Most of the early original Quran manuscripts, complete or in sizeable fragments, that are still available to us now, are not earlier than the second century after the Hijra. The earliest copy, which was exhibited in the British Museum during the 1976 World of Islam Festival, dated from the late second century of Hijri Islamic Year, which started in AD 622. However, there are also a number of odd fragments of Quranic papyri available, which date from the first century.

In this context, it is revelatory to find that the oldest copy of Quran extant in the world – a handwritten copy transcribed within two decades of the demise of Prophet Muhammad, under the supervision of the third Islamic Caliph Uthman, is in an ancient Islamic seminary known as Hash-Imam in Tashkent – capital of Uzbekistan in the Russian Republic.

The history of this copy is as follows: From the day he received the first Revelation of the Quran, all the tenets Prophet Muhammad received were pronounced to his disciples, who committed it to their memories and also wrote on the available writing material like barks of trees and sheep/camel skin.
 By the time of the Prophet’s demise in AD 632, the Quran was already written in the form of a book from cover to cover.

The Prophet is reported to have approved the version of the Quran after listening to it. A copy of this Quran was with his wife Hafsa bint Omar. It is from that copy, that Uthmn Ibn Affn (c. 580 - July 17, 656), the third Caliph of Islam, made other copies to distribute to different regions of the Islamic faith.

Definitive version
To prevent disputes about which verses should be considered divinely inspired, Uthman had this definitive version compiled by Islamic scholars. It was completed in the year 651, only 19 years after Muhammad’s death.

It is not known exactly how many copies of the Quran were made at the time of  Uthman, but Islamic scholars say: ‘The well-known ones are five’. This probably excludes the original that Uthman kept for himself. The cities of Makka, Damascus, Kufa, Basra and Madina each received a copy.

But only two copies are known to exist as per Islamic scholars, one at the Topkapi palace at Istanbul and the other at Tashkent.

The one at Tashkent is said to be the original one, as it is said that Caliph Uthman was murdered by a rebellious mob, while he was reading his book.

A dark stain on its pages is thought to be the Caliph’s blood. In fact it was his murder that precipitated the Shia-Sunni divide which has split the Muslim world ever since. 

Today this priceless Quran is kept in a special glass-fronted vault built into the wall of a tiny inner room of the Hash-Imam library of Tashkent. About one-third of the original survives – about 250 pages – a huge volume written in a bold Arabic script.

 “This Quran was written on deerskin,” says one Islamic scholar. “It was written in Hejaz in Saudi Arabia, so the script is Hejazi, similar to Kufic script.” 

After Uthman’s death, it is believed that it was taken by Caliph Ali to Kufa, in modern Iraq. Seven hundred years later, when the Central Asian conqueror, Tamerlane, laid waste to the region, he found the Quran and took it home to grace his capital, Samarkand. 

In Tashkent
It stayed there for more than four centuries, until the Russians conquered Samarkand in 1868. The Russian governor then sent the Uthman Quran to St Petersburg where it was kept in the Imperial Library. But after the Bolshevik revolution, as Lenin was anxious to win over the Muslims of Russia and Central Asia, after repeated appeals from the Muslims of Tashkent, it was returned once more to Central Asia in 1924. It has remained in Tashkent ever since. 

Recently Chinese Islamic scholars have claimed that they also have in the township of Jiezi in the Xunhua province of China, a copy of this rare document.

This copy of the Quran is said to be one of the copies written under the supervision of Uthman.

But even the Chinese scholars do not dispute, that this could only be a copy of the Tashkent Quran, which retains its fame as the oldest original Quran (1356-years-old in 2007) in the world.