Tatar Humanitarian Thought and “AZ i IA” by Olzhas Suleimenov

The study is devoted to the historiography of the ancient history and culture of the Turkic peoples in the context of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Olzhas Suleimenov’s book “AZ i IA”. The Book of a Well-Intentioned Reader.” The purpose of the research is to study and evaluate the works of Tatar humanities scholars on this topic from the perspective of modern science achievements, and to introduce new materials into scientific circulation. Special attention is given to reconstructing the stages of the development of scientific thought and understanding the contribution of individual researchers from the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods to this field of knowledge. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, interest in the ancient layers of the culture of the Turkic peoples emerged in Tatar historical studies, largely influenced by the founder of Tatar historical thought, Sh. Mardzhani, and the educator K. Nasyri. A comparative analysis of the works of I. Khalfin, Kh.-G. Gabyashi, A.-Z. Validi, and others conducted in this article demonstrates their deep knowledge and broad perspective on the history and culture of the Turkic peoples of Russia. The authors point out that the key element of the high culture of the ancient Turks was the presence of writing, and they express their opinions about the time of its appearance, the existence of cities, crafts, trade, and agricultural production in the steppes. The style, structure, and nature of the presentation of the material are largely influenced by the fact that these publications were intended for students of madrasas, as well as for the mudarris and mugallim who taught there. These works played a key role in the introduction of the new subject “History of the Turks” in new-method Tatar schools in the 1910s, and in teaching the younger generation about their ancestors’ involvement in the ancient history of the Turkic peoples of Eurasia. In the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the history and culture of the Old Turkic period were mainly presented in G. Gubaidullin’s book “Tatar Tarihy” (“History of the Tatars,” 1922), written in the early years of Soviet rule, and in the first volume of G. Gubaidullin and G. Rakhim’s collaborative work “History of Tatar Literature” (1923). Scholars consider the Old Turkic period and the late 18th century to be part of the ancient era in the history of Tatar literature. In the following decades of Soviet rule, the study of the Old Turkic period became the prerogative of the capital’s academic research centers. However, the autochthonous concept, which recommended studying the history of the ethnic group within the borders of the national republic until the late 1980s, prevented the inclusion of the Old Turkic period in the comprehensive works “History of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.” This interrupted the tradition of considering the history of the Tatars as part of the history of the nomadic Turkic world. O. Suleimenov’s book “AZ i IA,” published in 1975, resonated with the sentiments of Tatar scholars, who, due to the suppression of research on ancient Turkic history in Tatar historiography, perceived it as a kind of breakthrough in the official ideology and its scientific institutions, which hindered the comprehensive study of the language, history, literature, and culture of the ancient Turks. This explains the relevance of this study. In the post-Soviet era, the inclusion of the ancient Turkic period in the history of the Tatars was preceded by the beginning of research on the history of the Golden Horde in the early 1990s, which revealed the Eurasian scale of the history of the Tatar people. A significant event in this process was the publication in 2002 in Kazan of the first volume of the seven-volume “History of the Tatars from Ancient Times,” the book “The Peoples of Steppe Eurasia in Antiquity.”