The Muslim Board of Uzbekistan traces its institutional lineage to 1943, when Soviet authorities, seeking Muslim support for the wartime effort and easing decades of religious suppression, permitted the creation of an officially sanctioned spiritual directorate for Muslims across Soviet Central Asia, a body operating under close state supervision rather than full religious independence. When Uzbekistan became independent in 1991, its portion of that Soviet-era structure reorganised into the present national Muslim Board, headquartered in Tashkent and responsible for appointing religious officials, overseeing mosques and managing significant Islamic heritage sites within the country.
Among the institutions under its care is the Hazrat Imam religious complex in Tashkent, a major center of Islamic learning and administration whose library holds the Samarkand Kufic Quran. The manuscript's presence under a body with Soviet institutional origins, safeguarding one of the oldest surviving copies of the Quran, reflects the complicated path Central Asian Islamic heritage took through a twentieth century of state suppression, selective toleration and eventual independence, rather than an unbroken continuity of religious institutional custody.
Sources Muslim Board of Uzbekistan (institutional record) with The Quran of Uthman (St. Petersburg, Katta-Langar, Bukhara, Tashkent)Efim A. Rezvan