Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
A long time ago, Abdul said 15% of the Turkic migrants into Asia Minor converted to Christianity.
Although the tribes were on paper Muslim, many of the tribesmen might have been Muslims only nominally. Many societies became "Christian" because the leaders converted, but that doesn't mean everyone was an actual Christian.
Furthermore, if the active Muslims weren't the fanatical types, they might not have cared about conversions to Christianity, especially if the ones who did it weren't that great of Muslims to start with.
I think Abdul said Islam among the Turks was much more heterodox and rigid than elsewhere in the Islamic world.
It's hard to tell. There is incredible genetic similarity between Greeks, Armenians, and Turks. A lot of "Armenians" are Christian Turks, and vice versa. Anatolia was never "Greek", it was Hellenized in the West, and to a much lesser degree in the interior, where there was a multitude of peoples, even including Celts. Aramaic was still widely around when the Turks arrived.
The situation is very confusing because of the lack of Central Asian genetic input in the modern population of Turkey - nobody's really sure what happened. Some of the admixture is due to the Byzantine "ethnic cleanising model", in which populations were moved around to mix them up and facilitate Hellenization and the destruction of local cultures, and some of it was due to the polyglot nature of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, where the Slavic element was strong in the Greeks, and Slavs were the primary contributors to the Devsirme system and thus the Ottoman military and ruling class in the formative years.
As for Islam, the Ottomans were at first very heterodox, until the Mameluk Empire was absorbed, when they became Orthodox Sunni. They were not at all rigid, with Sufi orders playing a large role in society, and as Hanefis, the Ottomans subscribed to the most liberal and flexible school of Sunni Islam.