Samarkand Kufic Quran

The Samarkand Kufic Quran is a large, incomplete parchment manuscript of the Quran, written in the angular early Arabic script known as Kufic and now kept in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. About a third of the original codex survives. It is among the most venerated Quran manuscripts in the world, honoured in Central Asian Muslim tradition as one of the master copies prepared under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, and popularly said to be stained with his blood.

Its fame rests on that traditional attribution, which would make it a witness to the very moment when the text of the Quran was standardised in the mid-7th century. Modern scholarship treats the manuscript with great respect as a genuinely early and important codex, while dating it, on the evidence of its script and of radiocarbon testing, to the 8th or 9th century, later than Uthman's lifetime. The manuscript is therefore recorded here as authentically ancient but with its specific Uthmanic attribution debated. It was long kept at the Telyashayakh Mosque in the Hast Imam complex and has recently moved to the Center for Islamic Civilization in Tashkent.

The codex is documented in Central Asia, where it was associated with Samarkand and revered as an Uthmanic Quran said to have been carried east centuries earlier. After the Russian conquest of Samarkand in 1868 it was removed to the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, where the orientalist S. Pisareff produced a facsimile in 1905, spreading knowledge of the manuscript. Following the Russian Revolution the Soviet authorities returned it to Central Asia, briefly to Ufa and then to Tashkent, as a gesture toward the region's Muslims.

In Tashkent the manuscript was kept for many decades at the Telyashayakh Mosque in the Hast Imam (Hazrati Imam) complex, becoming a focus of pilgrimage and national pride, and it was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. It has more recently been transferred to the newly built Center for Islamic Civilization in the city. Only part of the original survives, roughly a third, and a number of detached early Kufic leaves connected with the same or closely related codices are held in museums and private collections abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Khalili Collection.

The tradition holds the Samarkand codex to be one of the standardised copies of the Quran that the caliph Uthman is reported to have commissioned around 651 CE and dispatched to the great cities of the early empire, and to have been open before him when he was killed, hence the reputed bloodstains. On this view it would be a first-generation Quran of extraordinary importance.

Scholarship does not deny the manuscript's antiquity or importance, but it does date the object later than Uthman. Palaeographers such as Francois Deroche place the great Kufic codices, including this one, in the later Umayyad and Abbasid periods on the basis of the development of the script and orthography, and radiocarbon testing of the parchment agrees: results reported for the Tashkent manuscript and its folios fall in the 8th to 9th centuries, with confidence intervals that do not reach back to the 650s. The contrast is instructive when set beside the Birmingham Quran leaves, whose parchment radiocarbon-dated to 568-645 CE genuinely could belong to the first Islamic generation, showing that early material does survive, but that this particular codex is not among the very earliest.

The honest position balances reverence and evidence. The Samarkand Quran is a magnificent and genuinely old manuscript, rightly treasured; the claim that it is Uthman's personal copy is a tradition that the scientific dating does not support. It is classified here as debated for exactly that reason.