Most scholars view the work as a fabrication,[1][2][3] while others view the work as authentic — a unique ancient source containing a lot of completely unknown information about the history of the peoples of Eastern Europe from the I millennium AD to the XVI century.
[4][citation needed] According to its publisher, Fargat Nurutdinov, the Cäğfär Taríxı was written in its present form in Bashkortostan, by Baxşi İman, secretary of Cäğfär, the leader of a Tatar liberation movement that supposedly flourished there at the time.
Nurutdinov states that the original, written in "Bulgar Turkic" (here equated with the language of the Volga Tatars), in the Arabic script, was translated into Russian in the late 1930s by his uncle I.M.-K.-Nigmatullin, who did this in order to save it from an NKVD campaign of confiscation and destruction of old Bulgar documents written in the Arabic script.
Nigmatullin himself was killed in World War II, and the translation was preserved by his mother, who eventually passed it over to her grandson, Nurutdinov, in 1976.
[citation needed] The text refers to numerous persons and historical events unattested in other sources; for example, it makes references to mid 7th century Khazar rulers named Khalga and Kaban, who do not appear in the account of al-Tabari, in the Schechter Letter, in the Khazar Correspondence, or any other extant document.