mongol world needs a source addressing that different region and period.