The third righteous caliph, Osman ibn Affan, completed the collection of the Holy Quran into a single book, which was agreed upon by the overwhelming majority of the companions of Muhammad ﷺ . This was done to preserve the unity of Muslims, since during the reign of Caliph Osman, disagreements over the reading of suras in different Arabic dialects intensified. Presumably, the Caliph kept one of the first copies of the Quran for himself. The work of the Golden Horde era, “The Open Road to the Gardens of Eden”, narrates that a handwritten mushaf preserved the story of the death of Osman ibn Affan. The presence of the “Quran of Osman” in Russia is noteworthy – during the periods of both the empire and Soviet power.
One of those fascinated by the history of this relic was the famous Tatar historian and theologian Shigabutdin Marjani. In his work, he wrote that “Utyz-Imyani (a Tatar religious figure – editor’s note) visited Samarkand, where he put in order the copy of the Quran that was there, corrected the mistakes in it, restored the lost sheets, and wrote them in a handwriting similar to the original <…> the inhabitants of Maverannahr claim that this is the same Quran that Osman ibn Affan had, may Allah be pleased with him”.
Samarkand was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1868. By that time, the “Quran of Osman” was kept in the mosque of Khoja Akhrar Vali, a sheikh of the Sufi order who lived in the 15th century. The head of the district, Major General Alexander Abramov, became interested in the ancient and rare copy. As a result, the Quran was handed over to the tsarist administration in order to preserve the antiquity that was valuable to science. The Governor-General of the Turkestan region, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, sent the mushaf to St. Petersburg with a message addressed to the Minister of Public Education. The letter was accompanied by a note on the origin of the Quran, compiled from the words of Samarkand scholars.
Von Kaufman wished to donate the manuscript to the Imperial Public Library, which already housed the oldest copies of the New and Old Testaments. At the same time, an attempt was made to transport to St. Petersburg the marble stand, which was believed to have been made specifically for this copy of the “Quran of Osman”. The massive pedestal from the time of Tamerlane, decorated with inscriptions, stood in the middle of the mosque at the half-ruined Bibi Khanum Madrasah in Samarkand. The idea of transporting the stand was abandoned due to its weight; however, the inscriptions were copied by the Islamic scholar Alexander Kun. The copies are stored in the archives of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A student of the founder of the Russian Arabic studies school, Viktor Romanovich Rosen (1849-1908), Alexey Shebunin, made a detailed analysis and description of the “Quran of Osman”, establishing its Middle Eastern origin (presumably Iraq) and the time of writing (2nd century AH). The work of the Russian researcher "The Kufic Quran of the Imperial St. Petersburg Library", published in 1891 as a separate edition, in many ways anticipated the ideas of Western colleagues, formulated only a quarter of a century later, about the need for a planned study and description of early copies of the Quran.
In 1905, the orientalist and Arabist Stepan Pisarev prepared a facsimile of the “Quran of Osman” for publication. Soon, the edition was published in the form of a full-size giant folio, almost life-size. A total of 50 copies were printed with the support of the St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute. Only a small part of the print run made it to the book market. The special edition remained a popular diplomatic gift from the Russian government to representatives of the Muslim East for many years.
Of the entire edition, only a few copies have survived to this day. Four editions are kept in the Museum of the History of Religion, one each in the office of the Saint Petersburg Cathedral Mosque, the Central Religious Board of Muslims of Russia, the library of Columbia University (USA) and the Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah (UAE). One copy is in Tashkent, in the State Museum of the History of the Timurids, and two more are in the mosque in the village of Klyuchishchi in the Nizhny Novgorod Region.
The subsequent fate of the original itself was influenced by the Soviet regime that replaced the autocracy. The Bolsheviks' attitude to religion varied at different times: from tolerance and non-interference to aggressive atheistic propaganda. In order to improve relations with the Ummah, the Soviet government decided to transfer the “Quran of Osman” to the Muslims of Russia at the request of the Regional Muslim Congress of the Petrograd National District. In 1917, a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR signed by Vladimir Lenin was issued on the transfer of the relic.
The regional Muslim congress, in turn, in 1918 handed over the “Quran of Osman” to the All-Russian Muslim Council. The handwritten mushaf was transported to Ufa. However, in 1923, at the request of the Turkestan Republic, after an appeal from the ulema of Tashkent and Jizzakh, it was decided to send the relic to Tashkent. A congress of Muslims was held in Ufa, following which a commission was formed under the chairmanship of Rizaetdin Fakhretdin. It included muftis and members of the Religious Boards from Tashkent, Astrakhan and Moscow. The orientalist Alexander Schmidt also participated in the delivery, which was carried out in a special wagon.
The history of the “Quran of Osman” remains unsolved to this day due to the contradictory conclusions of many scholars regarding the actual originality of the copy that ended up in Russia at the end of the 19th century. Today it is claimed that this ancient manuscript of the Quran, believed to be stained with the blood of the third righteous caliph Osman, is kept in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent, in the Muyi Muborak madrasah, which is part of the architectural ensemble of Khazrati Imam. The significance of the relic in the spiritual heritage of Muslims, part of which was the period of the stay of the “Quran of Osman” in Russia, remains undoubted.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
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