History and Provenance

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.