Engaging in trade took the members of this community as far as Austria and Germany.

The Bözsörmény are recorded in the sources as a community that played important economic and military roles in Medieval Hungary. According to the same source, the Pest side of the city - which consists of two parts, Budin and Pest - was given to the Muslim Böszörmény by Géza, and therefore this particular part must have been founded by Muslims. Furthermore, Gesta Hungarorum Géza, one of the most important inscriptions in Hungarian history, mentions even the capital Budapest among these lands bestowed by Géza. We know that, as early as the 10th century, Géza, the great Hungarian prince, had allocated areas for the Muslim Hungarians to live in. Despite the claims that the Bözsörmény were not originally Hungarian and that they were Ismaili Shiite Turks who had emigrated from the banks of the Volga river and settled in Hungary, it is a historical fact that they spoke Hungarian. These Hungarians who embraced Islam came to be called 'Böszörmény'. On the contrary, some Hungarians preferred to become Muslim. Nevertheless, not all Hungarians accepted Christianity. When the great Hungarian king Saint Istvan accepted Christianity in the 10th century, his people were baptized en masse and the conversion to Christianity began. The fact of the matter is, the city of Hajdúböszörmény, situated in the east of Hungary to the north of the town of Debrecen, tells us how far back Islam's European roots actually go. Narratives that date Europe's first real encounter with Islam to the 1950s with the arrival of the first group of migrant workers create the false impression that the continent was not familiar with Islam previously. The writer is a research fellow at the Turkish-German University (TAU), specializing in secularization theories, the relationship between religion and politics, Catholic theology, and occidental culture.

Origin of islam