Indigenous Muslims were already a subaltern people under Turkish rule

Evidence

One difficulty was that the indigenous peoples resisted easy categorisation. The majority of the indigenous population were Arabic speaking, but may have been fairly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. The indigenous Muslims, however, were themselves a subaltern people who had been living under Seljuq Turkish rule since the mid-eleventh century. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 192