Mirfatyh Zakiev

Zakiev Mirfatyh (Зәкиев Мирфатых) is a controversial academic in the domain of Türkology scholar. 
Education and career.
Mirfatyh holds a doctorate, and had served in a number of higher schools and institutes as a rector, director and department head (KGPI 1967-1986, IJALI 1986-1997). 
A full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Tatarstan Republic, he was an ex-chairman of the Republican Parliament in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and had also headed the Scientific Commission of the Education Ministry of the Russian Federation for the philological sciences.
Reception.
For Zakiev's fundamental research in syntactic architecture of the Tatar language, academician B.A. Serebrennikov had commented: "This is the first most full and logically faultless monograph about the syntax of the Türkic languages".
Zakiev claims that "proto-Turkish is the starting point of the Indo-European languages", that Sumerian, Ancient Greek, Icelandic, Etruscan and Minoan are languages of Turkic origin, and that the Sumerians, Scythians and Sarmatians were of Turkic origin. These views are generally rejected by the vast majority of scholars (see Pseudo-Turkology) and he has been frequently described as an "alternative historian" and a "militant amateur".