Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Zeki Velidi Togan" in English language version.
Zeki Velidi similarly did much to transform the parameters of Jadid discourse in this direction. In a series of essays he wrote for a Kokand journal Yurt (Homeland), he laid out the Turkist case in all its clarity. Turkestan was the first land inhabited by Turks to accept Islam and was one of the centers of Islamic civilization during its heyday. But the Turks, in spite of their political and demographic superiority, became "imprisoned in the civilization of the Iranians." Turkic intellectuals wrote in Arabic or Persian and neglected their own language. The literature produced at the courts of Bukhara, Ferghana, and Khiva had not a smidgeon of Turkic element in it, but was a pale imitation of Persian culture, and even the everyday speech of the cities had become intermixed with Persian vocabulary. All of that needed to be reversed: a search for "our own national spiritual wealth" was necessary and possible in the new order.
