The Quran Museum in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is located in Khazrati Imam Square, or, as the people of Tashkent usually call it, Khast-Imam Square. The building is also known as the Mui-Muborak Madrasa, or “Sacred Hair Madrasa” in English, and is usually included in the short list of Tashkent attractions that travelers must see.
The building was created in the 16th century, but was rebuilt many times. Initially, the building was a khanaka, i.e. a modest shelter for dervishes (analogous to the Christian ascetic monks). Later, the building was used as a madrasa, an educational institution that simultaneously served as a secondary school and a Muslim theological seminary.
Today, the library of the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan is located here, which includes over 20 thousand manuscripts and lithographs, a huge number of books, as well as translations of the Quran into dozens of languages. But the most important treasure of the library is the oldest surviving manuscript of the Quran, made in the 7th century AD by the disciple and secretary of the Prophet Muhammad, Zayd ibn Thabit.
This manuscript is called the Samarkand Kufic Quran, or more often the Uthman (or Othman) Quran after the son-in-law of the Prophet, his companion, who lived in the 6th-7th centuries, the ruler of the Arab caliphate. Uthman completed the collection of the Quran into a single book.
The book is made on 353 sheets, of which 284 sheets of parchment, i.e. material made of buckskin for writing on, and the remaining sheets of paper, which replaced the lost original sheets of parchment.
It is believed that Caliph Uthman ordered seven copies of the Quran, of which six copies he sent to the cities of Mecca, Damascus, Kufa, Basra, Bahrain and Yemen, and kept the seventh in Medina (now a city in western Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslims are forbidden to stay). Most of the copies sent out have disappeared (one of the surviving ones is kept in Istanbul).
Caliph Usman lived in Medina, the capital of the Caliphate. On June 20, 656, he was assassinated by a group of Muslims from Basra, Egypt, and Kufa, dissatisfied with the fact that he, in their opinion, treated state property as personal and distributed huge sums of money from the treasury to relatives and friends. The assassination of Uthman marked the beginning of a civil war in the Arab Caliphate, which lasted five years, and ended with the split of the single Muslim community into Sunnis, Shiites and Kharijites.
It is believed that the blood stains preserved on the Uthman Quran got there during the assassination of the caliph. But there are those who do not agree with this version.
After the death of Uthman, Caliph Ali (who was ascetic and alien to worldly goods), also the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, took the manuscript to the new capital of Kufa. There are several versions of further movements of the Uthman Quran, but it is known for certain that at the beginning of the 15th century the Uthman Quran came to the conqueror, the founder of the Timurid Empire, Timur (also known as Tamerlane) and sent to his capital Samarkand. In Samarkand, the manuscript was kept in one of the madrasas until the appearance of the Russian army there.
After the inclusion of Samarkand in the Turkestan district, the Samarkand clergy handed over the Quran of Uthman to the royal administration for a reward of 100 rubles, and the manuscript was sent to Tashkent to the Governor-General of the Turkestan Territory Konstantin von Kaufman. In autumn 1869, the Governor-General sent the manuscript to St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, with the wish to donate it to the Imperial Public Library (now the Russian National Library, or “Publichka”). At the end of the 19th century, the Quran of Uthman was studied in the library by orientalist Aleksey Shebunin. Another orientalist, already at the beginning of the 20th century, made a facsimile copy of the manuscript (which is also kept today or was kept in Tashkent).
In December 1917, on the basis of a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR signed by Chairman Vladimir Lenin, Uthman’s Quran was handed over to the Regional Muslim Congress of the Petrograd National District, and a month later it was delivered to Ufa for the All-Russian Muslim Council. Of course, the Bolsheviks pursued political goals, seeking to enlist the support of Muslims. They even tried to proclaim Moscow as a new «Medina» for the oppressed.
In the early twenties, in response to the request of the Turkestan Republic, the Uthman Quran was sent to Tashkent, and then to Samarkand, where it was kept in one of the mosques. In 1941, the manuscript was transferred to the Museum of the History of the Peoples of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. From the museum, the Uthman Quran was handed over in Tashkent to representatives of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in 1989 and was first kept in the Barak-Khan madrasa, where the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the republic was located.
Some historians and linguists date the Uthman Quran to the first quarter of the 8th century, arguing that it was written half a century after the assassination of Caliph Uthman. There are other stories or legends about the finds related to the Uthman Quran.
However, in any case, the Uthman Quran, which is located in the former Mui-Muborak Madrasa in Tashkent, is the greatest book written at least thirteen centuries ago and revered by Muslims around the world.
Now the Uthman Quran, put on public display, is stored in the Mui-Muborak Madrasa in a special glass sarcophagus. In the adjacent rooms, manuscripts of the Quran in different languages are exhibited. The madrasa also houses the hair of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Mui-Muborak Madrasa, or as many people call it, the Quran Museum, with the Uthman Quran in it, is one of the most famous sights of Tashkent.