Quran Usman

It is believed that the standard text of the Quran was developed under the son-in-law of Muhammad , the third caliph Usman . Presumably, the first five copies of the Koran were sent to the main cities of the Caliphate (one of them is preserved ^[2] in the Istanbul Topkapi Palace ), and the sixth copy was kept by the caliph. It is believed that the successor of Usman, the fourth caliph Ali , took this manuscript from Medina to his new capital, Kufu . There it remained until the invasion of Tamerlane in the 15th century. There are many versions of how the Qur'an of Osman came to Samarkand . According to one version, when in 1402 Tamerlan defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayezet near Angora , when he returned to his homeland, the commander's path ran through the Iraqi city of Basra . From where the Koran of Osman was taken and brought to Samarkand - the capital of the Tamerlane empire . There he was kept in a madrasah for a long time.

During the reign of Alexander II, the Russian Empire began military operations against the Bukhara emirate . In May 1868, Russian troops under the command of General von Kaufmann captured Samarkand. By that time, the Qur'an of Osman was kept in the mosque of Khoja Akhror, Sheikh of the Sufi order, who lived in the fifteenth century. The mosque was actively visited by pilgrims who wanted to see the preserved Quran. On major holidays, the book was taken out of the mosque and shown to the people.

Samarkand was included in the Zeravshan district (since 1867 - the Samarkand region of Turkestan region ). The head of the district, Major General A.K. Abramov, among other things, became interested in the old and rare list of the Koran. He instructed Lieutenant Colonel Serov "to take measures so that antiquity, precious to science, does not slip out of his hands." As a result, the Koran was handed over by the Samarkand clergy to the tsarist administration for a reward of 500 cocans (100 rubles) and sent to Tashkent to the Governor-General of Turkestan Territory von Kaufman. He November 5 (October 24 according to the old style) in 1869 sent him from Samarkand to St. Petersburg with a letter addressed to the Minister of Education . The note was accompanied by a note on the origin of the Koran, compiled from the words of two Samarkand ulama ^[3] . At the same time, von Kaufman wished to donate the manuscript to the Imperial Public Library , which then already contained the oldest lists of the New ( Sinai Codex ) and the Old Testament ( Leningrad Codex ). At the same time, an attempt was made to transport a marble stand to St. Petersburg, which was thought to be made specifically for this list. The massive stand of the times of Timur was decorated with numerous inscriptions and stood in the middle of the mosque (in front of the mihrab ) at the dilapidated Bibi Khanum madrasah in Samarkand. The idea to move the stand to St. Petersburg was abandoned due to its enormous weight. The inscriptions were copied by A. L. Kun . Copies from them are now stored in the archives of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg).

Usman’s Koran was kept in the manuscript department of the library, where in 1891 it was studied, described and dated by the orientalist A.F. Shebunin (1867-1937).

After two revolutions and a change of power in Russia on December 14, 1917, the Regional Muslim Congress of the Petrograd National District asked the People’s Commissariat for National Affairs to return the sacred relic to Muslims, namely the national parliament of Muslims of Inner Russia and Siberia, located in Ufa. Based on the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of December 19 (6) signed by its chairman Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), the Koran Usman was transferred to the Regional Muslim Congress of the Petrograd National District ^[4] . And in early 1918, the Koran was transferred to the All-Russian Muslim Council and transferred to Ufa . This transfer of the manuscript to Muslims was a symbolic gesture. It was a question of transferring part of the power in exchange for participating in the “revolutionary project”. “Moscow is a new Mecca, it is the Medina for all the oppressed,” was written in the appeal of the Scientific Association of Orientalists at the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, published in 1921 ^[5] .

However, in 1923, at the request of the Turkestan Republic (after the appeal of the ulema of Tashkent and Jizzakh ), the Soviet government decided to send the Koran to Tashkent. In June 1923, a congress of Muslim clergy was held in Ufa, one of the topics of which was the question “about the transfer of the Holy Quran of Osman to Turkestan Muslims at the request of the Turkestan Republic” ^{[6] [7]} . A commission was formed, which included the mufti and members of the Spiritual Directorates from Tashkent, Astrakhan and Moscow. The chairman of the commission was Riza Fakhretdinov . Oriental scholar Alexander Schmidt also participated in the delivery. In August 1923, the Koran of Osman was taken to Tashkent in a special carriage, where his transfer was arranged. Members of the commission visited several cities of the Turkestan republic, meeting with local ulama. After returning to Ufa, Fakhretdinov wrote the essay “On the Journey to Samarkand on the Return of the Koran of Osman” (lost) ^[8] .

Then the Qur'an of Osman was transferred to Samarkand, where he was in the mosque of Khoja Ahrar .

Since 1941, the place of its storage was the Museum of the History of the Peoples of Uzbekistan in Tashkent.

In March 1989, on March 14–15, 1989, the fourth Kurultai of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) was held in Tashkent, at which, by the decision of the government of the Uzbek SSR, the Koran was removed from the museum and solemnly handed over to representatives of believers. [1] After Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991, SADUM was renamed the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, which is under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Religious Affairs of the Cabinet of Ministers. In the early 1990s, the relic was handed over to the Mufti by Islam Karimov at Khast Imam Square. The Qur'an was placed in the building of the library of the Office, located in the Barak Khan Madrasah.

In 1997, UNESCO included the Usman Quran in the Memory of the World Register ^[9] . In Tashkent , the Muyi-Muborak Madrasah, part of the Hazrati Imam Ensemble, contains the only surviving original manuscript of the Koran, as evidenced by a certificate issued by UNESCO International Organization on August 28, 2000 ^[1] .

The Ottoman Quran already has diacritics (dashes replacing dots, as usual, in the Kufic script), but it still does not have other superscripts and superscripts adopted in later Arabic script (hamza, madda, shadda (tashdid), sukun). This allows him to be dated to the first quarter of the VIII century, that is, half a century after the assassination of Usman.

Blood Traces

Traces of blood are present on all three ancient copies of the Koran, which are usually associated with the personality of Usman. The Arabists who examined the manuscript consider the traces of blood to be a later fake: “Maybe there was less blood long ago than now; maybe the blood stains underwent the same restoration as ... the text underwent - now we can’t say anything in the affirmative, but one thing is certain, long ago or recently, but the stains we see now are not smeared by chance, but on purpose, and the deception is done so rudely that it gives itself out. Blood is found on almost all the roots and from them spreads more or less far into the middle of the leaf. But it spreads completely symmetrically on each of the adjacent sheets: it is obvious that they folded when the blood was still fresh. And at the same time, the oddity is that such spots do not go completely on adjacent sheets, but through the sheet ... Obviously, such a distribution of blood could not happen by chance, but we find it like that all the time ” ^[10] .

In 1905, in St. Petersburg, an Arab orientalist S. I. Pisarev, with the assistance of the St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute, prepared a facsimile for printing a manuscript. It was published in the form of a full-sized giant folio of almost life-size. The publication came out in a limited edition - a total of 50 copies were printed. Of these, 25 Pisarev sold, 5 copies were presented to royal persons: the Russian emperor, the Turkish sultan, the Persian shah, the emir of Bukhara Abdulahad Khan and his heir ^[11] .

Of the 50 copies, only a few have survived to this day. Two copies are stored in the State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg ^[12] , one in the office of the St. Petersburg Cathedral Mosque . Also, facsimiles are stored in the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia (CDUM) ^[13] , in the library of Columbia University in the USA , in Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah in the UAE ^[14] . One copy is in Tashkent at the State Museum of the History of the Timurids ^[15] . One of the Muslim Tatars of the Nizhny Novgorod region.

In 2003, a 52-minute documentary film “In Search of the Koran 'Osman” was created in Russia. The shooting was carried out in Uzbekistan , in lost mountain villages, where to this day valuable Muslim relics are stored, among which the most important fragments of this manuscript were miraculously discovered.

Local old-timers, including the original Arabs, who preserved their language, told researchers ancient legends associated with it. The list was sold in parts; it was confiscated by the KGB . The manuscript was kept with the hirka of the prophet Muhammad - a sacred symbol of power. This hirk was used by the head of the Taliban Mullah Umar , declaring himself the ruler of all Muslims. The manuscript was revered as a prototype of all the lists of the Koran. Her amazing story is connected with the fate of dynasties, states, Sufi brotherhoods.

The film was released simultaneously with the publication of the monograph by E. A. Rezvan “The Quran 'Usman” (Katta-Langar, St. Petersburg, Bukhara , Tashkent ) (St. Petersburg, 2004) (Russian-English edition ISBN 978-5-85803- 265-6 ).

• A. F. Shebunin, “Kufic Quran of the St. Petersburg Public Library” // Notes of the Eastern Branch of the Russian Archaeological Society. St. Petersburg, 1891, v. 6, p. 89-133.
• E. A. Rezvan. The Wanderings of the “Koran of Osman” // Journal Around the World No. 08, 2002.
• Nadezhda Kevorkova. “The oldest Koran in the world is in Russia” Interview with E. Rezvan // “Newspaper”, 10/06/2005
• Wanda Beletskaya. Tashkent. The fate of the “Koran of Osman” // “ Spark ”. - 1979. - December 22 ( No. 52 ). - S. 6-7 .

• M.E. Rezvan. The world of the Quran.
• BBC: "The hidden Islamic shrine of Tashkent"
• A. F. Shebunin