Overview

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.