A Tsar's Trophy, Returned as a Soviet Gesture

The manuscript's modern custody history runs through imperial Russia before reaching Tashkent: after the Russian conquest of Samarkand in 1868, the Quran, already venerated locally as an especially ancient copy, was removed to Russian territory and eventually placed in St Petersburg's Imperial Public Library, a transfer typical of the way Russian imperial expansion routinely relocated conquered territories' most prestigious religious and cultural objects to the metropole. It remained there through the Russian Revolution before Bolshevik authorities, seeking to build goodwill with Muslim populations in the new Soviet Central Asian republics, arranged for its return to the region in the 1920s, eventually settling in Tashkent rather than back in Samarkand itself.

Popular tradition identifies the manuscript as the personal copy of the third Islamic caliph, Uthman, said to bear his own blood from his assassination while reading it in 656 CE, a dramatic origin story that paleographic analysis does not support in its most literal form: specialists studying the script and manuscript production techniques generally place its actual copying somewhat later, in the early Islamic centuries but after Uthman's lifetime, consistent with an early and historically significant Quran manuscript without being physically the caliph's own copy. The Muslim Board's custodianship preserves both the manuscript's undisputed antiquity and the popular tradition surrounding it side by side, without the atlas or the Board needing to resolve the gap between devotional attribution and codicological dating in either direction.