“Jesus Christ was a Kazakh?” reads a headline from Nur.kz, Kazakhstan’s largest news agency, the article opening with the line, “Not a single scholar has refuted his point.” Another headline in the Russian tabloid Express Gazetta reads: “Zakiryanov’s Theorem: WE’RE ALL KAZAKHS.”
Kairat Zakiryanov is a Kazakh mathematician who espouses another branch of Pseudo-Turkology. By page three of his book, “The Turkic Saga of Genghis Khan and the KZ Factor,” Zakiryanov endorses the Sun Language Theory and writes in his biography that he is from Eastern Kazakhstan, “said to be the ancestral homeland of the Sumerians.” His website also claims he is a recipient of the title “Knight of the Genghis Khan Order,” which was “established by the descendants of noble families of Great Rome and Great Byzantium,” implying Rome and Byzantium are historic Turkic states.
If there was any doubt that Pseudo-Turkology, in its various incarnations, was alive and well, Zakiryanov has quashed it.
In fact, it has taken root even in Russia. In a country where “alternative history” is a genre unto itself, aided by widespread mistrust of authorities and official state narratives, one particular brand of pseudo-history entitled “New Chronology” has become immensely popular. While it developed separately from Pseudo-Turkology, it is essentially a Russian mirror of it, taking Russia’s own challenges of identity arising from its relationship to the Steppe and Turkic peoples and solving them with a convoluted, anti-Western, Turko-Slavic synthesis.
Anatoly Fomenko, a renowned mathematician and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, alleges in a series of conspiratorial books that Russian historiography is a falsification; the result of a Western conspiracy to conceal the existence of a great Turko-Slavic empire, Great Tartary. In this alternate world, Christopher Columbus, Jesus Christ, Moses and many more were all Russian, and millennia of history were faked by the Normans and Polish Jesuit priests.
