Ahmet Baitursynuly

He was born at Aqkol in Turgay Oblast to a Muslim Kazakh family. The date is genuinely contested: the English, Russian and Kazakh articles give 5 September 1872, the Russian article itself records a minority version of 28 January 1872, and the Arabic article gives 28 January 1873 ^{1 2 3}. He learned to read and write from village mullahs, worked in village schools, and graduated in 1895 from the Orenburg teachers' school founded by Ibrahim Altynsarin ¹. He married Alexandra Ivanovna, a Russian teacher, in a Muslim ceremony at Kustanay; she converted to Islam and took the name Badrisafa ^{1 2}.

In 1913, with Alikhan Bukeikhanov and Mirjaqip Dulatuli, he founded the newspaper Qazaq in Orenburg and became its chief editor; the paper's 8,000-copy run made it the leading Kazakh publication of its time ¹. In 1917 he took part in the two All-Kazakh congresses at Orenburg and entered the leadership of the Alash party ⁴.

After a rupture with the emigre Alashorda leaders he accepted an amnesty in 1919 and served briefly as people's commissar of education of the Kirghiz ASSR in 1920–1921 ¹. His lasting work was linguistic: he reformed the Arabic script for Kazakh into a phonetic alphabet used until the Latinisation of 1929, wrote the Kazakh primer and textbooks, coined much of Kazakh grammatical terminology, and taught at the Kazakh People's Education Institute and the university in Almaty ⁴.

Arrested in 1929 on nationalism charges and exiled to the Arkhangelsk region, he was released in 1934 through Ekaterina Peshkova's intervention, rearrested in October 1937, and shot at Alma-Ata on 8 December 1937 ¹. He was rehabilitated in 1988 ⁴.

No source read names a school or affiliation for Baitursynuly: the English article attests his birth into a Muslim family, his literacy learned from village mullahs and a marriage performed in the Muslim rite, and no edition's infobox carries a religion field, while Wikidata carries no religion value at all ^{1 2 5}. His faith segment is therefore recorded as unknown.

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.