Islam in Hungary has a long history that dates back to at least the 10th century. The influence of Sunni Islam was especially pronounced in the 16th century during the Ottoman period in Hungary.
History
Early history
In the old form of the Hungarian language, Muslims were called Böszörmény, cognates with Turkish Bozulmamış, which in turn descends from مسلم, Muslim, a term preserved as both a family name, and as that of the townHajdúböszörmény. The first Islamic author to speak of this Muslim community was Yaqut al-Hamawi, he writes about a famous Hungarian student who studied in Aleppo, according to the student there were 30 Muslim villages in Hungary. Yaqut writes in his famous geographical dictionary, "Mu'ajam al-Buldan", 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. The Spaniard Muslim traveler Abu Hamid al Garnati wrote of two types of Muslims in Hungary, the first being the Böszörmény of the Carpathian Basin and Volga Bulgars. In the 11th century, St. Ladislaus and later Coloman passed laws against the non-Christians. These laws subdued Islam by coercing Muslims to eat pork, go to Church and intermarry and to forbid them from celebrating Friday. Some of Coloman's laws include: László passed the following law: These laws discriminated severely against the small minority and eventually led to the disappearance of the community and its professions altogether.
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 into Turkish exile. Among them were such Hungarian officers such as Richard Guyon, György Kmety and Maximilian Stein. These personalities were afterwards raised to the post of General. 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. The council of Újbuda has given permission for the Muslim community in Hungary to build the first Islamic centre in Budapest. The new Islamic centre will hold a library containing 50,000 volumes. In 2013 Hungarian Islamic Council requested for the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and HerzegovinaHusein Kavazović to also become Grand Mufti of Hungary.
Religious law
Hungary's new "Law on the Right to Freedom of Conscience and Religion, and on Churches, Religions and Religious Communities" was enacted 12 July 2011 and recognizes only 14 religious groups. Islam is not included in this list and Muslims have to apply to get official recognition under the new law. Under the law, only 14 of 358 registered churches and religious associations will be granted legal recognition, while others will have to reapply for legal registration after two-thirds approval in parliament. On 27 February 2012, Hungary's parliament amended the country's controversial law on religious organizations to expand the list of officially recognized the Hungarian Islamic Council.
Demographics
According to the 2011 Hungarian census, there were 5,579 Muslims in Hungary, making up only about 0.057% of the total population. Of these, 4,097 declared themselves as Hungarian, while 2,369 as Arab by ethnicity. In Hungary people can declare more than one ethnicity, Data from 2011 does not show the Turkish population. However, the majority of Muslims in Hungary are of Arab or Turkish origin. Moreover, there is also a growing number of ethnic Hungarian converts to Islam. The actual number of Muslims in Hungary seems to be largely above 5,579 Muslims, following an important influx of asylum seekers since 2014, as there arrived about 200,000 asylum seekers in Hungary, largely from the Muslim countries Afghanistan and Syria..
