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.